There is a miracle of incorruptable holy relics (Incorruptable Bodies) of many of our Orthodox Saints in the Orthodox Church. Little or none is actually known in the non-orthodox christian realm about this great miracle proof of the truthfulness of our faith.
The incorruptability of saints has been a phenomena longly known to exist, some of the incorruptable bodies of saints are still preserved already for more than 10 centuries.
The phenomenon of incorruptable bodies is a sure sign for saintship in the Church. There are dozens of orthodox christian saints whose bodies are still intact. Our Orthodox Church teaches that the incorruptability of the saints body is given by God’s grace for all us the believers as a confirmation of the Resurrection of the Dead, which is about to come in the Great day of the Lord as the scriptures teaches.
A good example for incorruptable body which exists for 10 centuries in the bulgarian lands are the incorruptable holy body of St. John of Rila. St. John of Rila is the greatest known Bulgarian saint also officially recognized by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church as the patron saint of Bulgaria (protector of all Bulgaria).
In below’s videos I present you the antiphon of St. John of Rila:
Antiphon translated to English means (Song of Praise) dedicated to some Christian saint and is actually an Orthodox well-known Church term.
Saint John’s incorruptable bodies is still kept in his established monasteryThe Rila Monastery . Each year on the saints feast his incorruptable body is being bringed out of the monastery for a procession around the Church monastery.
On that day all the pilgrims who are looking for St. John’s spiritual intercession in front of God (The Holy Trinity) are lined up to venerate the great God servant St. John of Rila.
Unfortunately there is no video that has video-taped the incorruptable body of Saint John of Rila. However there are plenty of videos which shows a lot of incorruptable bodies of saints some of which are even Roman Catholic.
Along with the saints bodies incorruptability, many of the saints bodies does emit a specific a flower like odor, nevertheless the body is a thousands of years old.
Here is an example of a saints remains which is considered incorruptable, his body is preseved for more than 60 years without any special chemical threatment.
What is most important is many believers does receive a spiritual blessing or get healed from various spiritual or bodily diseases, when they look up for the holy intercession of the saint, who has been honoured by God with incorruptableness.
Before a saint’s body is recognized as a saint and his body as incorruptable, usually there are testimonials by christian layman for healings by his holy prayers during his earthly living. Some of the saints which are found to have incorruptable bodies has happened after a few years they have been put in a normal earthly grave. In holy mount athos there is a tradition that (if I remember correctly 5 years) after a monk’s death and burial, his grave is being digged out to collect his remains and put it in a ossuary.
After this 5 years some of the holy monks remains are found to possess this miraculous graceful incorruptable bodies.
As we know from Holy Bible, the body is the temple of the holy spirit my logical interpretation of some of the saint’s incrorruptability is rooted in there saint’s way of living as they have achieved the Holy Spirit (The Spirit of God) in an immeasurable quantities that, the Spirit of Truth that’s being flowing out from their incorruptable bodies is still sustaining the body and prevents the natural laws to destroy it.
The bodily incorruptabilities of our Orthodox saints is also a clear sign for the truthfulness of Orthodox Christian faith. The incorruptability is also a direct violation of the natural laws by God’s great providence and mercy and I guess is given as a stimulator of us whose faith in our saviour Jesus Christ and in God the Holy Trinity – The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit, to whom be glory now and forever and ever Amen!
The more my blog is growing the slower it becomes, this is a tendency I’ve noticed since a couple of weeks.
Very fortunately while reading some random articles online I’ve came across a super valuable wordpress plugin called WP-OPTIMIZE
I think it’s best if I present instead of taking the time to explain what the WP-optimize does for a wordpress powered blog:
WP-Optimize is a WordPress 2.9++ database cleanup and optimization tool. It doesn’t require PhpMyAdmin to optimize your database tables. It allows you to remove post revisions, comments in the spam queue, un-approved comments within few clicks.
Additionally you can rename any username to another username too.
For example: If you want to rename default ‘admin’ username to ‘someothername’; just put ‘admin’ (without quotes) to the Old username field and the new username to the New username field, then click “PROCESS”)
Now in short to rephrase above text, during MySQL database requests a lot of database starts needing the so called MySQL optimization , this operation becomes necessery especially for databases which are very actively used and is related to the basic design of the mysql server.
