Advancing the Cause of the Gospel Pastoral Blogging by Luther’s Heirs

Stroud, Robert C. “Advancing the Cause of the Gospel: Pastoral Blogging by Luther’s Heirs.” D.Min. diss., Concordia Seminary—St. Louis, [2016]. [353] pp. The purpose of this study was to explore whether provision of a digital Handbook for Pastoral Blogging would be of value to pastors who had never before blogged. A draft Handbook was provided to thirteen LCMS clergy from across the United States who were serving in parish ministries. They proceeded to begin blogs and maintain them over a period of three months. Data was collected from the participants at three points. The first was an online survey prior to receiving the Handbook. A second survey was completed after the conclusion of the three-month exercise. All thirteen subjects volunteered to also take part in a final one-on-one interview which was conducted via internet or telephonic media. The data supported the hypothesis that some pastors would find this type of resource helpful. As a result of their comments and suggestions, the Handbook was expanded to include additional information. In addition, a website has been prepared to provide supplemental support to blogging LCMS pastors, as well as other rostered workers in the Synod. This website had not been envisaged in the initial plan for the Major Applied Project. Both the expanded Handbook and the website will be offered for use by all rostered members of the LCMS upon final approval of this research project

Naming issues in the design of transparently distributed operating systems

PhD ThesisNaming is of fundamental importance in the design of transparently distributed operating systems. A transparently distributed operating system should be functionally equivalent to the systems of which it is composed. In particular, the names of remote objects should be indistinguishable from the names oflocal objects. In this thesis we explore the implication that this recursive notion of transparency has for the naming mechanisms provided by an operating system. In particular, we show that a recursive naming system is more readily extensible than a flat naming system by demonstrating that it is in precisely those areas in which a system is not recursive that transparency is hardest to achieve. However, this is not so much a problem of distribution so much as a problem of scale. A system which does not scale well internally will not extend well to a distributed system. Building a distributed system out of existing systems involves joining the name spaces of the individual systems together. When combining name spaces it is important to preserve the identity of individual objects. Although unique identifiers may be used to distinguish objects within a single name space, we argue that it is difficult if not impossible in practice to guarantee the uniqueness of such identifiers between name spaces. Instead, we explore the possibility of Using hierarchical identifiers, unique only within a localised context. However, We show that such identifiers cannot be used in an arbitrary naming graph without compromising the notion of identity and hence violating the semantics of the underlying system. The only alternative is to sacrifice a deterministic notion of identity by using random identifiers to approximate global uniqueness with a know probability of failure (which can be made arbitrarily small if the overall size of the system is known in advance).UK Science and Engineering Research Council

Implementing fault tolerant applications using reflective object-oriented programming

Abstract: Shows how reflection and object-oriented programming can be used to ease the implementation of classical fault tolerance mechanisms in distributed applications. When the underlying runtime system does not provide fault tolerance transparently, classical approaches to implementing fault tolerance mechanisms often imply mixing functional programming with non-functional programming (e.g. error processing mechanisms). The use of reflection improves the transparency of fault tolerance mechanisms to the programmer and more generally provides a clearer separation between functional and non-functional programming. The implementations of some classical replication techniques using a reflective approach are presented in detail and illustrated by several examples, which have been prototyped on a network of Unix workstations. Lessons learnt from our experiments are drawn and future work is discussed