Christmas Eve

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.
     (Luke 2:11)

For Christians, it means the birth of our Lord. For stores, it means up to 40% of their annual income. For people all over the world, it means a time to exchange gifts with loved ones, and to spend time with family.

Christmas is pervasive in American culture: from the iconic Santa Claus to the very real and packed malls. We tend to make this season the most frantic, stressful, and burdensome ritual we go through each year. We all should leave this stress behind, though, and give a moment of reflection to why we do this. What are the origins of the modern Christmas? Let us dive into a historical perspective of Christmas.

Christmas in the religious sense is the Christian celebration of the birth of the Savior, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is thought to have been born sometime during the early Roman Empire—the year 1, give or take a few dozen years. Christmas is the lesser of the two major Christian annual holidays, the foremost being Easter. Christmas in the secular sense has come to mean much more than this, but they both still share much in common.

Calling *BSD Testers!

The Humm and Strumm has recently gotten experimental *BSD support. So experimental, in fact, that it has yet to be tested! Neither Ricardo nor I have a BSD box on which to test it. Basically the new code (which is all contained in the system:: namespace) is written using the documentation I could find online (lots of it was nice POSIX calls). As such, the code is completely theoretical. We don't know whether it will even compile.

We are looking for testers who run a BSD system to test our new support. If you are interested, you can find information on how to check out the source code (check out from the PatrickNiedzielski branch) and how to build that source code.

Happy Zamenhof Day!

Even though this post is about Zamenhof Day, a holiday of Esperantists, I'm going to write this post in English, so as to reach the non-Esperantists who have subscribed to my blog.

The Esperanto movement is symbolized by the Green Star, „La Verda Stelo‟. (Image by Gabriel Ehrnst Grundin)

Feliĉan Zamenhofan Tagon! That's Esperanto for "Happy Zamenhof Day!" If you have never heard of Zamenhof Day, Zamenhof himself, or even the language Esperanto, don't worry. You're not alone. Esperanto is a constructed language, made in 1887 by Dr. Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, designed to ease communication between people of different language backgrounds. Since its creation, Esperanto has gained at least a million speakers, though that number is subject to debate. Perhaps it hasn't reached it's original goal.

Today, on December 15th, we celebrate Zamenhof Day, the anniversary of Zamenhof's birth. Zamenhof Day is the day Esperantists celebrate our language and our culture. Now is a great time to learn about the language. One of the best resources to do this is Lernu.net, an active community of Esperantists online.