Truth.
Without it the world devolves into an amorphous chaos where everyone's preferences describe a personal reality disconnected from everyone else's. In that dark place no decision is good or bad, no action is right or wrong. But in the presence of truth - we are exposed for what we are. Therefore we need truth as the divine measuring rod of our identities.
"I am the truth" - Jesus The Christ.

Hosting a Static Website on Amazon and Azure: Part 2-Hosting on Amazon S3

Submitted by parkernathan on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 6:57am
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In Part 1 of this three-part series, I explained that it is simple and affordable to host an entire static website out of cloud storage services such as Amazon S3 and Windows Azure Blob Storage. I also covered what I meant by a static website (no PHP scripting), and I offered a few pointers in PHP-freeing a website, especially in the areas of mobile site redirection, contact forms, and moving a self-hosted WordPress Blog to WordPress.com.

In this entry, I would now like to show how to get one’s feet wet with Amazon S3 and how to actually port a now-optimized website over to Amazon S3 and host the entire website right out of Amazon S3.

Hosting a Static Website on Amazon and Azure: Part 1-Site Preparations

Submitted by parkernathan on Mon, 02/13/2012 - 8:41pm
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Until recently, our company website, mallardcomputer.com, was hosted with a major hosting provider’s shared hosting plan. Pricing wasn’t too bad, and our website performance was running fine, but we wondered if we could simply get a better deal with our web hosting elsewhere, especially due to the fact that we have a relatively small website without too many hits a month, and also since we consult with a few nonprofit clients who also have extremely tiny websites with few hits a month, we wanted to see if we could save them some money as well.

Another company I work for informed me of their decision to move all of their infrastructure to Amazon Web Services, and their CTO informed me that since my company website was a simple website, I could pull it off hosting it in Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, Amazon S3, dirt cheap. After much research, I found out that indeed, it would be quite easy to pull off hosting my company website itself in Amazon S3, and the pricing isn’t too bad either. Amazon S3 customers get a “free tier” for the first year as long as they don’t go over that tier, and after that, pricing would be about 14-15 cents per GB each month, possibly a few pennies more if the website got a high amount of hits that month. In addition, performance and reliability should be better running in a major datacenter service like Amazon S3 than it would be with a traditional hosting provider due to the fact that Amazon S3 has a much larger infrastructure to handle all the “big guys” for their storage needs, so serving my company’s little site up on their massive datacenters should be a piece of cake.

Surviving a Crisis of Faith Luke 7:17-23

Submitted by tcblack on Sun, 01/22/2012 - 11:04pm
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It is part of God’s process of maturing us to bring us into situations where we must either trust Him or abandon Him. None could deny that Abraham was forced into such a crisis when God told him to sacrifice his only son – the son of promise. The writer of Hebrews tells us that Abraham reasoned in his heart that God must keep his first promise and therefore must raise him from the dead (Heb 11:17-19).

It was a prolonged period of running for his life which was the young David’s long protracted crisis in which he was brought daily and perhaps moment by moment to trust in God his deliverer.

It was Daniel the prophet hearing the king’s proclamation that none could pray to any but the king or suffer the lion’s den who resolutely opened his windows towards Jerusalem and prayed to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – who then endured the terror of being thrown into a den full of lions and the thrill of God’s merciful deliverance.

Whether Jacob, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Noah, or you – the Crisis of faith is defined best by that word: Crisis.

These memories are written for our instruction and for the building up of our faith. Since there is not one of us here this morning that has not experienced some Crisis of our faith, or who will at least be certain to face such a crisis in the future; would it comfort you to witness another and to see its resolution from God’s perspective?

This week as we come back to Luke – we arrive just in time to witness a crisis of faith in the person most of us would consider the least likely to suffer such a setback: John, the cousin of Jesus, called, “the Baptist”. Please read with me from the Gospel of Luke 7:17-23.

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