Very often many tables starts having a lot of garbage (repetitive) data and therefore read and writes from the SQL server gets slower and slower day by day.
Thus the MySQL server has it’s famous OPTIMIZE TABLE command which does wipe out all the garbage unnecessery data stored in a tables/s and hence seriously impacts the later read/write table operations.
Now to go back to wordpress the same optimization issues, very often are a cause for a performance bottleneck and some smart guy has came with the great idea to create a specific wordpress plugin to fix such an optimize table issues
The WP-Optimize plugin has 5 major options which somehow could have a positive impact on blog’s performance, these are:
Remove all Post revisions
Remove all auto draft posts
Clean marked Spam comments
lean Unapproved comments
Optimize database tables
Apart from the nice performance boost applicaiton the wp-optimize plugin has one super valuable function, it could change the default wordpress blog administrator useradmin to some other desired username, for example rename the default blog administrator username “admin” user to “john”.
From a security perspective this is another must have feature in every wordpress blog as it can kill many of the possible brute force attacks with some web brute force softwares like Hydra
Installing and using wp-optimize is a real piece of cake, here is a very quick few command lines to install it:
host:~# cd /var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins/
host:/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins:# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/wp-optimize.0.9.2.zip
host:/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins:# unzip wp-optimize.0.9.2.zip
...
To launch WP-OPTIMIZE and fix many speed bottlenecks caused by unoptimized tables, or just hanging around in database old spam comments, go and login with your adminsitrator to wordpress.
In the left pane menu starting up with Dashboard somewhere near the end of the vertical menu you will notice a button reading WP-Optimize . Click over the Wp-Optimize button and a screen like the one in below’s screenshot will appear in your browser screen:
I have personally decided to use just 2 of all the 5 available primary plugin options, I decided to select only:
Clean marked Spam comments
Optimize database tables
Scrolling below the PROCEED button I could also notice a number of tables which were missing optimization and hence required an optimize table to be executed on each one of them. Further on I pressed the PROCESS button and after a couple of minutes (2, 3 minutes) of waiting the wp-optimize plugin was done it’s selected tasks:
In the screenshot below, you see all my blog tables which were optimized by the plugin:
It’s interesting to say few words about the Remove All Posts revisions plugin option, as many might be wondering what this plugin option really means.
When writting posts, wordpress has an option to restore to a certain point of the write out and makes a sort of different versions in time of each of it’s written posts.
Therefore later restoration if something gots deleted by mistake is facilitated, this is actually the all meaning of Remove All Posts revisions
With time and the increase wp posts the amount of Posts Revisions is growing on and on and just taking space and possibly making the access to the database entries slower, thus it might be a good idea to also remove them as, it’s absolutely rare to use the wp post restoration function. However I’ve personally decided to not wipe out the old posts revisions as someday i might need it and I’m a bit scared that it might cause me some database issues.
I’ll be glad if somebody has tried the Posts Revisions wp-Optimize funciton and is happy with the results.
As I’m continuing my nginx adventures this days, by trying to take the best out of the installed nginx server, I’ve found few configuration options, which does improve nginx’s server performance and thought it might be nice to share it here in hope that some other nginx novice might benefit out if them. To setup and start using the options you will have of course to place the conf directives in /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf or wherever your nginx.conf is located.
The configuration options should be placed in nginx’s conf section which starts up with:
http {
Here are the configuration options useful in hastening my nginx’s performance:
If you’re experiencing problems with maximising flash (let’s say youtube) videos on your Debian or Ubuntu or any other debian derivative. You’re not the only one! I myself has often experienced the same annoying issue.
The flash fullscreen failures or slownesses are caused by flash player’s attempts to use directly your machine hardware, as Linux kernel is rather different than Windows and the guys from Macromedia are creating always a way more buggy port of flash for unix than it’s windows versions, it’s quite normal that the flash player is unable to properly address the computer hardware on Linux.
