Where Everybody's Crazy

Partly so I can get it on the road if I need it. :)

• Thursday 17th: Arrive, Gerrards Cross
• Friday 18th: 1pm JCL Prayer Meeting, St Helen's Bishopsgate; consultation with JCL staff; evening social meeting with London.pm at the Pembury Tavern, Hackney.
• Saturday 19th: Oxford. Friend's birthday party
• Sunday 20th: 10:30am, preaching St Aldate's morning service.
• Monday 21st: Evening WEC prayer group, Swansea
• Tuesday 22nd - Friday 25th: at home in Wales
• Saturday 26th: Gerrards Cross
• Sunday 27th: Japan Christian Fellowship, London
• Monday 28th: Gerrards Cross
• Tuesday 29th: Oxford
• Wednesday 30th: Meet missions pastor, St Aldate's Oxford
• Thursday 31st: Oxford
• Friday 1st: Friend's wedding, Cheltenham
• Saturday 2nd: Oxford
• Sunday 3rd: Preaching Japan Christian Fellowship, London
• Monday 4th: Meet with a friend from Argentina, Gerrards Cross
• Tuesday 5th: Gerrards Cross
• Wednesday 6th: Return to Japan

Let no man call it a holiday. Oh, and church folks here are looking in on the house, as is the police detective who lives next door, so don't try it. ;)

To eat, while in the UK:

• Minted lamb steaks
• Steak and kidney pie
• Full English breakfast

What else?

A while back Gervase asked me a very astute question about the role of doctrine. I am still thinking about this, and I don't have a good answer yet. So in seeking to come up with an answer, I want to throw out a few ideas.

1. I believe that doctrine really ought to be Biblical, and that the Bible is both necessary and sufficient for Christian doctrine.
2. I recognise that this first idea itself is not Biblical, and in fact no understanding of doctrine is Biblical, because the Bible does not define a theory of doctrine, nor any instructions about how to adduce one. People might combine various verses together to define doctrine, but the act of combination is a human and not a Biblical one.
3. So far I've said that (in idea 1) I want a Biblical understanding of doctrine but (in idea 2) I don't believe that I can get one because the Bible doesn't lay one out. So I have to start with some arbitrary choice to bootstrap this whole process, and idea 1 is as good an arbitrary choice as any.
4. Idea 1 turns me off systematic theology; the Bible does not lay out a systematic theology or an exhaustive philosophical description of the character of God, and if we believe the Bible is sufficient, then we don't need to lay out these things either.
5. Because of this, all doctrine we adduce from the Bible is provisional on our understanding of the Bible. In other words, doctrine is subordinate to exegesis. I have no time for commentaries where the converse is so obviously true.
6. Instead of being systematic, the Bible's exposition of doctrine is typically narrative and pragmatic. Any "Biblical doctrine" must be a doctrine based on the Psalms, on Job, on Titus - on the Song of Songs - not just on Romans and Corinthians.
7. When I say doctrine is pragmatic, I mean it. Biblical doctrine is for living. Even a doctrine like the second coming is always expressed in ethical terms - because Christ is coming back, live wisely. So if you can't live your doctrine, I'm not interested in it.
8. Even supposedly big heavy doctrines - the soteriology of Romans and the Christology of Phillipians - are pragmatic, and the way you live out the doctrines expressed in both of these examples is through the unity of the Church. Because Jesus saves both Jews and Gentiles, the Church should live in unity; because Christ came as a humble servant, the Church should live in unity. So if your doctrine does not lead to church unity, I'm not interested in it.
9. These two ideas lead me to be pretty ambivalent about most of the things that various Christian factions try to persuade me are important. (For instance, both Calvinism and Arminianism have little pragmatic utility and they certainly don't lead to church unity, so they're doubly useless as far as I'm concerned.)
10. Of course this is a bit of a facile oversimplification and even I don't completely follow it. I believe the doctrine of the Trinity is massively important, even though I have no idea how to live that out.
11. So I have criteria by which I am prepared to exclude doctrines, but none by which I include them. Hey, I'm OK with that; I said theories of doctrine had to be arbitrary.
12. Because I think that doctrine should primarily be lived, I am not enamoured of the idea of teaching doctrine. In fact, it can be a very counterproductive thing to do. Nothing sucks the life out of a church like turning it into a philosophy lecture series. (I know that some people can teach doctrine in an entertaining and lively way, in the same way that some people can swallow razor blades without harming themselves. The fact that it's possible doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good idea.) In other words, orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy, demonstrating rather than teaching.

