anchorite.org

I know I am long overdue for an update on what’s been going on with OrthodoxSermons.org, we launched the new site on July 12th.  The team at Mustardseed Media did a wonderful job and we are continuing to work with them for additional features on the site.

One of the features I am most excited about on the new site is the ability for other Orthodox Churches to easily upload their sermons, once uploaded those sermons can be embedded back on the church site.

For the techies who may be interested, we are currently hosting the site on a Virtual Private Server at Slicehost and and all the media is stored on Amazon S3.

It was decided to not do a national Fall roundtable due to the economy, and the expensive nature of travel in general.  Instead, we are going to make a strong push for some GREAT regional roundtables in the fall. DC is hosting one such round table at McLean Bible Church in Vienna, VA. The cost for this event is $35.00 and you can register at dc.citrt.org. Finally the deadline for registration is 10-20-09.

We are having a meet and greet dinner the night before (Sunday the 25th) for people that plan to come into town early. Be sure to indicate that on the registration so we can plan accordingly. There is no additional charge if you are coming the night before.

So, now you are thinking, what is my part.  Right?  Well I’m glad you asked…  The goal of the Church IT Roundtable is to further community, relationships, and information sharing among IT folks in the church.  So your part in all of this is to spread the word.  Get in touch with the IT folks at churches you have relationships with and let them know about the event.

Register at dc.citrt.org.

Growing up in today’s culture, our children are inundated with all types of media throughout the day, from tv to radio to print.  A lot of that media is negative or not appropriate for children, some Christians advocate having our kids grow up in a bubble, avoiding media completely.  I think that a more moderate approach is better for the children, with the understanding that you can’t take something away without replacing it.  That said, here is a list of wonderful resources where you can find positive, wholesome media for your kids.  Using these resources in a moderate way (growing up I was limited to 1hr/day of TV in the summer and 2hr/weekend of TV during the school year) can be a wonderful, educational and entertaining benefit for our children.

• LifeKids.tv – teachings, videos, worship music, activities to do at home and answers to some of the most commonly asked questions about a child’s relationship with Jesus.
• Jellytelly – A new, online daily show from the creators of VeggieTales.
• HisKids.net – positive. powerful. radio on-demand
• Adventures in Odyssey – original audio stories brought to life by actors who make you feel like part of the experience.

Plugged In Online is a good place to check for reviews and discussions of mainstream media before watching it with your kids.

What media resources for children do you use and recommend?

Let us consider those who serve under our generals and the order, obedience, and submissiveness with witch they perform the things commanded them.  All are not prefects or commanders of a thousand, or of a hundred, or of fifty, or the like, but each one in his own rank performs the things commanded by the king and the generals.  The great cannot exist without the small, not the small without the great.  There is a kind of mixture in all things from which rises mutual advantage.  Take our body for example.  The head is nothing without the feet, and the feet are nothing without the head.  The very smallest members of our bodies are necessary and useful to the whole body, but all work harmoniously together and are under one common rule for the preservation of the whole body.  Let our whole body, then, be preserved in Christ Jesus, and let everyone be subject to his neighbor, according to the special gift bestowed upon him.  Let the strong not despise the weak, and let the weak show respect to the strong.  Let the rich man provide for the wants of the poor; and let the poor man bless God, because God has given him one to supply his need.  Let the wise man display his wisdom, not by words, but through good deeds.  Let us consider, then, brethren, of what matter we are made.

-Clement of Rome

Taken from Day by Day with the Early Church Fathers, page 155.

We (StMarkDC) had a wonderful retreat earlier this month where we saw God answer prayers and work so many miracles.  Bishop David, Fr. Bishoy and Fr. Anthony delivered five amazing talks on trusting God in full.  Over 450 young adults attended the retreat from all over the world and every part of it was an amazing success, glory be to God!  Thank you for your prayers.

