James's Weblog

I've said before how valuable I find the writing of David Gooding, particularly on the book of Acts (paid link). It turns out his writing on Luke's gospel (paid link) is just as sharp.

This is one of those posts I'm putting here because I know I'll look for this again, and if it's on my own website I can search and find it quickly. It might also help someone else.

Tucked inside The BHS (Biblica Hebraica Stuttgartensia) is a small piece of paper, containing the Tabula Accentuum (table of accents). On one side is a list of the accents deployed by the Masoretes when annotating prose, and on the other side the ones they used when annotating poetry.

I wrote a longer post in 2010 that gave some thoughts on the book of Psalms and how we read them.

Today, I've been working on some notes to equip our small group leaders to lead a Bible study in Psalm 31. This comes as part of a series of Bible studies that look at passages that speak on the theme of prayer.

A Bit of History

Back in the day, there was a very small number of mobile phone providers you could use. Orange merged with T-Mobile to become EE. Vodafone has been around for a while. BT Cellnet demerged out of BT to become O2. Three was the newest addition, radically not offering the older 2G connections. (How quaint: 3G is about to be turned off.) So you had 4 choices.

Paul wrote to Timothy: "Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching." (1 Timothy 4:13)

This is a hard post to write, but I feel compelled to put pen to paper (as it were), out of a deep concern for a significant number of my Christian brothers and sisters who minister within the Church of England.

Potential Misunderstandings

Before I get to what I want to say, let me try to articulate why this is hard to write. There are 3 ways this could be misunderstood, and I do not intend any of them.

If you run an application that includes a database, you want to be taking backups regularly. Your backup needs to include tables, views and triggers. It must also include any stored procedures / routines you are using. Otherwise, when you restore from backup, your procedures will be missing.

This article is not about Microsoft SQL Server. This concerns MySQL and its forks MariaDB and Percona.

I've found lots of people asking this question on the web, but not many of the posts I've found have a working answer.

Where the North Sea meets the Atlantic lies a small country, the United Isles of Great Britannia (GB for short)

It is often reported that New Zealand has more sheep than people. GB has more cats than people – they are a nation of cat-lovers. As a result, a thriving industry in veterinary medicine has developed.

Yesterday, the Church of England published a press release summarising the proposals being brought by the college of Bishops at the end of the 6-year consultation process on same-sex marriage. This included a series of national conversations (tautologically, "shared conversations"), which took place at the General Synod and locally, and a course and set of resources branded "Living in Love and Faith".

The second of two blog posts looking at how the S&P 500 performance one year impacts what happens in the following year. The first post just looked at how many years saw the index decline or increase. In this follow-up post, I look at the actual figures: By how much did it go up or down? Does this more detailed analysis show any patterns that we previously dismissed?