All of this is a long way of saying: if theology doesn't change your life, it isn't worth doing.

It's been a horrible three days. Both my servers have been down, which meant no mail for me, none of my web sites up, no mail for WEC Japan, no WEC Japan web sites up, no lists up, no mail or web for my other users. Sorry, guys. We would have got things together much faster were it not for the hosting company, RapidSwitch. They were worse than unhelpful to begin with, but redeemed themselves towards the end. To keep things fair, I've interposed their excuses with the story.

On Sunday afternoon my time, there was a power failure at the hosting company's facility. They say:

At 4.43am on Sunday morning the building lost mains power. The building suffered a power failure which caused the automatic systems to start the generator, which ran as expected. The system is then design to switch off the Air Circuit Breaker (ACB) to the mains feed, and close the ACB to the generator, thus supplying the UPS with generator power. This worked as expected and the generator took the load. Approximately 2 minutes later, the power cut ended, and power was restored switching down the generator and operating the ACB's to switch back to mains, which all worked as planned.

Shortly after this there was a further power cut, which re-started the above sequence, in that the generator started (successfully), the mains ACB opened (successfully) and the signal was sent to close the generator ACB. This signal was sent to the ACB, however the ACB failed to close, thus meaning that the generator could not supply the UPS with power during the power cut. The UPS worked as expected and took the load. During this time the mains came back on. The ACBs have a physical and electrical interlocking system, which prevents both ACBs from being operated at the same time, thus preventing the possibility of both mains and generators feeding the load, which would result in a severe failure. Because the signals were sent to the generator ACB to close, but it never did, the interlocking systems got into a state of deadlock, where they were both stuck in an 'open' position, thus leaving the UPS with no feed, resulting in the batteries draining down after 15 minutes, and the system loosing the critical load.

So far, annoying, but not their fault. As a result of the power bouncing up and down, our server suffered a hardware fault affecting the IDE controller. (Also not RapidSwitch's fault, really, as much as I'd like to blame it on them.)

I brought the server back up, but within a few minutes it had become unresponsive even on the serial console. RapidSwitch have a facility for connecting up a keyboard, video and mouse to the server and making these available through a VNC session over the network. I got them to connect this up for me so I could see what was happening on the screen. Despite repeatedly rebooting the server, not a thing happened on the screen. I therefore presumed that the hardware was completely dead. In reality, however, the RapidSwitch technician had managed to connect up the KVM without actually noticing the server was powered off. Not great.

I have checked our logs for this and found a KVM session was processed at 11:38:27 on 29th June. The session was activated by one of our newest technicians and unfortunately he has clearly made a mistake. I will never condone rushing a job, but given the circumstances during the day, I think a slight mistake by such a junior member of staff is at least partially understandable. I will speak to him and highlight the effect that not checking his work has had. I am confident this is not something that happens except in extreme circumstances.

Because we thought the machine was dead, we thought the best thing to do was to order a new dedicated server from RS. And since a server is kinda useless without data, we asked them to help us transfer the disks from the old hardware to the new one. This was, apparently, anathema to them, so they very kindly cancelled the order and left us to start again.

I am sorry this is not part of the process we can do in our standard order processing. We have cancelled your orders because we cannot fulfil them to your requirements.

So we started again. They built the machine, it arrived in the rack and I started to set up the infrastructure; at this point I still held the vain hope that they would help us to transfer the data later, since, you know, a server without data is useless, and, well, we'd told them several times we needed to do this. While I was setting things up, the machine failed, twice. I guess they had given us a new computer with dead IDE hardware as an exact replacement of our old computer with dead IDE hardware.

I can assure that providing defective hardware is a very rare occurrence and usually only happens with new hardware that is faulty. If a piece of hardware is faulty it is highly unusual for the installation and update process to complete successfully without it being noticed. We certainly taking [sic.] the testing of our hardware very seriously.

I complained about this, and was told that if I wanted them to investigate the hardware I would have to agree to potentially being charged thirty pounds a half hour if they didn't find a problem. Faced with the fact that I was being asked if I was willing to accept a new, non-working server and a bill for the privilege, I stepped away from the keyboard and went to bed, leaving Jamie to respond before I did something I might regret.

