Many pies

Secondary attention

2012-01-25T13:45:00.001Z

Our old TV died the other week, giving us psychedelic colour effects as it did so. Now we've got a new one with a VGA input. So I've been thinking about what sort of secondary attention thing I can do with it.

The other day I found a video on YouTube of a fire. I put it on 20 minutes or so before there was a TV programme we all wanted to watch. After it ran for a few seconds the boys asked me to find something else. I said no, the whole point is that your fire doesn't change, it just keeps burning.

I'm thinking of something that's equally boring, but in time, or over a period of time, does something interesting. So when the TV's not showing a programme it sits there in the corner and is worth glancing at. So not a programme, but a program.

The BBC Micro and me

2012-01-11T19:50:00.000Z

A couple of weeks ago Charles Arthur, the technology correspondent for The Guardian asked on twitter

So who is there out there whose experience with the BBC Micro led them to achieve something notable in the computing business?

I responded as we had a BBC Micro at school which I used in the sixth form. I gave him some details, but he was looking for someone who, if it hadn't been for the BBC Micro, wouldn't have got into computers. I wanted to be a programmer from aged 11 and we had a Spectrum at home, so that didn't apply to me and he didn't use my story in the article that he wrote on it. I paid for my driving lessons with the money I made on games I wrote for the Spectrum (and probably the BBC) and sold to magazines.

In our correspondence he asked

And do you think that kids today have enough access to that sort of programming, or do they need a "new Micro" to inspire them?

I replied:

Kids today have access to a wide range of free programming environments via the internet. If I were to start doing games today I'd be using a physics/gaming engine to do the heavy lifting, and aiming to get my stuff on miniclip or in an app store. Angry Birds is probably the thing that inspires them.

So I'm not sure any new type of hardware is needed. Today the BBC ran this story about a new curriculum for ICT.

Computer games entrepreneur Ian Livingstone, an adviser to Mr Gove, envisages a new curriculum that could have 16-year-olds creating their own apps for smartphones and 18-year-olds able to write their own simple programming language.

So I guess they agree with me!

I also recently came across this petition on the UK Government petitions website "Teach our kids to code". I don't like the way it uses the word "coding" which is a bit of jargon which could be better expressed as "programming". It also seems a bit unnecessary now in the light of that BBC story.

Photo from Rain Rabbit.

My public speaking engagements in 2012

2012-01-06T15:16:00.000Z

I've read a couple of blog posts recently where people have outlined their public speaking engagements this year. Now I get to do it too!

Actually there's only one.

We're having the Wycliffe Conference at our church on 4th February 2012. I'm doing a session entitled "Tech Transforming Translation". What I'm planning to do is try and condense our Check IT Out day (which we're unfortunately not running this year) into 50 minutes.

So it's going to be a bit of a roller coaster ride. At the moment I'm planning to cover the following topics:

Using media (videos, CDs, websites, mobile phones, mp3 players) for distributing Bibles
Translating sign languages
Complex fonts
IT support in harsh conditions (dust, heat, humidity, lightning, dodgy electricity supply)
How you can use your IT skills to help missions, without leaving this country - MissionAssist (formerly Wycliffe Associates UK)

More details on our Wycliffe Conference page.

"Content" is a horrible word

2011-12-21T10:40:00.001Z

I try and keep work/technical things on this blog, and other stuff on my other blog. However the boundaries are blurred, so you if you're only reading this one you might be interested in my post on my other blog - "Content" is a horrible word.

raspberrypi - dirt cheap computing power

2011-12-05T13:47:00.001Z

I've mentioned "hobby" type electronics before, and I've come across some really expensive kits, but I've recently come across something that is cheap and powerful. raspberrypi.org are making "an ARM GNU/Linux box for $25" ($35 if you want ethernet).

My last job before this was for a small electronics firm. I remember the days when we'd get a PCB back from the manufacturers and then a few days latter we'd get a populated board and be able to hook up to it and start writing software. Exciting times. I plan to buy one of these, but it looks like it won't quite be ready in time for Christmas, so it won't be going on my present list.

I already have in mind what I'm going to do with it - hook it up to the BBC weather site so when we turn the TV on in the morning we know whether to take a coat or not.

Blackbaud NetCommunity redirect to previous page after login

2011-11-25T16:03:00.001Z

After I put on the Blackbaud forums that I knew how to do this and the third person asked for details I thought I'd better tell you all.

The scenario to use this is if, say, you have a donation page and you want to offer the option of logging in. Once the user has logged in you want them to go back to the donation page, rather than the page they would normally go to after login.

First of all grab yourself the code from Stephen Morley to parse query strings (the bit after a ? in a URL). Create a document library on some sort of test page on your site and upload it.

Then create a formatted text and images part and put this in it:

<p><script src="/NetCommunity/Document.Doc?id=10" type="text/javascript"></script><script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[//[cdata[/ />function gotoPreviousPageId(){loginPageId='274';loginHomePageId='275';// Technically this is not the query string for this page, it is the query string for the referring pageif (document.referrer !== '') { var queryData = parseQueryString(document.referrer);// As the previous page URL was something like ...pid=loginpage&srcid=donationpage we want to extract the srcid, which is the id of the page before the previous page, probably a donation page// We do not redirect if the previous page was the login page if (queryData.srcid){ if (queryData.srcid !== '') { if (queryData.srcid != loginPageId) { if (queryData.srcid !='1') { //1 is login link from top nav on any page on main site window.location = "https://secure.wycliffe.org.uk/NetCommunity/SSLPage.aspx?pid="+queryData.srcid; } else { // Redirect to logged in home page window.location = "https://secure.wycliffe.org.uk/NetCommunity/SSLPage.aspx?pid="+loginHomePageId; } } else { // Redirect to logged in home page window.location = "https://secure.wycliffe.org.uk/NetCommunity/SSLPage.aspx?pid="+loginHomePageId; } } else { // Redirect to logged in home page window.location = "https://secure.wycliffe.org.uk/NetCommunity/SSLPage.aspx?pid="+loginHomePageId; } } else { // Redirect to logged in home page window.location = "https://secure.wycliffe.org.uk/NetCommunity/SSLPage.aspx?pid="+loginHomePageId; }}else { // Redirect to logged in home page window.location = "https://secure.wycliffe.org.uk/NetCommunity/SSLPage.aspx?pid="+loginHomePageId;}}function runit3(){window.onload = gotoPreviousPageId;}runit3();//<!// </mce:script>// ]]></script></p>

