Release Notes // October 2024
10/28/24
This evening, we enjoyed a very special technical lecture from Dr. Kevin Kindall on the topic of Computational Finance, highlighting the importance of computer science in valuation, hedging, and risk management. Dr. Kindall is a quantitative analysis expert who has over 20 years of experience in the industry. An equity trend trader with a background in physics and computational finance, he is a frequent conference speaker and published author.
Despite his brilliance, he is, above all, a devout Christian. He spent the final few minutes of his talk giving some spiritual and practical life advice to the college students in the room. It is worthy of your attention as well.
Life Advice from a Quant
www.sermonaudio.com/sermons/102924151293058
Entire Technical Lecture
www.sermonaudio.com/sermons/1028242252552157
10/23/24
- ChurchOne v4.0.8 has been submitted to both Apple and Google Play stores, giving users the ability to download a text/pdf file attached to a sermon.
- Add Collection widget to the top of any relevant hashtag pages.
- Make library page header spacing match other pages.
- Make broadcaster home page Group a link to the denomination page.
- Articles list should now properly infinite scroll in the Dashboard.
10/18/24
- Huge improvement to the Broadcaster Search functionality to now include any combination of partial names, street addresses, city names, minister names, and anything else you can think of!
- Revisiting the Broadcaster Homepage to now include much more information at a glance, including a contact form, online giving, denomination, social media links, Listen Line information, and more.
- A major rewrite of sermon FILTERS that allows you to find sermons much easier by drilling down to your exact search results.
- Collections got another minor update to now include links to Related Topics as well as being able to find Collections in the Sermons by Topics section.
- Android app got an update to fix a video streaming issue.
- VAULT#2 was successfully brought online this past week after running some initial tests. It is now load-balanced as an active failover system for part of our database.
10/14/24
Spent the entire day working on VAULT#2 getting it online. We setup a new cluster with multiple servers, configured the firewall, and got it setup enough to be able to remotely administer the rest of the setup process. Heading home. Thankful for God's help in the entire project.
In the world of computers, it is never a good situation to have a single point of failure, or a single copy of data. Having three of something—often referred to as “N+2 redundancy”—especially in different geographic locations, is considered ideal for truly redundant and highly reliable systems. However, the Bible talks a lot about the “four corners of the world” and it has long been our desire to reach those four corners, both figuratively and physically, with the preaching of the Gospel. By establishing a Vault Network across four geographic locations worldwide, we will achieve the strongest fault tolerance by maintaining multiple full copies of the entire sermon library with distributed load. It is the ultimate protection measure that will ensure the long survival of this treasure far into the future.
LEARN MORE:
www.sermonaudio.com/vault
The Vault Update
We are grateful to the facilities team at Bob Jones University for their tireless work in finally completing the much-needed cooling upgrade in the server room of The Vault. When building out your own infrastructure, you'd be surprised to learn that the things we take for granted—namely, cooling and power—are some of the most important things needed to keep everything running properly. We took a Saturday to vacuum down every component on every rack, so things are now finally feeling clean, cool, and ready for work!
10/12/24
We'd like to introduce a new way we're beginning to organize some of the sermon content on SermonAudio with what we are calling Collections. You can think of it as carefully curated content—consisting of sermons, videos, series, speakers, broadcasters—on any particular topic in a tidy presentation.
Learn more about it:
www.sermonaudio.com/news/collections
10/11/24
ChurchOne v4.0.4 update is now available on both app stores of Google and Apple. Most of the fixes are for Android:
Google Android:
- Fixes audio not stopping when app is killed
- Adds the ability to download videos
- Adds Picture-in-Picture mode
- Fixes possible crash when cancelling a download
- Adds subtitle support
Apple iOS:
- Miscellaneous fixes
10/7/24
Interviewed Geneva Durand, the creator of the Build-A-Vault set for an upcoming video.
10/4/24
Working on a creative new project with a homeschool daughter of a missionary family to Chile, who also happens to be a very talented builder of Legos. All proceeds from its sale support the Durand family mission work in Chile.
10/3/24
We spent a good part of our staff meeting praying for the broadcasters in Western North Carolina affected by Hurricane Helene.
10/1/24
The SERMONS section of any broadcaster homepage will now have a convenient way to filter sermons by PRESETS like category, year, Scripture. It's just a convenient way to quickly get to the sermon you're looking for!