Ryan Gustason’s Blog

Well, I’ve found a new site that is really pretty useful.  It is called Stumble Upon. You create a free account on their site, set your interests, and then install either a firefox or Internet Explorer toolbar for Stumble Upon.  This will give you a stumble button, thumbs up or down buttons, Send to and Chat buttons as well as favorite sites list and a friends list.

The Stumble button will take you to a random site that has content related to your interests.  You then review the content of the site and choose either a thumbs up or a thumbs down.  In google or other search engines, you can enable a Stumble Upon rating to see what other people thought about the site.

All-in-all, a nice addition to your web browsing experience.

Here is a quick tutorial to install e-Sword on Ubuntu Linux. e-Sword is one of the best bible study software out there, and the only reason I stayed with Windows as long as I did. It will be interesting to see if Rick Meyers will port it to a native linux program. I believe he is trying to make a web based version of e-Sword, so his energies may be tied up with that. Until then, follow these instructions to get e-Sword running in Ubuntu using Wine. Note: I tested this with Xubuntu 8.04 and Wine version 1.0

First, install wine using a command line interface:

1. go to: Applications>System>Add/Remove…

2. Click on System on the left hand pane. In the right hand pane, scroll down until you find Synaptic Package Manager. Check it, click apply changes. If it asks for your password, enter it and click O.K. This step will install Synaptic which will be used in a later step.

3. Once Synaptic is installed (You should see it in Applications>System) Go to: Applications>Accessories>Terminal

4. In the terminal, past in the following and press enter (This will update Synaptic’s lists for Wine which is a Windows Emulator needed for running e-Sword): sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

5. Next paste: sudo apt-get update

6. Close the terminal and go to: Applications>System>Synaptic Package Manager

7. In the search box on the top of Synaptic, type in Wine and click search. In the list that displays, scroll down until you find wine. Check it. You may get a pop up asking you to install dependencies that Wine needs. Click mark and continue to install Wine. Click Apply at the top, and when a pop up windows comes up, click Apply again. Wait for the program to install.

8. Go to www.e-sword.net and download the latest version of e-Sword.

9. When the download pop-up window comes up, choose to open (run) the program using Wine. Wait for it to download the e-Sword installer. It should automatically continue with the e-Sword installation wizard.

10. Download msls31.dll from Dlldump.com.

11. Download Riched20.dll from Dlldump.com.

12. Copy the downloaded dll’s into the e-Sword directory by doing the following steps:

a. Places>Ryan (Change Ryan with your home directory)

b. Click on the view menu and check “Show Hidden Files”

c. Double Click .wine

d. Double click Drive_C

e. Double Click Program Files

f. Double Click E-Sword

g. Copy the two downloaded dll files into this directory

13. go to: Applications>Wine>Configure Wine

14. Click on the Libraries Tab, and in the “New override for Library” drop down box, fine Riched20, click add, apply, and ok. Close out of Configure Wine.

15. go to: Applications>Other>E-Sword to run E-sword. Everything should work fine, including the Strong’s tool-tips pop-ups. Enjoy!

Well, made a toolbar for the site. Download it here: http://gustason.ourtoolbar.com/

Here are a few useful resources I recommend getting for Bible studying.

Bible Concordance:

Strong’s Exhaustive

Bible Dictionary:

Smith’s

Vine’s Expository

Gesenius’ Hebrew

Thayer’s Greek- Based of N-A 27^th

Strong’s Greek & Hebrew Lexicon

Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek Lexicon

Brown-Driver-Brigg’s Hebrew

Commentaries:

Who’s who and where’s where in the bible- Miller

Holman Illustrated Pocket Bible Handbook- BHPublishingGroup.com

Nave’s Topical

Also get:

The New Cyclopedic Theological Dictionary:

Definitions and Commentary on Hundreds of Religious Terms an Essential Resource and Study Companion for Every Minister and Layman

by J. R. Ensey

ISBN 1560432063 / 9781560432067 / 1-56043-206-3

Publisher Advance Ministries

Language English

Edition Hardcover

Computer:

Free:

www.e-sword.net

http://www.crosswire.org/sword/index.js

Pay:

http://www.biblesoft.com/new/

http://www.bibleworks.com/

and MAC

Free:

http://macsword.com/

Pay:

http://www.accordancebible.com/

Well, just converted an SMF database from 1.0.8 to 1.1.5. Basically had to create a new instance of SMF from scratch. Used phpMyAdmin to do the merges. Here is what I learned for those of you trying to do something similar.

1) upload the old database files from the previous forum. Be sure the file is named something different than the new SMF.

2) use the following code sample in phpMyAdmin in the SQL tab:

INSERT IGNORE INTO `sample_new_smf1`.`smf_permissions`

SELECT *

FROM `sample_old_smf1`.`smf_permissions`

replace sample_old_smf1 with the name of the database you are copying from.

replace sample_new_smf1 with the name of the database you are copying to.

smf_permissions is the name of one of the tables in smf. You’ll have to repeat this for every table in smf. Also note that some of the table structures might have changed between versions. If you get errors merging the databases, this is most likely the reason why you are getting errors. To do the comparison, print out the table structure of the new table you are copying into. Then go into the old table and insert or modify the old table’s structure to make it match the new table’s format. Using phpMyAdmin, this is fairly simple. Just click on the pencil icon to modify a record entry, or scroll to the bottom to find an easy way to add new record fields into the table.

Once the two table’s structures match, re-try the merge again, and you should have no problems.

After all of this is completed, all you’ll need to do is relog into your forum and go through the fix any errors and optimize the tables.

Hope this helps.