Things to modify:

Set the id of the login page in the loginPageId variable at the top.
Put the id of that page in the loginHomePageId variable that you want them to go to when they log in through some other route (where you don't want them to go back to the previous page).
Put the id of the document you uploaded instead of "10" in this bit /NetCommunity/Document.Doc?id=10
Make sure that the function name runit3 is unique amongst all your javascript parts, otherwise change it.

Once you've done those modification you create a new page and put this part into it. Configure the login part to go to this new page after login.

You'll notice that I look for where the id of the previous page is 1. This is for a link we used to have at the top of every page on our site, but's no longer there. It had the srcid as 1 so we could track how many people clicked on that link in our analytics reports. I kept the code just in case.

Charity IT Conference 2011

2011-11-22T11:27:00.001Z

I attended the Charity IT Conference yesterday.

Cloud

"I think we're all getting a bit bored of the cloud" said the chairman of the meeting. You're telling me. The first two speakers covered this subject. The first was from an outsourcing company, who reminded us that just because the technology's moved to a different place doesn't mean you don't need to get your ducks in a row with contracts, agreements, T&Cs etc.

The second spoke about the need for business processes to change. He talked about a process in a bank that took 15 weeks to get something going. Having reduced the technological side to 20 minutes it still took 12 weeks because of the other processes around it.

Bring your own device

As I'm going to be looking at security of mobile devices this was a good session as it covered that, and other aspects, like support (you don't get any) and administration (I may want to wipe my data from your device). And of course you need to be letting users know where they stand.

Website personalisation

It's a good idea.

Security

As well as detailed steps which you can see on the powerpoints when they put them up on the conference site the speaker suggested using an iterative approach - improving things everywhere, rather than trying to do one thing well. He also suggested a risk assessment approach, which I was planning to do anyway. He mentioned a Charities Security Forum that he's part of, but the website appears not to be working so I won't link just yet.

Knowledge management

The speaker had quite a hard job giving an introduction to a big subject in half an hour, but she did well. I realised that a couple of the projects I'm working on are actually doing knowledge management, so I can find resources under that name to help me out.

Final session

In order to manage my own knowledge I left before the final session as my brain was full. It was from the global CIO of the Red Cross and Red Crescent. Seeing as we're a bit smaller than them, it might not have been relevant.

Social media

It was interesting to see the place of social media. Normally every conference like this has something about social media on the programme. However it wasn't there this time. Maybe because it's a bit more mainstream now. The conference had a hashtag on the publicity #citc2011, which I don't remember last time. I saw tweets about another conference Lasa European Not for Profit Technology Conference when it was on last week #lasatech11. I don't know for sure, but I get the impression that Lasa is more useful to small to medium charities (though I may be wrong), whereas this conference was definitely for the bigger charities. However they did get Martha Lane Fox, who has quite a big responsibility! Lots more tweets on their hashtag too.

My own tech focus group

2011-11-18T13:32:00.001Z

Having children gives me my own tech focus group. We now have an Android phone in the house as well as an iPod Touch, so a few days ago there was a little discussion on iTunes vs Android market.

Google have tried to get people hooked on their Chrome browser. Whilst I haven't pointed it out my kids have noticed that there are now Chrome games available so they can get their Angry Birds fix for free - only in Chrome though.

Adobe appear to be backing off of Flash and so there are the usual stupid headlines about the "end" or "death" of Flash. Whilst children of all ages enjoy Flash games (though Chrome games aren't flash) I think there'll be a place for it, especially on older browsers. However HTML5 + javascript is getting closer to what Flash can do - see canvasdemos.com.

This/Next Tuesday

2011-11-14T16:37:00.001Z

Have you had a conversation like this?
"I'll see you next Tuesday"
"Do you mean the Tuesday coming up, or the one after that?"
"I mean the day after tomorrow"
"Oh, I see, you mean this Tuesday"

Different people use different criteria from when this becomes next. I was working on decoding of "fuzzy" dates with Wolfram Alpha and here's how it works it out.

Today is Monday 14 November 2011.

This Tuesday	Tuesday, November 15, 2011	Next Tuesday	Tuesday, November 22, 2011
This Wednesday	Wednesday, November 16, 2011	Next Wednesday	Tuesday, November 23, 2011
This Thursday	Thursday, November 17, 2011	Next Thursday	Tuesday, November 17, 2011
This Friday	Friday, November 18, 2011	Next Friday	Tuesday, November 18, 2011
This Saturday	Saturday, November 19, 2011	Next Saturday	Tuesday, November 19, 2011
This Sunday	Sunday, November 20, 2011	Next Sunday	Tuesday, November 20, 2011

If you want to talk to Wolfram Alpha, now you now how to talk about upcoming dates.

Are you getting permission to use cookies on your website?

2011-11-10T14:26:00.002Z

I recently came back to this issue when reading a Data Protection update on Lasa's ICT Hub Knowledgebase. We use cookies for donations processing and that's OK as it's necessary for the transaction. However the problem for us, like many sites probably, is that Google Analytics uses cookies.

There's a good overview of the issue on the Webmasters Stackexchange site, including a link to a simple solution for getting permission. I reread the latest guidance and spotted for the first time that it said about such third party services that they

...will no doubt adapt to achieve compliance with the new rule...

Six months to go and there's no sign of it...

Has anyone seen a website, apart from the ICO themselves, getting permission to use cookies?

