New Living Translation SE Study Bible.

Posted on August 30, 2010 by davemackey
New Living Translation
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I have long been a fan of first The Living Bible and then the New Living Translation (NLT). The Living Bible (LB) was a paraphrase of Scripture, the NLT was a new translation from the original languages that attempted to provide the readability of the LB while not sacrificing the accuracy of more word-for-word literal translations like the NASB or NIV. While I loved the LB – the NLT was a huge step upwards.

More recently I discovered a series of commentaries that used the NLT as their underlying text. I was confused by this. While I love the NLT – I don’t study off of it. This is because the NLT focuses on a more thought-for-thought approach than word-for-word – which is great for readability but not so great for word studies and so on. Further research led me to the discovery that the NLT had undergone a second and major revision – which unfortunately is not highly publicized. I flipped to the front of my NLT and saw instantly it was copyright in 1996 – thus being a first edition. The second edition came out in 2004. The NLTse offered significant improvements over the NLTfe – particularly in its attempts to reduce thought-for-thought while maintaining clarity and accuracy – increasing the ability for one to perform word studies, etc. off the NLT text.

So tonight I ordered a NLT Study Bible. Traditionally, I’ve used the LB and NLT Life Application Bibles (LAB)…but I wanted something more concerned with historical, literary, cultural, geographical, theological, etc. info. rather than application. In general, if one understands the meaning of the passage I find it fairly simple (usually) to apply it to my life. The LAB didn’t always provide this background information but did provide applications. The NLT Study Bible I ordered uses the Second Edition text – though this might more properly be called 2.1 – since there was another small revision implemented in more recent years that continues to refine the NLT in a few areas.

All this to say – I’d highly recommend getting your hands on a New Living Translation (NLT) bible. I am a big fan of the dynamic equivalence method utilized and the translators who worked on this text are top notch. The continued revisions are quite impressive. Kudos to Tyndale for continued excellent work in making Scripture understandable in our present context. I’ll provide more details once I receive the new book and have an opportunity to work with it a little more…

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Major Biblical Studies Publishers.

Posted on August 24, 2010 by davemackey
  • Hendrickson Publishers
    • New International Biblical Commentary, Daily Bible Commentary, The Pulpit Commentary, Black’s New Testament Commentary.
  • IVP Books
    • John Stott Bible Studies, Tyndale Commentary O.T./N.T. Series, Crossway Bible Guides, Apollos Old Testament Commentary, Pillar New Testament Commentaries, IVP New Testament Commentaries.
  • David C. Cook.
    • BE Series, Bible Exposition Commentary, Bible Knowledge Commentary, Wiersbe’s Expository Outlines.
  • Crossway
  • Baker Books.
    • Baker Exegetical Commentary on the N.T., Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible, Paideia: Commentaries on the N.T., Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, Walk Thru the Bible Discussion Guides.
  • Zondervan.
  • Kregel
  • Thomas Nelson
  • Moody Publishers
  • Westminster John Knox Press
  • Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
  • Tyndale House
    • Cornerstone Biblical Commentary Series
  • B&H Publishing Group
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7-Zip – A Compression and Decompression Application.

Posted on August 22, 2010 by davemackey

Today the need for compression and decompression applications is not nearly as widespread as it once was at the consumer level. This is because we have increased our ability to store information – moving from floppy disks to DVD‘s and flash drives – and moving from dialup internet to high speed. In the past we tried to squish files down to the smallest possible size to make them fit on smaller media and transfer faster. Now, we don’t worry about that nearly as much.

Still, there are a large number of files that come in compressed formats. It is still a convenient way to send a whole bunch of files at once or to protect files with an encryption key. There are several commercial products available for this purpose including the venerable WinZip. That said, when possible I seek to find freeware or open source alternatives to commercial software packages – a habit that comes from growing up without (much) cash.

My personal favorite is 7-Zip. Its free and open source. My only complaint is that the user interface is not nearly intuitive or friendly enough. Still, if you are willing to take the time to learn the application – it is extremely powerful and can handle a wide variety of compression formats – way beyond just your normal zip/unzip.