Before doing so, I asked them to try rebooting the old server for me so I could try to get the data off that. Roughly six hours later, someone went and pressed the power button.

Unfortunately the technicians who were on had no idea how quick a fix your server might be. In that situation they have to deal with problems in order of the oldest ticket first. However, I completely agree, this was too long a period of time for the work to happen. Unfortunately one of the technicians for the night shift called in sick, which was particularly bad timing. I'm sorry that they had so much work on and that we were a technician short. Again, under normal circumstances the problems you had would not have impacted you the way they did.

While I was asleep, Jamie managed to sweet-talk (actually it probably wasn't very sweet) someone into building a second new machine. That one actually seemed to work, and I set up the infrastructure again but still we had no data. I asked them to connect up the old disks to this new, surprisingly-working server, but was told:

I'm sorry, but fitting the drives from a colocated server into a dedicated one is just not feasible. For starters, we obviously don't know what drives are in the existing chassis, not to mention that these are old drives going into a new chassis. We are (believe it or not!) quite particular about our components, as standardisation is a very effective tool for providing constantly high levels of support.

"Constantly high levels of support." At that point the red mist came down and I had step away from the keyboard again. And we still had no data, and it was now Tuesday.

Things started to improve at this point, though. RS, to their credit, offered to send up a technician to the old box with a USB drive so we could get the data off. They get points for the thought, but of course, the old box still has failing IDE hardware, so it's just going to crash again. Which it did.

Oh, did I mention that throughout all this, I'm in Japan and Jamie's on holiday in Cornwall?

He eventually came up with the plan of getting his parents to go into his house, pick up a spare server chassis, take it to the IT guy at one of our clients, and have him drive down to Maidenhead, get the old box out the rack, swap the disks into the spare server, and put it back in the rack. He used the work room at RS to do this, for which we were charged 30 pounds per half an hour, this time for the privilege of supplying our own technician. Do any other hosting services charge for build room time? I know Redbus doesn't.

With the old server resurrected, I started transferring the data onto the new server, finishing around 4:30am on Wednesday morning. My time. Again while I slept, Jamie persuaded RS to give us another KVM session (they were going to charge us for that as well) so we could reboot the new server safely into Xen, at which point we were cooking with gas. Well, there were a few little niggles, one with kernel drivers and one with networking - RS had put the new server on a different subnet to the old one, so we had to do clever forwarding tricks - but by midday on Wednesday, everything was back up and running.

I don't know what to think about RS. They were great once the dust had settled, but when we needed them, they were atrocious, and that's what makes the customer service experience. It's a bit like the Army. An army which is great in peacetime but completely pathetic in the fog of war is going to get routed. And not in the networking sense.

So yeah, I'm learning sign language. For the past few nights, I've been getting myself to sleep by watching sign language videos, and in particular these guys, who are especially easy to follow. But on Tuesday I had my first proper lesson.

I've been interested in learning sign language for a few years now, but never actually got around to starting. I have a little book of all the activities in the Nagahama community centres, and looked in there but there were no sign language classes; but since I was in there to play go on Tuesday, I asked at the desk if they actually did have any, and they told me that yes, there was one that evening, and should they tell the leader that I'd be there? Swept along by the flow a little I said yes, and later that night I was part of a sign language circle at the local Social Services center.

There were seven of us in the group altogether, six hearing people and one partially deaf. There was supposed to be an instructor for the group, but apparently she hadn't been turning up for the past few weeks, so the partially-deaf guy lead the group. Everyone had a workbook, and we took it in turns to try signing Japanese sentences from the book. He also took us through a couple of vocabulary lists.

I actually found it quite easy to pick up the signs, and was able to get almost all of the vocabulary right when they tested me on it afterwards. I'm not sure I'd be able to remember it all now though.

The one important thing about sign language is that it is not an international language - we are learning Japanese sign language which is distinct from English sign language, which is distinct from American sign language, and so on. In fact, there are regional dialects of JSL, just like there are any other language. But the other thing about sign language is that it is not simply a translation of the "host" country's language. Japanese sign language is hugely influenced by Japanese, and the grammar follows Japanese word order, but it's not Japanese. During the lesson I found myself trying to translate word for word between Japanese and JSL, but word-for-word translation is a bad way of thinking about any foreign language, sign language included.