Can you put it back together? IT Intern skills

2011-09-30T13:22:00.000Z

Various colleagues have asked what we're looking for in an IT intern. As well as particulars listed in the advert what we would like most is the ability to learn. That's easy to say, but hard to assess on an application form. One of my colleagues in the IT department said that they were probably the sort of person who took things apart when they were kids. We hope that by now they've learnt to put them together as well!

When discussing this one of the things that we agreed was that the sealed-box nature of many modern gadgets - including PCs which come with all you probably need - and you can plug in if they don't. People don't need to build or tweak PCs go get good ones, so the knowledge about how they work and how to fix them isn't so easy to find.

On the other hand, if you're so inclined I think the time is never better to build electronic gadgets. In the past there was Capsela

now there's Arduino and other open-source hardware systems.

There's also plenty of information out there on how to hack your Wii remote or Kinect. So if you've done that, get in touch...

You can quote me on that

2011-09-29T08:23:00.001Z

I was just getting ready to leave work last night when I glanced at a brochure on my desk, a brochure I'd already read the inside of.

The brochure is for the Charity IT Conference 2011. I went to the same event last year and that quote was taken from my feedback form, so I'm not entirely surprised that they used my words. And they spelt my name right.

I guess I'd better go this year as it comes so highly recommended.

Prayer and Training - behind the scenes

2011-09-21T10:30:00.000Z

IT training
Tue, 20 Sep 2011
Wycliffe Centre: Paul Morriss is leading another IT training seminar for some of the 100+ computer users today. “Improving the computer skills of staff is important to help them support Bible translation more effectively and efficiently.”

This is an item from our prayer diary - Call to Prayer. The way this item came about was this - the writer of Call to Prayer, Graham asked departmental directors for specific things that were happening in September. I'd arranged an hours training in our computer lab, so I mentioned that.

As it was I also did some one-to-one training with someone in the morning on Outlook and Excel. I've recently felt like a beginner myself as I've tried out Windows 8. A good user interface provides prompts to help you discover what you can do. For the person I was training in the morning one of the things they took away was that if you right click on something then it gives you options as to what you can do with it.

Was the prayer above answered? The people taking the training (on Excel) did will in the exercises I set them, but the answer will only become clear in the coming days and weeks as they are hopefully more proficient in Excel.

Classroom training has its place, but I'd like to plug the online service we've subscribed to - Time2Study. It doesn't give you motivation for self-directed study, but if you can motivate yourself I think you can learn a lot.

Polder Consortium

2011-08-10T08:41:00.001Z

For the past few months I've been involved in the Technical Steering group of the Polder Consortium.

The Polder Consortium helps organizations establish environments of trust for sharing critical information across organizational boundaries.

It involves Wycliffe and a couple of other mission organisations at the moment. Deciding what sort of organisations it should involve has been one of the things we've discussed on our teleconferences. My particular interest is authenticating a local application that I've written against one of our corporate systems. When it comes to the technical stuff and the discussions that accompany the beginnings of such a co-operative venture I'm a bystander, but it's interesting to watch the formation of this group. If you want a bit of technical detail then let me throw out a few words: SAML, federated identity, Shibboleth.

If you want to dive in a bit more I suggest you look at slides from an ICCM 2011 Presentation of Federated Identity. If you're wondering "Why the word polder?" then follow that link.

Update: I didn't realise until now the Polder Consortium is on twitter too.

Photo of the Petronas Towers Skybridge courtesy of Shubert Ciencia.

What exactly do you do, Dad?

2011-08-03T14:08:00.000Z

One of my sons asked me this yesterday as we were swimming in the on-site swimming pool at lunchtime. (Note to self: write blog post on the perks of working at the Wycliffe Centre.) It's hard to give a good answer to that, but if he'd asked me, "what did you do today, Dad?", on Monday, I could have said, "I made a new website go live".

The actual going live was done in a second by renaming a directory, but I've been part of a small team working on it on the last few months. I took the same basic template as our Wycliffe Centre website and with a bit of consultation with the original designer on suitable (purple and serious academic looking) colours came up with this new site. Most of the work was done by one of my colleagues who redid the wording on the old site for pages, and for course descriptions.

You can find more details on what "ETP" is on our corporate blog.

You do know how to backup and restore your software don't you?

2011-07-27T15:23:00.000Z

Based on a not-very-representative sample of the software we use I have concluded that people like to build stuff on the Microsoft platform. So that means SQLServer and IIS (and .net, though that's not relevant here). I have also concluded that for understandable reasons the companies that sell you stuff on those platforms don't support the Microsoft bits. This is because they could get sucked into all sorts of issues that aren't related to their software, but are very much to do with, say, tuning your IIS setup.

So whilst they make sure that it's all up and running when they first install you might find that you need to at least know a bit about SQLServer and IIS. So here's a checklist:

Do you know how to backup your database?
Is there more than one database?
Have you tried restoring the database onto another machine? This is crucial, because a good backup is no use if you can't restore it.
Do you know how to back up your IIS settings? iisback is the key to this
Do you know how the application software interacts with IIS?
Again, have you tried restoring your IIS setup on another machine? Web deploy for IIS 6 and 7 looks like a good (if not straightforward) way of having a standby server.

What would I do if I were working with Lord Sugar?

2011-07-25T12:49:00.000Z

BBC's The Apprentice is now rapidly fading from our corporate memories, but as I was watching the last episode it did make me wonder what I might do if I were to win. I've never really had any ambition to run my own business - I've always preferred someone else giving me work and a salary. However if Lord Sugar did come to me and say "what area should we go into business together?" I'm not sure what I'd say. (Given that he thinks no engineer can make a good businessman I think the odds are pretty non-existent.)

I'd want to do something online, as that's where the most (but by no means all) the interesting stuff is happening. I think music and books is too fast changing and unsettled to try and get anywhere with. It would be good to be the first to fix a big problem, and make a business out of that. Having multiple logins was a Big Problem for ages and then finally OpenID came along, and whilst it's not ideal, it's getting there. The dominance of a couple of big sites, and the ability to use those logins also helps, even though I think we're going to pay a price for that down the line.