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Andy Oram, Healthcare, and VistA

Posted on August 19, 2010 by davemackey

Andy Oram is a columnist over at O’Reilly Radar and recently blogged about the VA’s VistA software and how it is being used to revolutionize healthcare. He is specifically looking at a book written by Phillip Longman entitled Best Care Anywhere and provocatively subtitled, “Why VA Health Care is Better Than Yours.”

Healthcare has been gathering interest in the public eye, especially with the push through Congress of new healthcare legislation. It has also been gathering increasing interest from the IT sector – and articles such as this one are a reflection of that increasing interest. I’d encourage you to take a few minutes to read through Oram’s entire article if you are a techie, and if not to read through the first half in which he covers some of the less technical features of VistA that are revolutionizing healthcare.

You can also visit the official open source page for VistA here.

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DNSMadeEasy – Enterprise DNS Services.

Posted on August 9, 2010 by davemackey

Tonight I was pondering what I should blog about. I’m trying to be a little more regular in my blogging. I noticed an email from DNSMadeEasy, an enterprise DNS service I utilize, apologizing for a recent outage – their first in eight years – caused by a massive DDoS attack. Ahh, here is my topic.

What is DNS?

To understand DNS you have to understand a little bit about the architecture of the internet. Namely, we have clients, hosts, and dns servers (this is a vast oversimplification). The clients are workstations (e.g. the computer you are reading this blog post on), the hosts are servers that hold a specific website(s) (e.g. the server this blog post is hosted on), and a dns server is the white pages that allows a client to find a host.

See, computers operate off IP addresses like this: 70.40.206.244 But we type in URLs like this: www.daveenjoys.com. The client transparently sends a request out to a DNS server saying, “Hey, what is the IP address of www.daveenjoys.com” to which the DNS server should reply “70.40.206.244″. You can think of the IP address as a “phone number” and the “url” as a name (e.g. Mackey, Dave).

Do I Need a DNS Service?

The quick answer is – yes – but not necessarily an enterprise dns service. See you need a DNS service that allows you to lookup IP addresses, but you don’t necessarily need one to keep IP address / URL translation information about your domains – unless you own some domains. For most people, the DNS servers that are automatically and transparently configured by their ISP (Internet Service Provider – e.g. Comcast, Verizon, AOL). But if you host a website (say www.daveenjoys.com or www.yahoo.com) you need DNS servers.

Do I Need an Enterpise DNS Service?

The quick answer is no. Most hosts provide DNS services with their hosting packages. You go to a site like Bluehost or WebWizGuide and they bundle the DNS services right in. If not, usually your domain registrar will bundle in dns services. So why use enterprise dns services? Its all about quality…

Services like DNSMadeEasy offer features such as:

  • Faster propagation of updates[1]
  • Failover between IPs[2]
  • 24/7 Support.
  • Better Security / Defense Systems against hacker attacks.

Honestly, I don’t really need an enterprise DNS service myself. Most of my websites are pretty low scale. I purchased a plan with DNSMadeEasy when I attempted to launch Informed Network – a social news website for IT professionals. I keep DNSMadeEasy services b/c its a ridiculously low $60/year, the service is excellent, and I want to be ready for when I do ramp up for my next big project.

Conclusion

DNSMadeEasy may have lost their never-been-down crown (over eight years!), but I’m sticking with them. I’ve been happy with their service, their prices beat out the competition by orders of magnitude, and hey – look – they put up a new and slicker website!

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  1. [1] Think back to our analogy of a phone book. These books quickly become outdated. If you change phone numbers as a business – how long do you have to wait for your customers to get an updated phone book with your new number? Could be a while. In a similar way, when an update is made to one’s DNS records this can take a while (these days, usually 24 hrs.) to propagate – in which time your customers are hitting the wrong number. DNSMadeEasy and company make this into a seconds/minutes update process. ↩
  2. [2] What if one of your servers goes down? DNSMadeEasy makes it easy to rotate visitors over to another server. This can also be accomplished by a load balancer – and in many cases should be – but DNSMadeEasy provides a simple and quick solution to a sometimes complicated problem. ↩
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