Written by: Mobile Ministry Magazine

I’ve been sitting on the idea of this post for sometime. To be honest, I’ve really had many times during the past five years where I felt that MMM ended to be let go.

Then tonight, I was visiting with some friends, and it hit me just how important it has been for MMM to be here for the past 5 years. Yes, I can make the suggestion that it was needed for all of you who have come here over the years and gained insight towards life at teh intersection of mobile and faith. But really, it was for me to see just how much God values the gifts that we have, and how those gifts are to be used in the Body.

In the course of 5 years, there has been a number of PDAs, smartphones, laptops, and a few tablets that have passed through here. This site has gone through 5 major redesigns, and countless tweaks. Its been on Blogger the entire time, but took nearly 8 months or so for it to find a stable server to call home.

There have been guest posts by journalists, students, pastors, and evangelists. MMM has been noted at teh BBC and ABC. Its seen life on Jaiku, Twitter, Mippin, and Mobify.Me.

There has been reviews of devices, devotions, themed series, and the content that started it all – the issues.

This has been one heck of a ride. And I know that there are not many websites out there which can say that they have gone for 5 years on no budget. But man, God has shown me and Mobile Ministry Magazine a whole lot of favor.

I owe Sammy at Palm Addict a big thanks for his encouragement to just start this online, and his countless posts letting people know of MMM. Thanks to the host of folks who are represented in the links section – its amazing what your encouragement has meant over the years. And a huge thanks to LJ over at Trailblazin Ministries – dude, I love you in Christ and because of CHrist. THank you immensly for your words of wisdom, encouragement, and straightening up.

Now, there a some people who would say that they saw MMM going this far. There are some who are wondering still how we made it this far. I have no idea except to say that it has been God’s grace. A whole lot of grace.

Lord willing, before Blogger’s FTP service gets shut down, we’ll get another redesign up and then some stuttering of things as the move to another blogging system has been a lot slower than hpoed for. God, I really wish that I could have done a lot of things faster, better, with more clarity of the impacts etc. This site has been one heck of a learning experience, and I hope that for you visiting, reading, or just checking to see if MMM has finally found an editor, that you can understand that we are only moving forward because of the grace afforded to us.

Its been 5 years. And there are over 1700 posts here of stories which talk about life at teh intersection of faith and mobile tech. Wow. Just wow. If God gives this site another decade under my watch, I wonder what the imppacts and stories will look like then.

A new mission statement therefore for MMM: Enabling the story and His-story of the Christian faith through a mobile lens. How this is done has been stated for 5 years, but in this next stage of life for me and this site, we dig into this further. Hope you will come and share your story with us.

This post originally appeared on Mobile Ministry Magazine

Written by: Wes Allen

This week I got to play with an iPad for the first time – let me tell you, it’s a pretty impressive product. I really does look like a big iTouch, but the experience of using it is completely different. In fact, it’s all the computer my wife needs, and I have great hopes for tablets like the iPad to assist those who, while not blind, are severely visually impaired (like my son). Heck, I’d like to have one to use around the house.

There’s something about the iPad’s marketing tactics, however, that’s been nagging at my mind since it was first announced. Yes, the name is…. unfortunate (it might be the rare instance in history where a focus group actually would have improved a product), but I’ve gotten used to the name. What’s been nagging at me about the iPad’s marketing is the proud proclamation that the iPad is “magic.” Geeks like me have jumped all over that word, it seems to be the united opinion that hearing “it’s magic” about the iPad is akin to having someone run their fingers down a chalkboard. I share the sentiment, but because of who I am I started to think, “Why are we reacting to this word so strongly?” I’ve come to the conclusion that we geeks react so strongly to this word because we instinctively understand what this means.

“Magic,” in the Western Context, has come to encapsulate any kind of secret knowledge that’s kept from the uninitiated by a guild or secret society. Those who are not initiated into the guild need this protection because if they used it they’d only end up harming themselves and others. A great example of this view of magic can be found in the Harry Potter series (the ban on under-age wizards) and also in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels (Unseen university exists to keep people from using magic, which can accidentally destroy the world on a routine basis). Geeks understand this, when we drop to the command line and people’s eyes glaze over we get a glimpse of how the uninitiated see our world – “ls -l” might as well be an incantation to a non-geek. We like the fact that we stand between the user and their self-destruction – and it’s one of the reasons why we get so upset when users decide to use the magic, bypass our safe-guards, and then cry out for help when the digital demons come to ruin their day. We refer to this problem PEBKAC. If you don’t know what that means, chances are you’ve been a PEBKAC at some point in your life, you’re not in the guild.

Now, as I said, we’re quite happy being the digital wizards (or, if you want to go religious, “priests”). We stand between the users and chaos and we take pride in that. This is why we hate it when the iPad is referred to as “magic.” First, it offends our sensibilities that the uninitiated would be given the power of our digital realm without having to be taught how to think. All someone who uses an iPad has to know is where to touch and how to type in their password to buy an app – yet, they’ll still get to dance around the tablet like they know what they’re doing. Second, we geeks bristle at the fact that we, who know how to think are are initiated into the grand guild of geeks, are only allowed to use the same limited magic on the iPad that people who are normally PEBKAC get to use. It’s like Apple is saying that there’s another guild that only exists at 1 Infinite Loop, and we aren’t allowed to even consider joining it. So, we get peeved and think, “Who does Steve Jobs think he is, anyway?” What really hacks us off though, is that Steve Jobs isn’t really even considered a geek by the initiated, he’s an artist who employs geeks to merge the worlds of art and digital magic for the PEBKAC peoples of the world. In Steve Job’s world, it’s like we’re unnecessary, his special guild is all the world needs to be protected from digital chaos – and so we get miffed.

The thing is, we know that Steve Jobs still needs us, and he knows it as well. After all, without us where would he get the geeks to create the alloy of his art and our digital magic? So what do we do? We take our guild underground, we “jailbreak” our phones and tablets, and teach others the secrets that are happening under the screen of limited (yet pretty) magic that Steve’s guild offers to the PEBKAC masses. Yes, we know that there are other platforms out there that we don’t need to break into, but the pride of geeks is huge, and so we break into the walls of the iCastle in an act of rebellion. Yet, I think the best of us will eventually find the Artist waiting for us in some hallway of the iCastle with a smile on his face – and before we can attack he’ll say, “Oh good, I’ve been waiting for you. You see, I have this idea….”

It’s like…. magic.

This post originally appeared on Painfully Hopeful

Written by: Sean Boisen

Apparently i neglected to let Blogos readers know that i was speaking at LinuxFest Northwest this past weekend: my bad! My talk was a basic practical intro to Django, the Python-based web application framework, entitled “From 0 to Website in 60 Minutes – with Django“. Since Django is touted (rightly in my view) as a highly-productive way to do web development, what better way to demonstrate that than to actually build a functioning database-backed website in the course of the talk?

It was a pretty ambitious goal, and i had to take a few shortcuts to pull it off (like starting past the boring stuff, with Python/Django/MySQL already installed, and data ready to go). But i think i can fairly claim to have delivered what i promised. We walked through an application that’s been a side-project for the Whatcom Python Users Group, a web version of Sustainable Connection’s Food and Farm Finder brochure. It’s a nice simple learning example, well-suited to tutorial purposes. I’d say there were at least 40 or so in attendance, many the kind of beginners i was trying to focus on. And even though the time slot turned out to only be 45 minutes, I finished with several minutes to spare (in retrospect, i could have gone a little slower).

Slides are here, along with the data you need to follow them on the main page for the talk. I have audio of the talk that i’ll post in the next day or two once i’ve cleaned it up a bit: then it will be almost like being there (though without the ability to make sense of the “skeleton” joke). I was glad to have the opportunity to shine a little light on Django and repay a tiny portion of the debt of gratitude i owe its creators, since it’s been a major productivity boost in my work at Logos.

Here’s another reason why i give talks whenever i get the chance: you always learn more when you teach others. As a concrete example, i was reminded while prepping the talk that Django’s template framework, while primarily designed around HTML generation, is quite general and therefore capable of generating other data formats as well. At work, i’d built up an entire module of custom code around serializing Bible Knowledgebase data as XML for internal hand-off to our developers. Re-reading the Django book gave me the idea of using Django templates to do this instead. In fairly short order, i was able to rewrite my test example, 80 lines of custom code, with a single clean template and 20 much simpler lines instead.

This post originally appeared on Blogos

Written by: Mobile Ministry Magazine

Just a short post, but I did want to recommend the M3: Mobile post which was posted over at the the BibleTech Conference Blog. Not because it points to MMM – though that is humbling – but because of what was realized for a country when something as simple as a mobile was considered as part of the toolkit for a pastor.

Such moments leave me personally without many words. I would hope though, that for any who have stories of their own, that they too would find some consolation in the fact that in its right context, mobile tech is one powerful minstry agent.

This post originally appeared on Mobile Ministry Magazine

Written by: Mobile Ministry Magazine

As just stated on twitter, MMM has just been through a redesign. This is the 3 major redesign, and probably the 20min minor one done since this site was conceived 5 years ago. The importance of this update was to get one last redesign in before moving to another platform – which should have the same design – and to better focus on the mission of Mobile Ministry Magazine (will update the About page hopefully soon).

The New(ish) Mission Statement: Enabling the story and His-story of the Christian faith through a mobile lens.

Its the opinion of this site that how we define and work out living out this Christian faith has significantly changed, in part due to the threads that various forms of technology has given us. With this new design and sharpened focus on the story as it comes from you and your engagements with faith and mobile devices, its the hope that this site will keep that story of our faith out front so that present and future generations can see how His story is continuing to be threaded throughout our lives.

The design is based on lessons learned from the Mag+ Concept Video and Project which had been posted some months ago. Some of the core lessons in this video dealt around not making digital content fit older models of reading, but to develop containers for that content which allow digital technology to take a better advantage of how digital tech is being used – specifically with reading devices. Most of MMM has been in long-form blog postings, themed content, and then interactive elements sprinked throughout. Its the hope that attention to the story instead of the various aspects of “chrome” will come to the front, and then using the tools exposed on the site, you’d be able to see just how much can be done when a story is shared.

I am totally sure that there are issues somewhere and with some posts; but being under a tight deadline and with only access to a mobile device, this step was taken to ensure that a move to a new blog/content management system will follow a similar look, but push that interactive story a good bit further.

As usual, comments are welcome and appreciated – and will be answered with a grateful heart.

This post originally appeared on Mobile Ministry Magazine

Written by: Mobile Ministry Magazine

Just wanted to add a few more notes about what’s happening with the site in the coming weeks:

• Updates to MMM will happen via Twitter (@mobileminmag) as the site will be moving to WordPress. This will be the case for a few weeks until that move is completed.
• The Archives section will appear on the bottom of the page, until that happens, the search buttons at the top and bottom of the page will work towards finding content. Also the Category link is a good resource to search for items here.
• MMM will publish via Twitter some updates about its involvement with Digital Disciples in the coming days.
• Will be looking for a suitable netbook or notebook to replace a desktop that I have so that MMM can get back into creating some unique content and following through on some research.
• Oh, MMM is a full-time gig; look forward to more speaking and appearing at conferences (as budget and travel allows).

So that’s the deal with things as it stands right now. There’s much that needs to be done, and at the same time a call to me, and to MMM, that needs to be followed through with. You are invited to come alongside and help us till this digital ground together, and at the same time, if you have a need towards understanding how to engage this story of our Christian faith through this mobile lens, well, this is what we do and would like to help you see similar possibilties. A new adventure begins, and a new chapter to MMM starsts now.

This post originally appeared on Mobile Ministry Magazine

Written by: Sean Boisen

I’m Dave. I’ve been developing software in some form since around the time I learned to ride a bike, professionally since 1998 and at Logos since 2008. I’ve spent most of my career developing web applications, mostly in Java, but also PHP, Ruby and most recently, C#. In the last few months, Objective-C found its way into my toolbox as well as I’ve been working on the Logos iPhone app.

This post originally appeared on code.logos.com

Written by:

I recently encountered some confusing code that was written to work around this issue. Let’s say you want to find all items whose title is null. Using LINQ, you could do something like this:

var titleless = items.Where(x => x.Title == null);

This works just fine in LINQ to Objects, LINQ to SQL, and LINQ to Entities. But what if you instead want to find all items whose title is equal to a variable that may or may not be null?

string title = null;
var titleless = items.Where(x => x.Title == title);

This works in LINQ to Objects, but not LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities, due to the fact that it generates SQL something like this:

select * from Items where Title = @x 

which translates into

select * from Items where Title = null 

which doesn’t match anything, because null does not equal null in SQL. It needs to generate this:

select * from Items where Title is null 

You can make it work in LINQ to SQL if you use object.Equals:

var titleless = items.Where(x => object.Equals(x.Title, title)); 

That generates the is null when title is null. But it doesn’t work in LINQ to Entities. You can make it work in LINQ to Entities with this statement:

var titleless = items.Where(  x => title == null ? x.Title == null : x.Title == title); 

But that generates some scary SQL akin to this:

select * from Items where (