I think the other Big Problem is comments. There's no good, easy way to keep track of all the comments you make on blogs. With services like Wordpress and Disqus doing well there are few engines powering those comments than there used to be, but everything still isn't unified. I'm not sure how you'd make money out of it though.

If he ever calls, I'll make sure I update this blog.

Feedback

2011-07-07T14:25:00.000Z

I recently got a Kindle. I send an email to the kindle-feedback email address. I got an email in reply asking for feedback.

Using a digital photo frame as a secondary screen.

2011-07-01T12:54:00.000Z

Inspired by Russell Davies' post about second screens I decided to some research on an idea I've actually had for a while. It would be nice to be able to plug a PC into a digital photo frame we've got and make the photo frame display a picture from the PC. (Seeing as you don't have comments on your blog Russell, if you read this perhaps you could give me some ideas.)

That picture could be, for example, a picture based on the weather forecast for today. I did a bit of search and found out that via superuser.com that I need to use USB On The Go (OTG). A bit more digging makes me think this isn't possible because it seems that the USB port on the PC needs to physically support this new protocol. I couldn't find any Windows XP drivers anyway.

Another alternative is to plug something into the SD card slot which looks like an SD card, but which is actually a USB cable. However that's probably going to cost more than the price of a wireless photo frame.

So I'm stuck. Unless anyone else has any ideas?

IT Intern needed

2011-06-24T13:58:00.001Z

It's not even the school holidays and already I'm thinking ahead to the autumn. We have a vacancy for an intern in our IT department from September.

Here's the advert. You can respond on that advert page or in the comments below. You get to work for someone who works for me, but there are advantages to the job too - nice location, free coffee, air conditioning, beach volleyball court and swimming pool onsite. The Internship programme means no salary, but pocket money, food and accommodation provided.

Comprehensive site on fonts, scripts and writing systems

2011-06-14T13:14:00.000Z

One of the organisations that I follow the work of is the Non Roman Scripts Initiative (NRSI) of SIL. Getting Bibles into all the languages of the world that need them often means getting the Bible into all the writing systems of those languages, and the people at NRSI do a lot of work on getting complex scripts to work on modern technology.

They've recently launched their ScriptSource website. There's actually been something there for a few years, but only a few pages. However I can now see why it took so long to launch it properly - there's so much there - 181 scripts, nearly 7000 languages, 100,000 Unicode symbols (including the snowman). It's not just a site for information though, they invite contributions and advertise software needs.

I'm impressed.

Sharing information

2011-05-03T10:40:00.000Z

I'm working on how we share information inside our organisation. Some information is available on our intranet, but it tends to be information about the IT department that people need to know. Using an intranet is a very "IT" thing to do. It occurred to me that in any given organisation, not necessarily ours, that various departments could use various methods:

IT create an intranet
Maintenance/Facilities Management put a noticeboard on the wall
Personnel hold an information sharing meeting
Catering hold a meeting in the dining room with free cake
Finance put a message on the bottom of a financial statement
Marketing/PR create a glossy leaflet and circulate it
Fundraising send an up-beat email
Legal send a sternly worded email with lots of bold bits
Cleaning leave a note on your desk

Of course, the method of sharing should be appropriate to the audience, not the author of the information. What other methods could other departments use?

A sight to make an IT Director's heart glad

2011-03-29T14:17:00.000Z

These are some discarded filing trays in a store room. This means that people need paper less, which means less printing, which means less use of printers that keep going wrong. Not that I'm against paper altogether (and there are more pieces of paper on my desk since I wrote that). However there is a good case for using it less where it makes sense. In fact several good cases.

Letter sweep

2011-03-04T15:15:00.002Z

I liked the idea of Tim Bray's letter sweep http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/03/03/ABC so I've done the same thing.

[a]mazon.co.uk - birthday presents, the odd CD for me.
[b]logger.com - editing this blog.
[c]olly.com - web designers blog. If I click through his feed from Google Reader it never works, so I go straight to his site. Perhaps I ought to tell him.
[d]ownforeveryoneorjustme.com - Useful if a site goes down.
[e]urotp.org - the website of our training organisation. At the moment I'm in between reworks.
[f]acebook.com - like [insert latest stat here]% of the population.
[g]uardian.co.uk - I heart The Guardian.
[h]something - our local intranet.
[i]something - our organisation wide intranet.
[j]obs.wycliffe.org - runs a couple of apps listing vacancies and asking lots of questions of potential recruits.
[k]ingsgateuk.com - I was finding out this churches postcode.
[l]not disclosed for security reasons
[m]anypies.paulmorriss.com - this blog.
[n]ews.bbc.co.uk/weather/ - always good to know.
[o]utlook-trust.org - they use some of our spare office space. We have more available!
[p]aulmorriss.com - my site.
[q] - no default, but the most useful on in the suggested list was this interesting article quora.com/Microsoft/Why-doesnt-Microsoft-understand-tablets.
[r]eplay.waybackmachine.org - previous versions of websites.
[s]tackoverflow.com - top quality programming answers.
[t]echmeme.com - tech news aggregator.
[u]nionbaptist.org - my church.
[v]alidator.w3.org - essential web developers tool.
[w]ycliffe.org.uk - our website, I'm always working on minor changes.
[x] - no default, the most useful was this site about wikis built on the engine that stackoverflow.com uses (don't know why it came up under x).
[y] - no default, though I do visit youtube.com .
[z] - no default, though my recent search for "zero inbox" was at the top.

Is an email address personal data?

2011-02-24T10:31:00.000Z

I was at a Data Protection seminar last week and this question came up. The answer was "yes, if the email address contains a name". However I wondered if that's always so clear cut:

Alternatives to Dabbledb - my conclusion

2011-02-23T13:52:00.001Z

This is a follow up to this article - Alternatives to Dabbledb.
In the end I picked Teamdesk (but see update at the end). Here are my conclusions.

