If yesterday was all theory—all message and no meeting—today is the humble reality of practice. Out on the edge of things, between the gate and the grave, two crowds collide. One follows Jesus and another follows in the footsteps of death. And here it is like a lens clicking into focus: a dead man, the …
Yearly Archives: 2001
Sunday Week 18 Year C
“So I shall say to myself, ‘Self, you have so many good things stored up for so many years, so rest, eat, drink, be merry!’” Famous last words—but not my favourite ones! My favourite, famous last words come from General John Sedgwick during the Civil War: “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist…” There’s …
Sunday Week 17 Year C
Once upon a time—that’s just to let you know that this is one of those homilies—once upon a time, Jesus was sitting there praying, looking out from closed eyes over the sun-scorched hills of his homeland. The guys who followed him from place to place were all there watching him, impatiently, maybe wistfully. They could …
Sunday Week 16 Year C
This is a divisive little episode for we who hear it. Who are you rooting for? Let’s have a show of hands on that… Who’s to blame? Who’s the bad guy? Mary who’s sitting there like a lump neglecting her sister … or Martha who’s so full of her hospitality that she can’t be hospitable? …
Sunday Week 14 Year C
“I saw satan falling from the sky like lightning.” That shadowy figure from the Book of Job and from millenia of myth. The prosecuting attorney, the accuser, the adversary. My spellchecker has been insisting all week that “satan” has a capital “S” while the whole point of Jesus’ strange, ecstatic outburst in the gospel seems …
Sunday Week 3 of Easter
Let’s start with children’s stories. Long before there was Harry Potter, there was Sparrowhawk, Archmage of the land of Earthsea. Ursula LeGuin’s four beautiful books are about the magic of names. Her wizards work their wonders by knowing and speaking the names of things—their true names—the names they have in the old tongue, the language …
QDB: Quick Database Components
Borland’s Delphi© makes the construction of Windows applications easier than ever. In particular, the Borland Database Engine (BDE) offers enormous power with great ease. Sometimes, however, the full might of the BDE is overkill. Wouldn’t it be better for your simple projects to use a simple tool, one that could be distributed inside your EXE …
Snoop: Memory Leak Sniffer
Writing programs that work at all is difficult enough without having to track down memory leaks and strange problems with overwritten memory. Snoop and Snoop Monitor make it easy to snoop out those bugs — and they’re free. Caveat! It is some years since these components were developed and they won’t function beyond D5. They …
CompDocs: Structured Storage Wrapper
OLE Structured Storage (or Compound Documents or DocFiles … the names change regularly!) provide a clever way to have a whole file-system within a single file with nested ‘directories’ (storages) and ‘files’ (streams). There’s also the ability to do transaction processing: keeping modifications in limbo until ‘committed’ or rolled-back. The only catch has been that …
Widgets: Title-Bar Buttons
Another title-bar button? Yes, but one that works simply and cleanly to provide buttons which mimic the look and feel of Windows’ own frame controls by using Windows’ own drawing technique. Each Widget contains a single glyph from a truetype font. Windows uses the “Marlett” font for its own glyphs but you can use any …