Matt Farina - Tech / Faith / Life

My first article appeared on the fshbwl, today, called "What If We Dropped the Word?". It's an article about the word evolution. This comes on the heals of my 2nd guest hosting spot on the Swim Podcast.

All this theological stuff is getting to be a bit fun.

I've often heard that science is capable of proving anything. Is this really true? Does science have no limits to it's deductive abilities? Sadly, there are some limits to what science and the scientific method can do. Let's take a look at a few of them.

Rotating banner images is a simple way to spice up most sites. It adds something shiny that can hook people in. If you use jQuery, like I often do, then a simple way to do the rotating banner images is using the jQuery cycle plugin. This plugin can even be used along with drupals views module to create dynamic lists of rotating images.

But, there are some downfalls with this approach. For example, if you create a list of images for the jQuery cycle plugin to rotate through you need to set all but one of them not to display with css. Even though most of the images are not initially displaying they are still downloaded in many browsers. If you have a bunch of images loading that have any size this has a potential to waste a lot of bandwidth if those images aren't viewed.

This was a problem that I ran into working on a few sites. Here's a solution I use that solves this problem while working well with Views, jQuery, and any content Views can create.

You can read the complete article at http://www.innovatingtomorrow.net/2008/05/12/rotating-banner-images-with...

I recently moved MattFarina.com from a single site drupal installation over to a multi-site installation. This means that all the image paths in all the posts were updated (via a script). If you see an errors or anything out of place I'd appreciate it if you let me know.

Have you noticed all the bagging on the church in recent years? Sometimes it's the worldwide church. I've herd people call them ignorant or that they just don't get it. Sometimes it's the local church. I've herd people criticize it for not being the way they picture or want it. Sometimes it's a denomination. People love to argue who is right and why. I'm not talking about a discussion, I'm talking about an argument.

Looking for an easier way to follow the content on drupal.org, drupal groups, the drupal planet, and all those forums? The drupal widget is here to help you with that.

The drupal widget works on Netvibes, igoogle, Windows Live, Opera, Apple Dashboard, and Windows Vista. Click one of these buttons to immediately add it.

A special thanks to Netvibes and Greg Cohn for producing this widget. This isn't the first time Netvibes has brought the drupal community something cool and useful. Last year Netvibes launched the Drupal Universe.

If you have any suggestions for feeds to change in the widget please let me know.

The Fishbowl is a faith based, non-profit community website that recently launched.

The idea behind the fishbowl is to explore faith from a number of different angles. Each day a new piece of content will come out in one of the 7 different categories. On Mondays it's content about World Views, Tuesday it's the Swim Podcast, etc.

How often do you think that if people knew the truth they would act differently? Or, if they just felt what you felt it would convince them to change? Or, if you could just get them to try something they would see that it's important and change?

About 5% of the people in the world say there is no God. According to the Pew Forum, the atheist population has been increasing at about 220% in America. In an effort to understand atheists and this modern day movement I've started to ask some tough questions. One of the first that came to my mind was, is there a way to know that there is no God? I'm talking about moving beyond belief into concrete testable knowledge. After digging through the different possibilities I've come to the conclusion that there is no way to know if there is no God. Let me explain my reasoning.

A lot of people I know would tell you they have found the truth or that they are searching for it. But, is that really the case? I have a friend who says he is searching for the truth. But, he is not praying, not reading up on science, not studying philosophy, not seeking out logic, and rarely seeking to take this search outside his own mind. Is that searching for the truth? On the flip side I have friends who sit in circles of people who share the same beliefs as them, they read only books that tell them what they are looking to hear, and they discuss topics with people who won't challenge them on it. Is this really searching for the truth? In both cases here I don't think these people are searching for the truth. They might be searching for peace of mind. They might be searching for what is comfortable. So, what does a search for the truth look like? Let's take a look at a few characteristics I've noticed.