For instance, JSL has four signs for "to eat", as opposed to Japanese's one word, dependent on what it is you're eating. There are two different signs for "year", depending on whether you're talking about a point in time or the passage of time. In Japanese, you would take "year" and then slap "+duration" on the end of it, but in JSL it's a different sign. Similarly, one of the sentences that someone had to sign was "Where shall we have the meeting?":

Japanese: 会議はどこにしましょうか？
Gloss: meeting +TOPIC where we-shall-do +QUESTION

They were told off for trying to literally sign "we-shall-do". Instead, the signs should be:

Gloss: meeting what place decide +QUESTION

Apart from the fact that "where" doesn't get its own sign but gets broken into "what place" (meanwhile "who" does get its own sign), there's the change from "do" to "decide", which reminds me that, hey, this isn't just Japanese-with-your-hands, this really is another language. If I'm going to get anywhere with JSL, that's a realisation that I'm going to have to hold in my head the whole time.

So the other day I wrote a Javascript go board.

First, it had a few problems with the rules and liberty counting, and I've ironed those out. Now as I said before, what I actually want is a go problem application for the iPod, and to get that working, I'd need to be able to read in Go problem files. Go games are stored in a format called SGF. The next step to my go problem application, then, is a Javascript SGF parser. So... you guessed it.

Here's a second version of the Javascript go board, this one will pull in an external SGF file and replay it move for move.

Yes, it's a heavy blogging day, but it's the only day of late I've had enough time and energy to put fingers to keyboard and get this stuff out of my head. So anyway, the other day I said:

The idea is that God wants all men to be saved (I have yet another blog post brewing about what that actually means)

The Bible is a book written by people who, on the whole, are first-language Hebrew speakers. Even the bits which are written down in Greek contain a self-expression and mode of thought which is authentically Semitic. When people who are not expecting a Semitic mode of thought read the Semiticisms in the Bible, funny things can happen. A particularly funny one is the use of the word "all".

As you may have just gathered, I have an unusual view of the Law. This view was formed in part by having a leading Messianic Jewish thinker as my tutor at Bible college, who turned me on to some of the Semiticisms going on in the Bible. For instance, one day we were talking about evangelism to the Jews and I, being a little naughty, said "Why bother? Doesn't Romans 11 say 'all Israel will be saved'?" Now of course Richard had probably heard this a hundred times before, and I was just trying to stir things a little, but he still floored me with his answer: "Of course all Israel will be saved. But not every single member of Israel will be saved."

‏כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל. "All Israel". But "כָּל" means, in the parlance of British Law, jointly but not severally. The group known as Israel will be saved, but not every single member of that group.

Once you get your head around this, then other troublesome verses containing the word "all" fall into place. 1st Corinthians says "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive", and if we follow the standard evangelical line, the first "all" means that "every single person will die" and the second "all" means "only those who believe in Christ and confess their sins and turn to him will be made alive". Even if we permit a certain overreaching of interpretation it would be best to require a little internal consistency. "All" either means "all" or it doesn't.

But we need not follow that line; the Orthodox line is perfectly reasonable under the Semitic interpretation: the group known as humanity died through Adam's sin; the group known as humanity will be made alive in Christ. Which individuals make up that group is a separate question.

And another verse, the subject of my frustration, the insistance on making "God... desires all men to be saved" into a missionary text.

Since God desires all men to be saved, goes the Western reading of this Semitic text, we need to go out and make sure that every single individual gets saved. And, under this reading, since not every single individual actually is saved, God is frustrated with us and it's all our fault for not being good enough evangelists. Bad Christian. Go proselytise more. (Amusingly, the people who believe this also believe that nobody can be saved without the work of the Holy Spirit. But even knowing that, they still blame each other and themselves rather than blaming God for their evangelistic work not paying off. Remember what I said about internal consistency.) We talked about the house church being legalistic and driven. This is where it comes from.

My view is that God's Will is also God's Responsibility. If God really does desire that every single individual gets saved, then, being omnipotent and stuff, He's only got Himself to blame if His will gets frustrated.

A major mission motivation of the sixties and seventies went something like: (I don't have Bosch to hand, but it's certainly in there) "When God holds you responsible for the souls of your generation, how will you respond?" Here's Keith Green, who was a great musician but a bloody awful theologian:

It's our fault because this generation of believers is responsible for this generation of souls on the earth.

But I include the quote because it's typical of the genre: If people don't get saved "it's our fault". It's our fault.