All the content from the retreat is now online:

• Audio and video of the talks are up on OrthodoxSermons.org.
• Gigapan shot of retreat attendees during Bishop David’s talk.
• Flickr photo album, if you additional have pictures send them to me.
• Download the retreat presentations and booklet.
• Download high quality videos: Talk 1 Talk 2 Talk 3 Talk 4 Sermon Talk 5

A few of the retreat testimonials:

• Thank you and God bless you for all that you do. This retreat helped shape my perspective and bring me closer to God during a challenging period in my life.
• I loved the retreat and benefited greatly from it. I never felt this way about retreat before…it was amazing! Thank you for caring.
• This one went deeper and deeper. Thank you for all of your preparation, tremendously hard work, service, and continued guidance. To Bishop David, Father Bishoy, and Father Anthony, we love you SOOOO MUCH!
• This was the best retreat I have ever attended
• The retreat coordinators did an excellent job. I’m sure it was not an easy task given the number of people attending the retreat. Thanks for all of your hard work and may God Bless you all!

At DrupalCon in DC this week, several people expressed interested in integrating Drupal and FellowshipOne. Fellowship Tech is demoing a new RESTful API, iPhone application, Facebook integration, ExpressionEngine, and ASP .NET MVC at the DC09 Developer Mini-Conference so the pieces may finally be coming together for a workable solution.  Some of the possible features that integration could provide are:

• Unified login – share logins between F1 and Drupal, so that once logged in they can comment, access restricted or personalized areas of the web site or make contributions, register for events, etc.
• Social networking tie in…Facebook app?
• Connect participation/interest from Internet campus and online classes to attendance/contact in F1.
• Tying small groups (or other types of groups) with content (small group materials, bible studies, etc.)
• Communications workflow – connecting news, events, schedule and activities in one place.

We have setup the project on drupal.org/project/f1 and are open for ideas, comments, questions and support.  Once  we get the vision firmly established, we may setup a ChipIn to get this accomplished.

Last May we started thinking about the next version of OrthodoxSermons.org, we took comments from our users, studied the market, did some of our own brainstorming and put together a wish list.  We spent six months getting quotes from vendors and evaluating “out of the box” solutions.  We narrowed all the possible options from a list of 20 to 3 and then with some intense comparison and prayer we were able to select Mustardseed Media as a ministry partner for the development of OrthodoxSermons.org 2.0. There are a few things that stick out about Mustardseed:

• 99% of their work is done for Christian Churches & Ministries
• They support the online Christian technology community via their podcast community Geeks & God.
• They are a Drupal shop and are active contributors to the Drupal Community.

You are probably wondering, what did make the final cut on that wish list for OrthodoxSermons.org 2.0?  Here is some of what you can look forward to:

• Improved navigation and search.  Sermons will be categorized and tagged.  Transcripts (if available) will be searchable.
• Ability for churches and organization to upload their own content and feed their content back to their own sites via RSS.
• Support for attaching transcripts of sermons, users can volunteer to transcribe sermons.
• Full audio and video podcast support, compatible with iTunes/iPhone/iPod as well as site wide RSS feeds and RSS feeds on all tags.
• iPhone based site for browsing from mobile Safari.
• Audio and video of sermons can be embedded on your own site, also can be shared by emailing to a friend.

We started the development process a couple weeks ago and are making good headway, we are hoping for launch around the beginning of 3rd quarter, 2009.  If you want minute by minute updates on the development process, I suggest you follow us on Twitter: @amitry, @mustardseedinc, @rob_feature, @suydam.

A few of the early mockups:

Home

Sermon with video and audio

Sermon with only audio

Last week a post over at Sneakers and Books caught my attention, Nader was highlighting a BBC “Extreme Pilgrim” program featuring Fr. Lazarus Saint Anthony.  Back in the summer of 2000, I got to spend several weeks with Fr. Lazarus on a mission trip to Kenya and Tanzania.  At that time he was serving as a monk priest in Musoma, Tanzania.  At first he came off to our mission group as a strict ascetic , but as time passed, we all warmed up to him and looked forward to hearing his stories and wisdom at our nighttime gatherings.

Thanks to Mixahl at OrthodoxFathers.org for finding the video.

Yesterday, I made a few mistakes and learned a few lessons.  I was at a client site helping them move to VMware.  We decided to switch one of their virtual machines from one VMware ESXi host to another.  They have shared iSCSI storage (EqualLogic SAN), so it should have been a relatively simple procedure.  I made the mistake of not taking a snapshot of the volume before the switch.  While making the switch, something happened to the volume (not sure if it was accidentally removed or if it was some kind of corruption).  We could detect the iSCSI target but it wasn’t showing in the storage list.  When we went to add storage it showed the volume as blank.  The web interface on the SAN still showed the data there, so we knew (hoped) it wasn’t gone.  After a bit of searching I found this forum thread that hints at a possible fix but lists the solution as a call to VMware support.  We called VMware and successfully used this process to restore the volume.

Via console or SSH access:

login as: root
root@XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX’s password:

Tech Support Mode successfully accessed.
The time and date of this access have been sent to the system logs.

WARNING – Tech Support Mode is not supported unless used in
consultation with VMware Tech Support.

~ # cd /tmp
/tmp # fdisk -l

Disk /dev/disks/vmhba32:1:0:0: 549.7 GB, 549763153920 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 524295 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes

Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System

Disk /dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:0: 549.7 GB, 549763153920 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 524295 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes

Partition table entries are not in disk order
/tmp # dd if=/dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:0 of=/tmp/ddout bs=1M count=2
2+0 records in
2+0 records out
/tmp # hexdump -C ddout |less
/tmp # fdisk -l /dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:0

Disk /dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:0: 549.7 GB, 549763153920 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 524295 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes

Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/tmp # fdisk /dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:0

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 524295.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:0: 549.7 GB, 549763153920 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 524295 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes

Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System

Command (m for help): n
Command action
e   extended
p   primary partition (1-4)
p
Partition number (1-4): 1
First cylinder (1-524295, default 1):
Using default value 1
Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-524295, default 524295):
Using default value 524295

Command (m for help): t
Selected partition 1
Hex code (type L to list codes): fb
Changed system type of partition 1 to fb (VMFS)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:0: 549.7 GB, 549763153920 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 524295 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes

Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:1             1    524295 536878064   fb  VMFS

Command (m for help): x

Expert command (m for help): b
Partition number (1-4): 1
New beginning of data (32-1073756159, default 32): 128

Expert command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:0: 64 heads, 32 sectors, 524295 cylinders

Nr AF  Hd Sec  Cyl  Hd Sec  Cyl    Start     Size ID
1 00   1   1    0  63  32 1023        128 1073756032 fb
2 00   0   0    0   0   0    0          0          0 00
3 00   0   0    0   0   0    0          0          0 00
4 00   0   0    0   0   0    0          0          0 00

Expert command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing disks.
/tmp # vmkfstools -V
/tmp # esxcfg-vmhbadevs -m
vmhba32:0:0:1   /vmfs/devices/disks/vmhba32:0:0:1 42240509-d9375061-f3bd-0018fe7e542e
/tmp #

Twitter is a micro blogging platform that has taken off on the web, the short messages coupled with an easy to use system makes it a natural for techies and non-techies alike.  Here a few resources to get you started.  Make sure to follow me!

Twitter explained:

• Anthony Coppedge’s E-Book, “The Reason Your Church Must Twitter”
• Dean Lisenby on More reasons to Twitter!
• Matt Singley’s New Media Primer: Twitter
• Twitter in Plain English

Desktop Twitter Clients (listed in order of preference):

• TweetDeck
• Twhirl
• Disgby

iPhone Twitter Clients (listed in order of preference):

• Tweetie
• Twitelator Pro
• Twitterific

Full list of apps on the Twitter Fan Wiki