Gene Veith points out a brief comparison and some far less brief analysis of 7-8th grade reading lists from 1908 versus today.

In other news, I may have found a new personal reading list. Some really good stuff in those old reading lists to which I haven’t yet gotten.

C.F.W. Walther wrote a letter to incoming members as to what he expects membership to entail. Interesting and relevant to our times. Found via Steadfast Lutherans.

Interesting quotes:

A genuine member of a Lutheran congregation must have a thorough understanding of pure Lutheran doctrine or at least must desire to grow in the knowledge of it. Such a one will imitate the Bereans in searching the Scriptures daily, he will not lay aside his Catechism when he has completed his elementary school training, but throughout his life continue to review it in order that he may understand it better and become more thoroughly grounded in it. He will read other good orthodox books and periodicals to become ever more firmly established in the pure doctrine.

…

A member of a Lutheran congregation must be able to defend his faith and to prove its correctness from God’s Word. St. Peter writes, I Peter 3:15: “Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asks a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” A sad state of affairs is revealed when members of a Lutheran congregation, asked about their faith, say, “You will have to ask my pastor about that.”

…

It is a settled fact that whoever is indifferent to false doctrine is indifferent also to pure doctrine and his soul’s salvation, and has no right to bear the name Lutheran and the name of Christ.

The AAP is sponsoring the development of an open source newsroom CMS.

They have Docker and Vagrent VMs, a live-blog component, and it looks like they communicate with NewsML G2.

“Enter Australian Associated Press, a news agency playing the wholesale game with its competitors and collaborators. These are your Reuters, your Associated Presses, Agence France-Presses, Press Associations, and all the world’s agencies that provide the bread-and-butter content for publishers, print and digital, and the broadcasters, streamers, the on-demand hipsters—news retailers.

Bitten once by a monolithic proprietary system, weary of increasing cost pressures as in-house teams bolted ever more complex satellite systems to an ageing core long overdue for the scrapheap, the Australians are just so over all of that. They want their tools, for their people, their way. Not least, they want the dev effort to reflect the needs and wishes of their journos, not their managers.

Their solution is to go open source. Not just as customers, either. No, AAP has rolled up its sleeves and is now partnering with the Prague-based open source outfit Sourcefabric in its development of the Superdesk news management suite of tools.”

Eric Li writes about the process of Optimizing WebSockets Bandwidth. I found the degree to which things like byte alignment, enums, struct packing, and other low level techniques matter here to be interesting. “All the complexity of assembler with the efficiency of javascript.”

Steadfast Lutherans has reposted an article by the sainted Klemet Preus on his journey to becoming convinced that every Sunday communion is a good and salutary practice within the church, which should be restored.

Dr. Paul Grime wrote an article for the Concordia Theological Quarterly entitled: Inclusive Liturgical Language: Off-Ramp to Apostasy? Very timely in regards to the new WELS hymnal.

A really useful feature, which I hope gets broad browser support: Subresource integrity.

It basically allows a reference to include the SHA256 hash of the expected result. As such, you could link to a download on another site and verify that the downloaded file was not tampered with.

Another use I would like is if the browser can verify that the downloaded file is not corrupted.

Thanks to CodesInChaos for pointing this out!

@will_in_wi Yes, it's called Subresource Integrity http://t.co/v5S5ZSflyD

— CodesInChaos (@CodesInChaos) January 16, 2015

A tutorial on using a GUI for GDB called Nemiver.

Pastoral Meanderings points out a fascinating piece of liturgical heritage.

An early piece of organum from around 900 AD.

Steadfast Lutherans has an article discussing what to do with the leftovers. This caught my attention because my wife and I were discussing this last Sunday.

I love how the practice is all centered around proclaiming and practicing the doctrine of the real presence.