I tell you what, if I die and stand before the Judgment Seat of God and He holds me responsible for all these Japanese souls in my generation, I know exactly how I'm going to respond: (i) "Hey, You're God, You could have made it happen but You didn't, so why are You suddenly blaming me?", and (ii) "Nobody can come to faith without the work of Your Holy Spirit, and it looks like You didn't open their hearts, so let's not try to make that my problem."

The stupid thing is, we could have avoided all of this rubbish if only we'd have been a little more careful about the way we translated the tiny little word "כָּל".

God wants humanity to be saved. And it will be. Precisely who gets to be a part of that is His problem, not ours.

Oh yeah, this one occurred to me a few years ago but I was reminded by a particularly muddle-headed sermon recently: (Any sermon which contends that God chose the Jewish people as His own Special Chosen People to work with for a few thousand years, just so that He could cynically use them to demonstrate to the rest of the world that they completely let Him down, and therefore they should all go to Hell for being unable to keep his utterly impossible Law, is going to end up in a big bucket of Fail as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, such a view is not so much widespread as omnipresent.)

So, you know how your God demands that you forgive your enemies unconditionally, right? And by unconditional forgiveness, we mean not waiting for them to make the first move but deciding to unconditionally forgive them there and then, yes? They don't have to accept it, you just have to forgive them anyway, right? Because if you don't forgive them their sins, God won't forgive you yours - I think that's in the Lord's Prayer, isn't it?

But you also say that He won't grant forgiveness to sinners until they repent and profess faith in Him. Suddenly they have to turn around and accept that forgiveness before they get into heaven. Talk about one rule for one and another rule for another. Are you guys being held to a higher standard than the God you serve? If so, that makes you morally superior to him.

Anyone who can get their way out of that one has clearly done their homework. Oh, and anyone who comes back with "Well, He is God and so we don't get to question anything ever" ... well, you can work out which camp they fall into.

I'm finding myself getting very busy and very tired these days; I have a lot of things I want to write about but I'm finding it hard to catch up. This entry has been sitting in my editor window for four days. Let's see if I can finish it today...

Saturday was fantastic. I mean, fantastic. In the morning we headed into Kyoto's Tofukuji, to join a meeting of a Kyoto deaf church. Henrietta and I both independently had an interest in deaf evangelism for a while now, and we've both come across more deaf people in the past year than one would expect. H took a course in sign language while she was at university; I always wanted to but never got to it. And last week, at the house church conference, we met an American couple who are working as evangelists to the deaf here in Japan, and they gave us an introduction to a church in Kyoto, and volunteered kindly to interpret for us.

After worrying that we might be a bit of a nuisance, we were incredibly warmly welcomed by the church there, and gave testimonies and received prayer. And it was a strange and very moving experience to be in a silent church service; even the worship was done purely by signing, and somehow it gave it an added meaning. It was also interesting to contrast deaf Japanese culture and hearing culture - they told us that deaf Japanese were a lot more "straight talking" than hearing ones!

I don't know whether we will be involved in deaf ministry in the future - I know I am someone who has many plans and projects and only a few of them come to pass - but I sure hope so.

In the afternoon we went on to a gospel concert; H is in a couple of gospel choirs and one of them was giving a concert in one of the Kyoto underground stations - supported by Kyoto City Transport Department. There were about forty or fifty people there, and between the songs the leader explained the Christian message behind them.

This really, really, impressed on me the difference between what I will call centripetal evangelism and centrifugal evangelism. As those with better elementary physics than I will remember, centrifugal force flings things outwards; centripetal force tries to pull things inwards. Most of our evangelism is centripetal. At our missionary conference this year we had a great talk by a pastor in Tokyo whose church runs all kind of small groups and activities. And people come along! But his basic model is that the church puts on activities which people come to. Come to the church! Come to the church! And people come.

But there are a couple of problems with this. First, surely we don't want the church to be an inward-pulling organisation which plucks people from the surrounding society so that they can join the sacred communion of the saved, but rather to be an outward-pushing body which gets people into the highways and byways and get the message out there where it belongs. Church surely has to be outward focused, not inward focused; centrifugal not centripedal. Second, pragmatically, putting on loads of small groups and activities and events takes a whole load of time and effort.

You try putting on an event in your church in Japan and getting forty or fifty non-Christians to hear the gospel. I'm sure you can do it, but it'll take you a year of planning and probably quite a lot of money. And yet we've got this gospel choir, made up of both non-Christians and Christians, and when they want to spread the Gospel, they get the city council to provide a prime location, lay out the seating, do the advertising, put the banners up and bring in the punters. All the choir needed to do was just go out and share the Gospel, which is what it's supposed to be about, isn't it? Surely being a missionary is about just going out and sharing the Gospel, not working on providing venues and preparing events and organising the damn seating.

On Monday I spent the day at our mission camp site, getting ready for the summer camps we host. In other words, me and a bunch of others in our mission spent a whole day as missionaries providing venues and preparing events and organising the damn seating. Maybe, just maybe, we've missed the point of what this is all about. Still, it was good exercise.

Tuesday didn't get any better. The morning's prayer meeting was worthwhile, and in a sense the afternoon's Shiga county pastors' meeting was a good opportunity for fellowship and cross-denominational unity. We watched a very interesting video about the Gospel in Bunraku, a presentation of the Gospel using traditional Japanese puppet theatre. And then, unfortunately, we tried to do something together, and that's where it all fell apart.

Next year is the 150th anniversary of Protestant mission in Japan. So it would seem like a good opportunity for all the Protestants to get together and do something. Maybe put on various consciousness-raising events throughout the year. But oh, no, that might actually achieve something. And besides, we're not Protestants, we're Evangelicals and none of our denominations have a 150 year history, so why should we care about the 150th anniversary of Protestant mission in Japan? Obviously working with the non-Evangelical churches is impossible - obviously! - and if we did something without them it would look like we're in disunity and be a bad witness. (Even though we actually are in disunity and it's a bad witness, and this would be a good way to get over that. But that would be impossible. Obviously.)

In a consensus-based society like Japan, a group proceeds at the pace of its least-imaginative member. (Incidentally, WEC International is a concensus-based society.) So we're doing nothing.

This works for me. After all, the hallmark of Protestantism is to subdivide into innumerable tiny factions, close yourself off from everyone who doesn't completely agree with you, and make enemies out of people who really ought to be your friends. So our way of celebrating 150 years of Protestant mission seems strangely appropriate.

So that was Tuesday.

Today I spent the whole day writing my sermon for Sunday, because it needed doing.

I haven't spoken to a non-Christian this week. I haven't had the time.

I had four things I wanted to do today. I've done two of them and I've started on the third but I'm probably too tired to actually finish it. Unfortunately, the third is the one that I actually have to do today, my sermon for Sunday. So what have I been doing instead? Um, well, messing with Javascript, actually. (OK, I also spent some time helping a local evangelism group learn how to improve their Internet communication, and I spent the afternoon with the old guys in the local community center, so it wasn't a complete messing-about day. But there certainly was some messing-about in it.)

Well, to be honest, I see messing about with Javascript as part of keeping my hand in with the latest technologies, which is useful both for me personally if I need it for professional work, and for the mission as I am frequently called upon to do various computer jobs for them. Even a relatively old technology like Javascript has undergone a seismic shift in the way it's been used and understood, from being a hackabout way to get web sites to do something interesting into being a fully-fledged dynamic programming language with object-orientation and complex data structures.

I've known that Javascript was something that I need to spend some time re-learning, and so I set myself a challenge. (This is the best way to learn or re-learn a programming language - to have something specific you want to do, rather than follow other people's tutorials which don't relate at all to your own goals.) And my challenge is to do with Go.

I study Go (baduk in Korean, weiqi in Chinese, igo in Japanese, and pretty much impossible to Google for in English), a Chinese strategy board game which is very popular here in Japan. It's both a good way for me to relax and to meet and get to know some of the older folks in town. As part of my Go studies, I have a bunch of books of Go problems, which give you an isolated portion of a Go game and ask you to look ahead several moves and come up with the best sequence. The books will tell you several possible enemy responses for your moves, so if you make bad moves, you will be shown why they are bad. One computerised version of this idea is at goproblems.com.

But that particular site requires quite a lot of processing firepower to get going: first, you need a Java client, and second, you need to be connected to the Internet. What I want is a problem engine which can run as an off-line application on my iPod, and for that, the best way is to write it in Javascript. (OK, we can debate whether that's really the best way, but it's certainly the best way for me.)

As a first step to a full-blown Go problem engine, it'd be nice to have a Javascript class which models a Go game, knows when stones have been taken, and so on. So (you guessed it) I wrote one. Please see this page for a very-much-prototype, Javascript-only Go board simulator.