As i’m not programmer and I couldn’t exactly explain the cause for the fullscreen flash player mishaps, I’ll skip this and right give you the two command lines solution:
This should fix it for, you now just restart your Icedove (Firefox), Epiphany Opera or whatever browser you’re used to and launch some random video in youtube to test the solution, hopefully it should be okay 😉 But you never know with flash let’s just hope that very soon the open flash alternative gnash will be production ready and at last we the free software users will be freed from the evil “slavery” of adobe’s non-free flash player! Though this tip is tested on Debian based Linux distributions it should most likely work same in all kind of other Linuxes.
The tip should also probably have effect in FreeBSD, though the location of the adobe directory and mms.cfg should probably be /usr/local/etc/adobe, I’ll be glad to hear from some FreeBSD user if including the OverrideGPUValidation = 1 flash option to mms.cfg like below:
# mkdir /usr/local/etc/adobe
# echo "OverrideGPUValidation = 1" >> /usr/local/etc/adobe/mms.cfg
would have an impact on any flash player fullscreen issues on FreeBSD and other BSD direvative OSes that run the linux-flash port.
As I’ve mentioned in my previous post, one of the greatest “evils” which prevents a good internet anonymization whether you surf online is Adobe Flash Player
There are two approaches you might partake to disable the privacy issues which might be related to Adobe Flash cookies saving data about flash banners or websites which stores their cookies to your computer.
To find out if flash websites has already saved their nasty flash cookies on your Linux, issue the commands:
hipo@debian:~$ cd .macromedia
hipo@debian:/home/hipo/.macromedia$ find -iname '*.sol'
./Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/#s.ytimg.com/settings.sol
./Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/settings.sol
./Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/#ip-check.info/settings.sol
The returned output of the above find command clearly reveals the shitty flash has stored already 3 flash cookies on my Linux, 3 cookies which later can be easily requested by other flash banners. The 3 flash cookies are: 1. Saved by Adobe’s Flash Configuration Manager 2. Saved by the website ip-check.info 3. Saved by s.ytimg.com’s website
Now to deal with the situation and get rid of flash cookies, there are possibly two ways of approach that one can take:
1. One is to use some kind of script like the one clear_flash_cookies.tsch the other one is to completely disable flash cookies. Using the clear_flash_cookies.tcsh does get rid of flash cookie problems just temporary as it might be set to be executed either once the browser is starting up, or directly via some kind of cron job entry like:
eHowever clearing up (removing) the flash cookies, still doesn’t completely proihibit saving up of flash cookies and in the time intervals between the clear ups of the flash cookies, still some websites might save information related to their use on your Linux host and expose this information for other external flash websites to read and retrieve information about your previous websites visits.
Therefore it might be a better solution in terms of browser security to;
2. completely disable the use of adobe flash cookies on your Linux powered desktop.
Disabling adobe flash cookies is possible by either using the online flash Global Storage Settings (Flash Settings Manager) by navigating to the URL:
A friend of mine has recommended, few websites which are quite useful in checking what kind of information a remote website could possibly retrieve about your system. I’ve found quite useful as they expose the high level of browser security there is nowdays even on a Linux based systems. I’ve been stunned that so many information about my Linux desktop could be mined even when I use my browser through a tor network.
Here are the websites you might also like to check and possibly afterwards improve your Browser security:
I was rather shocked that some information that could be retrieved on my Linux host could even reveal fundamental details about my Linux Desktop like a version of my currently running Linux kernel!
In the past I’ve blogged an article which is quite related to the topic of Internet Anonimity and Browser security
The Fifith week and the fifth Sunday of Lent is preparation for the Holy Week (right before Eastern). In the Gospel readings on the fifth Sunday it’s being told how God on his way for Jerusalem revealed for a time to his deciples (The Holy Apostles), that his way is the way of the cross, the suffering and death and that the high-priest and the jewish scripture interpreters will betray him, will violate him spit at him, beat him and crucify him and most importantly that he will be Risen on the third day.
The pupils has been terified walking with him on the way to Jerusalem and haven’t really understood the Lord’s prophetic words.
The mother of John and Jacob for example asked the Lord that her sons be allowed to sit on his right and on left side of the Lord’s throne, without knowing like the rest of the desciples that the Lord’s way of unbelievable suffering, which the desciples comprehends a bit later.
