Quill v0.3.0

November 8, 2014 By willduquette

Quill v0.3.0 has now been released, and is available on the Quill Release Page. Binaries are available for OS X, Windows, and for 32-bit and 64-bit Linux. Quill is a project automation tool for Tcl/Tk projects. Quill creates project directory trees with skeleton code, and manages many project tasks, including running tests, building documentation, preparing libraries for inclusion in a teapot repository, building applications, and building distribution sets. Some of these capabilities depend on ActiveTcl and TclDevKit; many do not.... Read more

High Geekiness is in the Forecast…

November 8, 2014 By willduquette

…with overcasts of nerdity in the early morning. This is to say that I’ll be heading off to the Tcl/Tk Conference on Tuesday morning. It will occupy virtually all of my time from then to the end of the week; and in the meantime I need to beaver away on Quill so that I can deliver Quill v0.3.0 in time to share with folks at the conference. I’ve got more to add to the User’s Guide, and a number of... Read more

More Thoughts on Schism

November 7, 2014 By willduquette

Yesterday I made the somewhat cryptic comment, “But if we set ourselves against the Pope and the bishops as a general thing, then we are in schism already; and if we remain there the Church will leave us behind.” When I said the “Church will leave us behind,” here’s what I was thinking. Consider the last two major schisms from the Catholic Church: the Society of St. Pius X, founded in 1970, and the Old Catholics, founded in (more or... Read more

The Mystery of Preaching: The Proclamation of the Kingdom

November 6, 2014 By willduquette

My latest at CatholicMom.com. Preaching the gospel means sharing the Good News of Christ’s death and resurrection to those around us, but it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You have to be in the right place at the right time, and you have to prepare the way with prayer. And for one hour of preaching to the masses in the evening, you have to spend a whole day’s worth of trudging along in the dust and the hot sun. Read more

Athanasius was a Bishop, You Know

November 6, 2014 By willduquette

There’s pattern of give and take I’ve been seeing over and over again in the Catholic blogosphere over the last year. I’m not going to name any names, because it’s a general pattern. Blogger A says, effectively, “Francis and the bishops are giving away the store. The Church is going to die. Schism might be necessary to preserve the Faith!” Blogger B responds, “Wait a minute. This is the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. Jesus promised that the Gates... Read more

Faith and Revelation, Mindmapped

November 5, 2014 By willduquette

I’m one of the members of my parish’s RCIA program, and last week I had to give a presentation and lead the discussion on the topic of “Faith and Revelation”. So to prepare I put my notes into the form of a FreePlane mindmap; and when it came time for the session I displayed the mindmap on a screen and opened and closed bits of it as we discussed the material. It all worked quite nicely. So here, for what... Read more

St. Martin de Porres

November 4, 2014 By willduquette

Yesterday was the feast day of St. Martin de Porres, a Dominican saint from South America and friend of St. Rose of Lima. I’m a little late to the party, clearly (I spent the last few days down with a cold); but fortunately my fellow Patheosi Diana von Glahn was on the case with a truly lovely post about St. Martin and his gentle devotion to those around him. Read more

CT 16: God Not A Body

November 3, 2014 By willduquette

We’re blogging through St. Thomas Aquinas’ Compendium Theologiae, sometimes called his Shorter Summa. Find the previous posts here. A body, in philosophical terms, is a material thing that takes up space. Stones, trees, dogs, and human beings are all bodies, that being the most general physical genus on the Tree of Porphyry. God, however, is not this kind of thing. It is evident, further, that God Himself cannot be a body. For in every body some composition is found, since a body has... Read more

Beautiful Code One Screen at a Time, Part II

October 31, 2014 By willduquette

Last week I talked about code being beautiful at the level of individual lines of code in small procedures. But what about longer procedures? There are a couple of standard rules of thumb for how what a procedure should do, and how long it should be: it should do just one thing, and it should be no bigger than will fit on the screen at once. And note, these dicta date back to when the typical screen was 80 characters... Read more

The Monster Mash, Just Because

October 31, 2014 By willduquette

So Tom McDonald has been regaling us all month with “Dark Country” songs in honor of Halloween. For my response I’m bringing it the fully goofy. Yes, here’s a fully computer-animated version of “The Monster Mash”. I think think it’s a re-recording by the folks who did the animation; it certainly isn’t the Bobby “Boris” Pickett recording I usually hear. The animation’s a little clunky, but fun nevertheless. Read more