The Fedora Infrastructure was recently compromised. Hopefully they secured the systems using the CIS Redhat Linux hardening guide.
Installing Nmap from SVN on Ubuntu 10.10
If you are an Ubuntu user and simply cannot wait to get the latest nmap features, follow the procedure below. Throw this into a file and call it, ‘build_nmap’ and copy it to the /etc/cron.daily directory and you will have a daily build of the latest and greatest version of nmap.
P.S. The same procedure will also work for you Backtrack geeks.
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1. Open a shell terminal. 2. svn co –username guest –password “” svn://svn.insecure.org/nmap/. 3. cd nmap 4. ./configure 5. make 6. sudo make install |
The Genius of Puritanism
The Genius of Puritanism by Peter Lewis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Thought this was an excellent summary of Puritan thought and how necessary it is for the church never to forget the tokens of grace that they have left for us. I particularly enjoyed the focus on Christian depression and the remedies that were provided. The author also had a pretty good balance of quotes from a variety of Puritan sources.
Thoughts on Van Til: Scripture & Philosophy
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“But to engage in philosophical discussion does not mean that we begin without scripture. |
The starting point for the Christian worldview is always the scriptures, but if you listen to Christians attempting to defend the Christian faith, they seldom start with the Scriptures. Instead they feel it is necessary to “put themselves in the mind of the unbeliever” in order to establish a “common ground” to have sound discourse with them. When this approach is utilized the battle is over.
Why would the battle be over with defending the Christian faith with this approach? The moment the Christian concedes(Even just for the sake of argument) they have already agreed that there is a possibility that God and the Bible may not be true. The Scriptures never grant the Christian such liberty. Let’s look at the verse below and see if we can apply it to our example above:
(ESV) John 8:24: “I told you that you would die in your sins, for unless you believe that I am he you will die in your sins.”
Jesus was speaking to the Jewish religious leaders and you say he was engaged in an apologetic for the faith. He does not once concede and say, “OK, let’s just for sake of the argument I”m not who I say I am, namely the Son of God, who takes away the sins of the world…?” No, this is never once entertained, but the unbelieving leaders are forced to either accept His testimony and therefore to believe that he is the promised Messiah or they will perish in their sins. There is zero room for neutrality. And this is the point; to concede to the unbelievers position is to believe that God is neutral and we not from the Scriptures that this is not the cause. The Lords judgements are binary; we are either covenant keepers or covenant breakers. Saints or reprobates.
So this is why the presuppositional method of apologetics is the most faithful defense of the Christian faith to the scriptures. We have committed our way to the King of Kings and as Christ said in Matthew 12:30, “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.”
The Doctrine of Repentance Book Review
The Doctrine Of Repentance by Thomas Watson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
As is the case with most of Thomas Watson’s books, the exegesis of scripture is superb and the practical advise that he offers is timeless. This book really hits home by expounding that for the Christian repentance is a continual process and is part of the sanctification process that God uses to conform us to the image of His Son.
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.
Installing Emacs on Ubuntu 10.04 from Source
Here is how you can compile the mother of all editors on Ubuntu 10.04 from source:
1. Obtain the source archive for Emacs from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/
2. Open a Terminal in Ubuntu and type:
A. sudo apt-get install build-essential libxpm-dev libgif-dev libtiff4-dev
B. This will install the necessary packages to compile Emacs.
3. Extract the Emacs archive downloaded in step 1 by typing: tar xvzf emacs-major_version-minor_version.tar.gz.
4. Change to the Emacs source directory. a.k.a. cd emacs-major_version-minor_version
5. Type: ./configure
6. Type: make
7. Type: sudo make install
Enjoy.
US-CERT Has More Holes Than Swiss Cheese
This just in….US-CERT found to have plethora of security holes in their network. End of the world predicted in a matter of days.
Review of Always Ready
Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith by Greg L. Bahnsen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a most excellent book as to how the Christian should be ready to defend the faith and I think it’s the only way to expose the “intellectual schizophrenia” that is within every non-Christian and that is at the core of their world view, which is a network of their presuppositions. The whole problem with an evidence based apologetic is that there is always room for a probability that it may not be true, which God never grants us as an option in scripture.