The cross’s road of suffering is a predetermined path not only for Christ’s desciples but for the whole Orthodox Church in general and for all the believers inChrist’s name. God does alone has carried out suffering for the human sin and sinfulness and bears it together with man entering and changing human’s history and completing his redemption for us on the cross. On this land a man without a revelation of God, never could understand that God is love, that God is good, even if they are already talking about two thousand years all the saints and Fathers of our Church. God is love and sacrifice himself for man, so our suffering is noble by his feat, carried out for good, because the truth because of the transfiguration of man. His sacrifice is the noblest sacrifice of this world.
But in essense as many ordinary people say in the suffering there is nothing good and noble. The sufferings however after Christ’s sacrifice in his “house-building” plan to transfigurate the man’s personality does prooved miraculous for many Christians throughout the centuries.
A very light example of such a transfiguration of the human’s personality (soul) can be clearly seen in the example of saint Mary of Egypt’s living whose memory do celebrate in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church today (in the Fifth Sunday of the great Lent).
St. Mary of Egypt has lead a very unusual way of living, which is really striking to be comprehend even for us the modern Christians.
Her living is a God’s omen for all generations of Christians and is in clearly distinctive with ours.
As we can read in short in her living, from a very rich and prosperous prostitute touched by Christ’s love after entering an Orthodox temple by the Mercy and the great prayers of the Theotokos (Virgin Mary) she has decided to loose all earthly preasures and all the old unrightous way of living and start living a saint hermit life in the desert, she has fought the devil’s temptations and the consequences of sin and God’s wrath for the sinful way of live she has lead for so monay ears before she has turned to Christ in humility in about 25 years alone in the desert!
That’s clearly a God’s great miracle and faith simulator we should thanks God for ..
Her living is a very bright example that we should not despair ourselves about our salvation, and that God takes care for everyone who puts his faith in him and decides consciously to let behind his sinful way of living and evil and starts fighting with it.
God grants us our earthly living and waits throughout our whole earthly live for us to turn back from our sins and change for good.
St. Mary of Egypt is a great example for us who belief in Christ today about how much a repentance could work out in our lives.
From one of the greatest city sinners she has turned into a saint by repenting for her previous sinful life for 25 years.
After the end of her great trial period in the desert, seeing her great repentance God has granted us all the gifts of healing and miraculness of the Holy Spirit.
I would not stop into details of the great saint’s living I’ll just say it’s worthy to check her living in http://orthodoxwiki.org/Sunday_of_St._Mary_of_Egypt and be seriously astonished!
Let us take st. Mary of Egypt for a leading example in our lives and hope that God will have mercy on us and grant us her humbleness and repentance for our great sins we stand in daily ..
Save us Oh Lord by the prayers Saint Mary of Egypt!
A friend of mine who is a devoted Orthodox Christian (and ipodqkon Georgi), regularly visits Holy Mount Athos as a pilgrim. On a few times he has been there serving to the workman who are currently restoring a number of monastery building which has been abandoned for quite some time.
Every Sunday morning he also goes to the Monastery Church St. George Zograph for the monks Holy Liturgy service. He send me few recordings he made with his phone during the Holy Liturgy monks chanting. The recording’s quality is quite raw as however still it’s very invaluable piece of spiritual music, which I think every spiritual person will highly regard and enjoy.
Here are the 12 songs which he send me over skype I hope the songs, will be enjoyable and a spiritual blessing to some Christian brothers and sisters out there:
I have noticed that many blogs nowdays offer an email subscription box to simplify the subscription procedure for the blog readers.