Zoho Creator
The deal breaker with this one was that you couldn't display parent records and child records on the same page. Also, according to one person their support isn't so good. From what I can tell they only have one person assigned to support.

So in the end it came down to Infodome or Teamdesk. Looking at their respective pages with wishlists of features it looked like Teamdesk had more people using it. Also, the fact that Teamdesk has other products was encouraging, as it meant that their income wasn't vulnerable to the popularity of one product.

As I started implementing I struggled with the complexity of our data, with four levels of relations to nest. However that's the limitation of these web interfaces and programming-free approach. There were also some niggly things with the way that relations worked, but I could have lived with those.

Due to external reasons we're thinking of using another system to manage the data.

(Update 18 March 2011 - That other system is Highrise, and we've decided to go with that instead. That's not because of a shortcoming of Teamdesk - it is a good equivalent to Dabbledb. However the nature of the data is about people - contacts and cases, not so suited to a rigid database format like Teamdesk or Dabbledb.)

How long have you got? 1 second to a lifetime?

2011-02-15T16:16:00.000Z

I hope readers of this "work" blog will appreciate the fact that I don't promote the organisation I work for ad nauseum. However I came up with this list a while back. I'm not aware of any concious effort on behalf of our marketing team to cater for every timescale, it just seems to have worked out like that.

If you have...
1 second - like Wycliffe Bible Translators UK on Facebook.
1 minute - pray
1 hour - From Eden to Eternity (actually it's a bit over an hour, but I'm sure you won't notice the time going).
1 day - Wycliffe and Me
1 week - Window on Wycliffe
1 month - Engage
1 year - One-to-One
1 lifetime - long term work

Finding out about IT in Wycliffe

2011-01-24T12:28:00.000Z

We're holding an event so that you can find out about IT in Wycliffe, not just in the UK office, but in all the places where Wycliffe works in the world. It's called Check IT Out.

Alternatives to dabbledb

2010-11-25T13:50:00.003Z

(Update: I've come to a conclusion.)
I'm doing some work in my spare time for a local charity. They are using dabbledb, which has been acquired by twitter. The future is not certain, though they are supporting existing customers and say they will give 60 days notice before they shut it down.

I looked around for alternatives and came across this helpful article - migrating away from dabbledb. It lists a number of alternatives. I'm still investigating the alternatives, but I thought you might find it useful to know what I've found so far.

Zoho Creator
They are the only one I've found to have a specific dabbledb migration tool, which takes the schema and sucks it in. What it can't do is spot which tables link to what, but once you tell it that it brings all the data in. ~~Once you've created your app joining two tables can be done, but not through the interface, you have to resort to the scripting language.~~ Update: you can join tables. However, the fact that it has a scripting language increases its power. If you want to make forms available to non-users you can ask them to do that, it can't be done yourself. (Update: this is a one-off and you can do it with subsequent forms - see comment below.) As you'd expect with a web page, form layout is pretty basic, though you can put fields in a second column. The form editor has drag and drop. Reporting options are varied: you can have lists, grid, chart, calendar, HTML page, as well as pivot table and pivot charts.

"Creator" is one of many applications they offer.

Teamdesk
Teamdesk offer a Dabbledb migration tool, though unless I'm missing something, it's just an import tool that reads in all your CSV data. It's been around for 5 years, which is quite a long time in this business, but is probably a good thing. It looks a little outdated, but is quite capable. When I imported data it didn't recognise data that was a picklist, but by using the move column function you can convert an existing column to a picklist. It was easy to set up relationships between tables. As well as normal data table views you can have summary, chart, calendar and timeline views.

ForeSoft, the company behind Teamdesk, have a small number of other applications.

Infodome
Infodome is Flash-based, so looks a little more swish than the others. The import from dabbledb worked well. You can define table relations through the interface. You don't seem to be able to make forms available to non-users. Forms have free-form layout (probably easy because of Flash) and you can have subforms. It's reporting function allows you to do simple grouping and totalling, as well as just listing things, so less options than the other two.

Infodome is the company's only product.

There were three others that I'm not considering.

Caspio is another Flash-based one, but needs you to host it on your own site, even though you work on designing your database via their site. After I signed up for their trial I was contacted by someone wanting to help me, so that's good customer support. One gripe on the import - it couldn't recognise data types, like dates, by default, and made everything text.

Qrimp looks quite capable, but the company seems quite small. I asked for an account on their demo system and never got one. Although you get two free months (all the others have 14 day trials) you only get that by signing up with your Paypal account.

Intuit Quickbase is an order of magnitude more expensive than the others above.

MyTaskHelper had a lot of features in beta when I first looked, but since then the product seems to have matured - see the discussion below.

It's always hard to evaluate suppliers without having access to their financials. You don't want them to go under, or be too successful like Dabble and get bought out. Zoho boasts a large number of users. I couldn't tell much about the other companies.

Interim Conclusion
I had hoped that writing this would help me decide which to use, but I think I need to try and do more real stuff before I see if it fits what I want. I haven't mentioned features that they mostly or all have - separate applications, users, dashboards, email functions, sample/template applications etc.

The real conclusion is in another post.

Civil Society IT Conference

2010-11-19T16:13:00.000Z

Yesterday I went to the Civil Society IT Conference.

The opening plenary talk was from Ian Osborne. He talked a lot about the Cloud. I'm still sceptical as to whether it will make much difference to small to medium charities. One of his passing comments was about online databases which made my ears prick up, as I'm working, in my spare time, with a local charity to get them off DabbleDB, an online database tool. There are a few around and I think for a very small charity, they represent a good solution for record keeping. It's not rocket science, but if well packaged and delivered it could give a good alternative to Access.

The first workshop I went to was Martin Jervis from Blackbaud talking about a CRM implementation they did with British Heart Foundation. He did well at not blowing their own trumpet and the fact that the BHF project manager co-speaker wasn't able to attend meant he could be effusive with his praise for the absent person.

