Many Pies

Many Pies

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Online forums - what happens if someone takes their ball and goes home?

This is more of a thinking-out-loud stub than a proper blog post.

This article by Martin Belam reporting on a talk by Nigel Smith on the closure of BBC Archer's messageboard prompted me to gather links about this topic.

I asked on Quora a while back, prompted (probably) by one of Martin's earlier blog posts on the subject, How can people using an internet forum prepare in case the provider shuts it down?. No answers were forthcoming.

Earlier this year I said
So that new thing is Discourse, making quality forum software available. But the question still remains "if someone else is hosting [a forum] and they want to shut it down, can the community be sure that they can get at the content?"

When we moved house I spent a while on the uk.rec.motorcycles and the uk.rec.gardening Usenet forums. Quite a different style between the two. I need to see if the two people who were feuding on ukrg are still doing so.

Monday, June 17, 2013

Laptops and our nomadic workers

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how we're not your usual IT Department because of the type of people we support.
We help all sorts of Wycliffe people out, not just those working in our offices, but people passing through from all over the world. 
Today I'm writing a bit more about those sort of people. We have a mixture of management types who are working with teams who span the globe and linguist/translator types who are working with language projects in a different country to the one they live. Sometimes we have couples where one partner is here for a specific reason and the other is coming along with them so they don't have to be apart, and because they are able to continue their work away from their normal work location.

These are highly mobile people, who have one thing in common - a laptop. (No sign of tablets being the primary work machine yet.) Here's a picture of the inside of one which came our way last week:


This amount of dust is more than we usually see, but not surprising. We see a number of common problems with laptops - broken screens, broken backlights, liquid spilt on keyboards and corrupted hard drives. I say "we", but in fact its my colleagues who do this stuff. We are able to do so without charging commercial rates. One of the local suppliers we order parts from charge £90 for hardware repairs, and £144 for a screen replacement. We just charge the cost of spares + 8%.

Laptops are a vital part of the nomadic Wycliffe worker's luggage and we are pleased to be able to help them with their problems. In case you're wondering what we recommend for international travellers - Toshiba.


Thursday, June 13, 2013

Stonemasons' forum

At lunchtime someone who's doing an MA in Digital Education gave us a talk about what he'd learnt. They are learning about Digital Education using digital methods (online forums, Skype, blogs). It made me wonder if other professions learnt in a similarly recursive way then what would it be like. Imagine what a stonemasons' discussion forum would look like...

tap, tap, tap, tap
tap, tap, tap, tap, tap
tap, tap
tap, tap
tap, tap, tap, tap
tap
tap
tap, tap, tap, tap, tap
tap
tap, tap, tap
tap, tap
tap, tap, tap
tap, tap, tap, tap
tap, tap
tap, tap, tap, tap
tap
...
...
tap, tap, tap
tap, tap, tap, tap
tap, tap
tap, tap, tap
tap
tap, tap, tap
tap, tap, tap

tap, tap, tap
tap
tap
tap, tap, tap
tap
tap

"IMHO"

And if you're familiar with Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels then you will know what I mean about trolls having a whole new meaning.

A virtual computer lab for linguistic software

Today's Call to Prayer entry (the Wycliffe Bible Translators UK prayer diary) reads like this:
In January, we asked you to pray for the move of Wycliffe’s training programme to Redcliffe College in Gloucester. One of the big issues was how Redcliffe College was physically making space for the new programme. New seminar rooms have now been prepared and are being equipped to cater for the teaching programme. Continue to pray for the space needed for staff rooms and offices: the work looks manageable in the time remaining, but the final decisions and details still need prayer.
I was at Redcliffe with one of my colleagues yesterday. One of the consequences of the teaching taking place there is that there is no longer a dedicated "computer lab" with 13 PCs available all the time for teaching the software that linguists and translators need, which is what we have at the moment. What they have adopted is a virtual environment. I won't mention the provider of this virtualisation software, but you've probably heard of them if you know anything about this stuff. So we have a number of virtual PCs that you get to by installing some software from the afore-non-mentioned company which puts the screen from this virtual PC on your PC, Mac, tablet etc.