My blog was lacking this feature so I took the time to find out how can I add an e-mail subscription box field on my blog. My research has shown me that the easiest way to add the subscription box is by using Google’s Feedburner RSS service . I’ve been using Google FeedBurner for quite some time and I’ve already 27 subscriptions with it. Earlier when I added a FeedBurner subsciption to my blog I’ve blogged about it, so if you’re not acquainted on how to add FeedBurner service to your blog, you might want to read my previous article Adding RSS Feed to WordPress in conjunction with FeedBurner / WordPress add-to-any-subscribe plugin
In this article I will explain in short step by step, how to add the subscrpition email box to your wordpress I assume, that the reader has already enabled and configured registration with Feedburner, if you still haven’t just skip few lines above and check my previous article. I would hereby skip the explanation of why feedburner as an RSS is so advantageous for every blog owner and readers and skip further to the email subscription procedure step by step instructions: Step 1: Login to your FeedBurner Account
In my case my feedburner account url is accessed via the URL http://feeds.feedburner.com/WalkingInLightWithChrist-FaithComputingDiary
I have been properly logged in to my feedburner, so to view statistics of my current feeds subscription and to configure various variables of feedburner I had to access the URL address: http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/myfeeds, a very quick shortcut to my feedburner account settings is also avaialable by simply accessing the URL: http://feedburner.com
Step 2: Click on the link that saysMy Feeds
If you have configured feeds for your feedburner you will get the list of feedburner feeds, (one could have multiple feeds, let’s say if you have a couple of blogs or sites and you use one feedburner account to podcast your feeds for each of the separated blogs or sites.
Step 3: Click over the feed you want to have the feedburner email subscription box
Below you see the screenshot of my configured feedburner feed:
Right after clicking on your configured feed in my case Walking in Light With Christ – Faith, Computing, Diary you will see the screen:
Step 4: Click on Publicize menu
You will see the following two screens while scrolling with your browser:
You see in the second screenshot above there is a textbox with a html form code, to set the feedburner subscription to appear on your blog you need to copy/paste this code and put it on your blog.
After copy/pasting the code, don’t forget to scroll down in your browser and save the email subscription generated form settings, (NB! if you don’t save it it want be working even if you install it on your blog). Here is the Save button screenshot:
Step 5: Setting up feedburner email textbox to wordpress
In order to set up the just copied html and css form code you need to login to your wordpress blog admin and go to:
Appearance -> Widgets
Scroll over the Available Widgets list, find the Text Widget and press the Add button to include the Text Widget to your blog sidebar.
Further on the same Widgets page, go to the Sidebar menu find the just added Text Widget and click over the Edit link:
Here is my screenshot of the edit screen of the Text Widget:
Step 6. Add the feedburner email subscription box to single posts blog views
This step is not a requirement, but I found it for myself to be vital, as it might rise some more subscribers to my blog, if my blog readers finds individual indexed pages in Google.
This step is also highly dependant on the wordpress theme you use, I use the old wordpress default theme and it’s default behaviour is not to show up the wordpress sidebar, whether an individual wordpress post is clicked over, therefore to enable my feedburner subscription box for individual posts I also need to place the form code obtained from Feedburner.com’s to my templates single.php
If you’re using some kind of theme that doesn’t have the non-sidebar single post behaviour you might skip forward this step, otherwise just continue on reading.
To include the feedburner email form subscription to my single posts I edited blog/wp-content/themes/default/single.php
In the single.php file find the code:
<?php comments_template(); ?>
Immediately after the above code place your feedburner form code, like you see in below screenshot:
Step 7: Modify your form code css and javascript to make your feedburner more accustomed for your needs
Again this step is voluntary and is not necessery I’ve disliked the default way the form is formatted so I played a bit with few of it’s values to customize it to my likings, the things which I have changed a bit in the provided feedburner form code was:
Remove the Delivered by Feedburner text from the form
>To do so in the issued feedburner form code below when you copy the code paste it to some text editor and remove from the code the text:<p>Delivered by <a href=”http://feedburner.google.com” target=”_blank”>FeedBurner</a></p>
– Change the subsciption box width and height:
style=”width:140px”Changed that to:style=”width:120px”also I’ve changed:’scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520’to:’scrollbars=yes,width=450,height=420’Another point of interest for adjustmnets in the feedburner for are in the form code:
Remove feedburner subscription form default bordering
form style=”border:1px solid #ccc;padding:3px;text-align:center;”I’ve changed that to:form style=”border:0px solid #ccc;padding:2px;text-align:center;”By changing the css values border:1px to border:0px I have instructed the subscription box to show up without borders.
That’s all now refresh in your browser and check if the feedburner email subscription form is showing up properly to your wordpress. To completely ensure yourself it works correctly try to subscribe yourself to the form and during your next blog post you should receive an email notifying you about the newly written article.
You can see, my blog feedburner subscription form on the blog right sidebar or on the below picture:
