Blackbox Engineering & Ordo Salutis

I think any rationale person would agree that in order to understand anything you need an adequate of the thing being discussed. For our purposes we will be referencing “thing” as a system. Our model will be simple. We will create a system that simply adds two integer values together and outputs the sum of the two values. That being said we can view the conception of the things defined in what historically engineers have referred to as “Black Box Engineering”. This method is commonly used in engineering disciplines and is really very simple.

In the diagram shown above the model consists of 3 parts:

1. Input – Before anything meaningful can be done with our system we need some type of input to act on. For example, we will pass two inputs: a = 1, b =2.

2. Blackbox – This is where our input collected in step 1 is transformed into something that we desire. In our model our blackbox will compute the sum of the two input values.

3. Output – This is the result of our transformation produced by our Blackbox in step 2.

Now let’s make this a little more interesting. Can we apply this method to the order of salvation in relation to the Christian religion? Yes, we can and more specifically as it relates to the Ordus Salutis (Order of Salvation):

1. Inputs – The inputs to feed into our Blackbox consist of biblical means of grace that includes:
A. The preaching of the Word. (Romans 10:17)
B. Prayer (I Tim 2:1)

2. Blackbox – Regeneration that occurs by the Spirit of God working with the inputs of A & B primarily.

3. Output – The resulting output is a new creature in Christ that is justified, sanctified, adopted in the family of God, faith, and eternal life to name a few.

So we see everything human beings deal with are systems in some form or another weather they be buildings, bridges, or the order in which Christ saves a man.

How to move window buttons back to right in Ubuntu 10.X

As the Ubuntu’s new tag line says “It’s time for a change.”, indeed a lot of change has been implemented to the operating system, applications and the interface. There are few which you will find it interesting and useful and while few others might annoy you because of a sudden change.

I never liked Ubuntu much, and it seems many people are complaining against it saying that the move to have the buttons at the left hand side (close, maximize, minimize) like we have in Apple OS was a bad one. People find the sudden shift hard to come to terms with.

Tell you what, it’s extremely easy to move the buttons back to the right hand side. All you need is a bit of configuration tweaking from Gnome Configuration Editor and you are done. To begin, open gconf-editor. Either type it in terminal and hit enter or press Alt+F2 and run it from there.

Once you open gconf-editor, navigate to

/apps/metacity/general

You can see the top class ‘app‘ in the left hand pane. Now navigate to the path mentioned above. Then, in the right hand pane, change the value of the key button_layout from

close,minimize,maximize:menu

to

menu:minimize,maximize,close

You can either right click the key value and edit it, or just double click it and start typing. Once you have changed the value, hit the enter key and that’s it. All the windows will now have buttons on the right.

There is still one problem however, as you can see, the graphics used for the buttons are not the same for all 3 buttons, so they look a bit weird. You can either change the theme, or change the graphics for the buttons to get a smoother blending.