One of the things BHF did was to fit their processes with the software, something which I remarked on after a conference four years ago. Someone else said you do that for the run of the mill stuff, like HR and Finance, and work on tweaking and bespoking the area where your charity specialises. Interesting thoughts.

Andrew Brenson from Save the Children spoke about Creating a sustainable IT strategy, with some common sense stuff about hitting the right point on the adoption curve, and the importance of not letting a strategy gather dust, but refining it.

I was fortunate enough to meet my counterpart in another Christian charity and it was useful to share experiences and explore the differences between our approaches to CRM and websites.

There was a session on Getting Your Website Strategy Right with Catriona Campbell from Foviance, and her work with clients on user personas. Also talking about TV and online video was Jackie Brambles who I vaguely remember from Top of the Pops, but who has been presenting other stuff in the US and then back over here since then.

Touchstone did an extended plug for their CRM stuff. The interesting thing about that session was that it works in an online way with Azure. I wondered when Azure first came out why it was positioned in the way it was, not directly rivalling App Engine or Amazon EC2. However now I can see that it's a platform for their own offerings, like Dynamics, or for third parties to do the equivalent.

Robert Schifreen from Security Savvy gave a talk about security, which can never be really done well in a short space of time. However I think he was scary enough to make you look at it again.

Recent IT conferences have had social media all over them. This one didn't at all which was strange. I found all but one of the sessions (guess which one) were useful, and if there's a different spread of stuff next year I'd consider going.

[Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver] Could not use '(unknown)'; file already in use

2010-11-10T17:14:00.000Z

I got this when trying to open a second recordset in an ASP page. The problem was the permission on the directory where the database was didn't allow the IUSR_.. user to create or modify files, even though they could modify the mdb file. Presumably it was something to do with access to the .ldb file.

Mission Information

2010-09-30T16:19:00.000Z

I met someone at lunchtime today who told me about a couple of projects of interest to those involved in missions and information:

The Harvest Information System is a cooperative effort of several organizations who share a desire to facilitate the task of taking the gospel of Jesus Christ to all the peoples of the world. HIS assists mission sending groups in fulfilling their portion of the task, by improving the sharing of information through the standardizing of categories and codes.

It has a rather bizarrely arranged website, which for some pages requires you to download .mht files, a Microsoft archived web page format file. However anything that helps missions work together better is a good thing in my book.

The second project is Open Petra. This is a project arising out of OM's need to develop a system to manage their office information. There's an interesting history on their website including an abortive attempt to use Delphi. They've since started work on an open source solution they hope will be of use to other non-profit organisations.Something worth watching.

A day to find out about IT in Wycliffe

2010-09-28T13:11:00.000Z

I wrote an article on the Wycliffe blog yesterday: A day to find out about IT in Wycliffe. In my first draft after announcing the name of the event Check IT Out, I put "(Did you see what I did there?)". My editor suggested it might not be clear, but I think the audience for this blog might recognise that grammatical construction as indicative of a pun.

New intern in IT

2010-09-20T09:21:00.000Z

I've pleased to say we have a new intern starting in the IT department today. As I've written in our current prayer letter, now the department is short-staffed, rather than being really short-staffed. I've updated the IT Support Assistant advert to take out the fact that it's available under the intern scheme, as we only have one intern place. However if you can commute to the High Wycombe area, and you don't need paying, we'd be glad to have you!

From OpenID to SAML

2010-09-10T13:52:00.000Z

A colleague read my post about OpenID and pointed me towards SAML. Whereas OpenID handles authentication, SAML also handles authorisation. My questions about OpenID arose out of a user's perspective, but it looks like SAML might be useful between the separate Wycliffe Organisations.

Funding projects - a blog post I never wrote

2010-09-03T08:05:00.000Z

It's good to work in a team. I fired an idea off to one of my colleagues who writes for our website, and a few days later out pops a blog post on funding projects.

Whilst possibly not as interesting as hearing about ex-pats working on Bible Translation, the fact that more "nationals" (to use the jargon) are involved in Bible translation means more money is needed, as the local church often can't support them.

Making to do lists into a game

2010-08-25T13:37:00.000Z

Following up on my post Being more organised is less fun I came across this item from Pulse Laser, the blog of a company called Berg who seem to have fascinating work to do. They link to a website called Chore Wars and an app called Epic Win, both of which turn to do lists into games.

Lazyweb request - help me understand OpenID

2010-08-20T15:09:00.001Z

I have some questions about OpenID that I plan to find the answers to one day, but maybe someone will heed my lazyweb request and supply them.
Here are the questions:
1. Does it matter which provider you use?
2. What if the provider goes out of business? Are you stuck?
3. If I switch OpenIDs what do the sites I've logged in on the old one need to do to help me switch to the new one?
4. Is that part of the spec or does it depend on what the sites do with my OpenID?
5. When I log in what information is my OpenID provider passing on to them?
6. What implications does it have if I tick the "log me in automatically" option available on myopenid.com?

As well as finding out the answers to those, I may put in something about Microsoft Hailstorm on wikipedia, as it doesn't have its own page.

Being more organised is less fun

2010-08-18T12:00:00.001Z

I've been using OneNote alongside Outlook for the past few months. It's really handy and a great way of managing my todo list. A while back my todo list was an email that I'd keep in the drafts box. Then I switched to tiddlywiki. With OneNote I can achieve a frightening level of organisation. I type something into OneNote, and press ctrl+shift+3 and a task is automatically created in Outlook for this thing to be done by the end of the week. With OneNote I can see things laid out in four dimensions (two dimensions on the page and then two other dimensions with Notebooks and tabs within them). With Outlook I can see things organised by due date.

Each day I can review the tasks to be done and either do them, or defer them to the next day, later this week, or next week depending on priority. When things are awaiting on other people I can add a symbol with a keystroke to show that I don't need to do anything more with it, and I can see a list of those waiting things from OneNote.

(It may even be possible with a bit of programming to get tasks lined up with even more accuracy. My computer could say to me "you've got 15 minutes before lunch and an appointment straight afterwards, so here's your next task that shouldn't take too long - write a blog post". Or "you really ought to be going home now, and you're probably a bit tired - why not do a little bit of light document editing and then go". )

But I find that the more organised I am the less fun things are. There is a brief moment of satisfaction when I press ctrl+shift and number key as I know that I don't have to do anything else to make sure I get a reminder. Ticking off tasks as done is also satisfying for a second or so. But it doesn't last, I'm back to a list of things arranged in order of importance that have to be done. It means that I'm more effective and important stuff gets done first, but it's a bit soul-less.

I've been thinking a lot about games recently. There's talk on the interwebs about bringing gaming elements into tasks to make them more enjoyable. There are people who are trying to develop games that teach you things, like Smokescreen which teaches about on-line privacy. I've also been reading my son's Official Nintendo Magazine and a couple of articles about bedroom games makers, of which I was one in my teenage years.

What I'm wondering is how I can continue to get important stuff done, and have fun doing it?

Don't drink and type

2010-08-17T07:47:00.003Z

Last week a laptop was brought into our IT office. Someone had sneezed while drinking coffee and spilt the coffee on the laptop. It was dead. Don't do it - don't drink and type.

Random thoughts

2010-08-06T14:45:00.002Z

Random thoughts from my trip to London yesterday:

I noticed that Android phones aren't ashamed to declare their operating system in the Carphone Warehouse and Samsung billboard adverts. Previously I'd just seen the little Android figure peeking out from behind a phone on a TV advert. I guess it's a unifying brand across all the different handsets. Of course they mention the Android app store. So "app" is the new buzzword - I saw a browser toolbar being described as an app the other week.

I listened to a few episodes of Guardian's tech weekly podcast and one of the presenters mentioned that one of the Google offices had a beach volleyball court. So do we!

Vacancy statistics - marketing people needed

2010-08-06T13:55:00.003Z

I'm just running some stats on the data behind our vacancies page. As you might expect the top sort of jobs for Wycliffe Bible Translators is "Language Related" (400 out of 1172 vacancies). However the next highest category is "Marketing and PR" (157), closely followed by Teaching, Admin and IT.

Blackbaud NetCommunity user group

2010-08-05T15:32:00.004Z

I've just come back from a Blackbaud NetCommunity user group in their London office. They've had others in the past 2 days and this was the last of the current lot. We had a general presentation from Robert McAllen on interactive websites, and then some future features of NetCommunity 6.20. Some of the staff haven't had the presentation on that yet (I think it's tomorrow guys) so I won't spill the beans here - yet.

As it wasn't just a product presentation but a user group we got a chance to talk to each other I was able to hear about other people's experiences with implementing logins, as we've done recently.

It was quite useful to hear about future plans, and also just to chat to other users. There are more in Glasgow later this month if you're in that part of the world.

IT challenges in Wycliffe Bible Translators - part 2

2010-07-30T09:28:00.004Z

Last month I wrote about IT challenges in Wycliffe Bible Translators with regards to software. This month I'll tell you about the challenges we have with our site. The Wycliffe Centre is set in a beautiful location. However it's quite spread out.

View Larger Map

This means that wiring up the site has been quite a task for the past few years. We have a mixture of copper and fibre for the longer stretches between buildings, or even along some of the longer buildings. This means the fun of pulling cables as well as switches and converters along the way. We use wireless coverage for some locations where it is appropriate. We've managed to get network connections to pretty much every location. However maintenance and upgrading is an ongoing task.

Charity bag overload

2010-07-20T07:43:00.003Z

This is a picture of all the bags that have been put through our door by charities over the last couple of years. They are all asking you to put unused stuff in there and leave the bag on your doorstep on a certain day. Even if we'd used them (which we haven't) by the time we'd used the first couple or so we wouldn't have much more to give away every few weeks as the next bags arrive.

It's like fishing in an empty pond. Come on charities, be more smart.

Lotus Notes to mediawiki

2010-07-16T15:17:00.003Z

I'm in the middle of moving a Lotus Notes document database to a mediawiki wiki. (Or is that a media wiki?)

I did it by means of a Perl script using the HTML::WikiConverter module and a Python script.

The starting point is to save each Notes document as a web page (using Firefox, and saving as "complete" so you get all the images). The Perl script (reproduced at the end) then converts each web page to a text file. I did a bit of custom processing to remove some tags: font, div, center, and some attributes: width, border, valign, bgcolor.

(In order to get the WikiConverter module to work I had to fix a bug in either the module, or the media wiki specific module, sorry I can't remember which. However a workaround was listed in the bug report and involved a script to rebuild the grammer in the CSS::Parse module.)

The Python script then takes the text files, now in mediawiki format, and converts to XML file(s). For testing I use an xml file per text file. For the real thing I put them all in one xml file. The Python puts the appropriate XML around the text so that the pages have titles. I haven't included the Python, as it's quite specific to what I want. However here's a clue for you - the title is two lines after a line with the word "Subject:" in it.

As well as parsing the text to find the title at the top, I also converted a document history table at the bottom of each file (part of our documents, not part of the Notes template) into a series of mediawiki "revisions", so that the information on what, who and when each document was changed wasn't lost. This is useful even though I don't have the actual revisions.

Each page does need a bit of attention, because this three stage conversion isn't perfect. For example, successive bullet points have blank lines between them, which is fine until you have indented bullets, when they don't render properly in mediawiki.

One thing I wish I'd done with hindsight, is put a category onto each page, which I could remove once I'd tidied it up, to see what remains to be done. As it is I've used a category once I've tidied it, but eventually every page will have that category, which will be meaningless. To remove it would mean editing every page, unless there's some global change plugin I'm not aware of.