These virtual PCs are themselves running on a virtual server running on a physical server. For some people this is a bit mind-blowing, but then I have been reading a number of stories about people uploading themselves to virtual environments (a la Matrix). However if I say any more about that it will be on my non-techie blog. Yesterday we were showing those who are going to be teaching in this environment how it all worked and checking that they could do what they needed to. It all went pretty smoothly. I was worried that the software would somehow not work because the virtual PC was in some way not quite as good as a physical one, but that turned out not to be the case. The seminar rooms that the prayer item mentions will be used, with students using laptops to get on these virtual PCs.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Work for me! Server manager needed

We're recruiting for a server manager. The job advert is here. This is a one year position and the salary is £24-28K.

NetCommunity donation form based on URL variable

I put some code onto the Blackbus site in response to a question and I was recently asked about it. I realised that my code wasn't on my blog, so I'm putting it here now. What it does is pick something out of the URL for a NetCommunity page and using it, fill in the free text field on a donation form (and choose "other" from the fund dropdown). For instructions on how to get the parsequerystring code installed see my blog entry.

It's designed to use recipient instead of fundid in the URL. It also allows the amount to be set. You'll need to find out the unique id for the "Other" option in your dropdown and put it in the code.



If you want to use a simple form which then redirects to this page then set the post action for your form to be a PHP file which contains this line of code. It assumes you have form fields for pageid (this can be hidden), amount and receipient.

header('Location: https://secure.yoursite.com/NetCommunity/SSLPage.aspx?pid=' . $_POST['pageid'] . '&amount=' . urlencode($_POST['amount']).'&recipient=' . rawurlencode($_POST['recipient']));


Wednesday, June 05, 2013

Due to the unique way we're funded...


(Although I'm mentioning who I work for, the opinions expressed below are my own. Who else would want to own them?)

I was thinking about the BBC this morning and how we have (in my opinion) the best TV in the world because of the license fee. (For my readers not in the UK, everyone has to pay an annual license fee in order to own a TV, even if you never watch the BBC.) There's no suggestion that this fee is going to go away, but every so often the BBC subtly reminds us of the advantages of this system, saying, "due to the unique way the BBC is funded".

Mission organisations vary in the way they are funded, specifically in how individual workers get their money. Some have a common pot, some channel money directly from donors to the workers. We, Wycliffe Bible Translators UK, have the latter system (find out more at What, no salary?). There are also different ways to handle the situation when the donations don't match the need, and how the "need" is defined. In our UK headquarters office we have some employees too, as well as volunteers who don't get any money through us at all. So while the way we're funded isn't quite unique, we do have a rare mix of people.

With our upcoming move to new offices the current mix of "supported staff", employees and volunteers in the IT Department is changing, and I've been communicating various aspects of this for different purposes. As it's on my mind I thought I'd share some thoughts publicly.

I know I'm biased, but I think IT is important. As things get more technical - our cars, our washing machines, our phones - we're probably all more aware of how reliant we are on those things when they go wrong. The trouble is that it's a bit boring. Actually, that's not right, it's very boring, unless you're an IT person. So whilst I highlight some things of general interest like sign languages a lot of the stuff we do isn't that noteworthy.

We help all sorts of Wycliffe people out, not just those working in our offices, but people passing through from all over the world. We also have a number of people dotted around the UK who, thanks to the internet, are working on translation projects overseas. They don't pay for our services (unless they buy something through us, in which case they pay a small handling fee on top of cost price), in the same way that the people who benefit from their work don't pay the full cost of getting a Bible in their hands.

So someone has to pay for all this IT, but it's not as compelling as other causes. What to do?

Tuesday, June 04, 2013

Daddy, daddy, look what I found on YouTube

It used to be that my children would come to me and say "daddy, daddy, look what I made out of Lego". Now they say, "dad, look what I found on YouTube". (They don't really say "daddy" as I put in the title. That's a carefully crafted sentence designed to get you to click through from my social media feeds.)

What they are showing me is episodes from their favourite "series". I say series, because apart from the length, they are like TV series, with new episodes coming out regularly, weekly for example. The quality is professional. I wonder who's paying for this stuff? The money for those cameras has to come from somewhere, the people who do the work need to eat.

In the case of Rhett and Link (500 web videos produced) they "support themselves by creating and distributing their branded entertainment", though they do get paid to do stuff for other people. I'm not clear though whether the video or the money came first.

Video Games High School is another interesting one. 5,661 pledged $273,725 on Kickstarter to make this series. All those people paid all that money and we get to watch it for free. (Internet connection charges apply.) How does that work?

I don't have time to dig into all the other people my kids are telling me about. (Jenny Bee signed our ukelele, does that give me street cred?) I'm just bemused that all this good quality stuff is up on YouTube and people are managing to eat too.