# Convert saved pages from Notes Documents to media wiki format

use HTML::WikiConverter;

sub DropTag($) {
 my ($page, $tag) = @_;
 my @tags = $page->look_down("_tag",$tag); # Font tags
 foreach my $element (@tags) {
  $element->replace_with_content();
 }
}

sub DropAttr($$) {
 my ($page, $attr) = @_;
 my @attrs = $page->look_down($attr,qr/.*/); # Tags with appropriate attribute set to anything
 foreach my $element (@attrs) {
  $element->attr($attr, undef);
 }
}

sub ExtraProcessing ($) {
# Does various extra things that we need:
my($page) = @_;

DropTag($page, "font");
DropTag($page, "div");
DropTag($page, "center");

DropAttr($page, "width");
DropAttr($page, "border");
DropAttr($page, "valign");
DropAttr($page, "bgcolor");
}


my $wc = new HTML::WikiConverter( dialect => 'MediaWiki' );
opendir(DIR, "saved html files");
@FILES= readdir(DIR);
foreach my $path (@FILES) {
 if ($path =~ m/\.htm/) {
  print $path."\n";
  open FILE, ">output text files".$path or die("Could not open file for output\n");
  print FILE $wc->html2wiki( file => "saved html files".$path, strip_tags => [ '~comment', 'head', 'script', 'style' ], preprocess => \&ExtraProcessing);
  close FILE;
 }
}

IT challenges in Wycliffe Bible Translators

2010-07-13T09:14:00.004Z

Here at the UK HQ of Wycliffe Bible Translators we have a number of challenges when it comes to IT. Some of our activities fit in with normal business or charitable activities and so you can get off-the-shelf software that mostly does what we want. Other things we do aren't a good match.

We use The Raiser's Edge for Donor Relationship Management (a bit like CRM except that the first word begins with D). We sent out mailings and receive donations, so that's a fairly good fit.

We have Sage for accounts. It's not to great for doing charitable type accounts, but then most charities find that and get around it with spreadsheets or third-party solutions. We use spreadsheets.

On the personnel side most of our staff are volunteers, and most don't work in this country. So personnel software isn't much use, as it thinks about employees, and payroll, and contracts and leave whereas we think about membership agreements, and seconding people overseas and strange concepts like "furlough" (the old fashioned term) aka Home Leave, and "topping up support". Personnel software doesn't care about people's children, and what medical and schooling needs they have, whereas we care about the whole family that we send abroad. So all the personnel stuff has been done in-house.

Where the people and the money come together we use the services of Wycliffe International who save us having to send money to 50 different countries, by acting as a clearinghouse. You can't get off-the-shelf software for interfacing UK accounts software with Wycliffe International, so we've done that ourselves.

We run courses, so we're like a small university with the need to book people in on courses, give them accommodation and food. We also have spare accommodation so we host conferences. We have software such as a hotel might use, but that's orientated towards individual guests, not conferences or courses. That's where my current challenges lie.

Essential reading for IT Directors

2010-07-05T13:50:00.002Z

When I learnt I was going to become an IT Director I search out a page I'd come across a while before - Desert Island Standards on the excellent ICT Knowledgebase from LASA (London Advice Services Alliance).

It contains 8 IT-related standards. IT is more than complying to standards documents, but it's a good place to start.

My first month as IT Director

2010-07-01T08:17:00.003Z

I've just written my first monthly report as IT Director for Wycliffe Bible Translators in the UK. Don't worry, I'm not reproducing it here. Whilst a lot of what I did was part of my previous job, there were some Director-type things, like looking into Data Protection.

One of the most useful things I found whilst doing that was that the scope of the Act wasn't as broad as I first thought. When I attended a seminar on it many years ago the person leading it said that unless you chucked all your paperwork on people into a large pile in a room, than any filing system would fall under the scope of the Act. However on the Information Commissioner's Office website it has a document which describes the "temp test". So if your data about people is arranged in such a way that a temp couldn't find information about specific people, then it's not a "relevant filing system" under the act. This means that every scrap of personal data, even, say, squirreled away on archive tapes in a safe, doesn't have to be erased when we no longer have need to store that person's data.

IT people needed

2010-06-03T13:50:00.003Z

I've just put an advert up for an IT Support Assistant on our vacancies list.

Do you want to use your IT skills to support the vital work of Bible translation? Based in the UK at the headquarters of Wycliffe Bible Translators, we are seeking IT people to help keep the IT systems running, so that staff here can help recruit and support those doing Bible translation abroad.

We are looking for people who

are familiar with Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7
are familiar with Microsoft Office products from 2000 to 2007
have Linux skills (desired quality)
are able to learn new things quickly
have experience in PC support
are good at diagnosing problems with hardware (PCs and printers for example)
are able to use tools to repair machines

Particular qualifications are not required.

You will be working in a small team of specialists and you should be a team player able to work well without close supervision, and also to able work under pressure. You should be able to explain technical concepts to users of differing IT ability, increasing their IT knowledge and confidence. We seek people who are committed to upholding and demonstrating the Christian ethos of Wycliffe UK, and to achieving the core aims and objectives of the organisation.

This would suit someone working through our Intern scheme or someone who has retired and who lives locally to High Wycombe. Unfortunately we are unable to provide work for people working remotely, or for less than 6 months. This position is not salaried.

For more information, or to apply for this job, get in touch.

New month - new role - IT Director

2010-06-01T06:50:00.003Z

From today I am IT Director for Wycliffe Bible Translators in the UK. When a couple of my colleagues heard this was coming up they were concerned who was going to do the user support I'd been doing and I was able to reassure them that this was in addition to my current work. It's not a full-time job so I should be able fit it in alongside everything else.

After 10 years in my current role it's going to be good to have a new challenge.

Display a tweet on a web page - getting around the authentication restrictions

2010-05-21T11:27:00.004Z

I was working on the Engage page on our website and I wanted to display a single tweet from a particular user. It was a lot more complicated than I thought.
An old version of a similar page used the query (with a bit of JQuery around it)

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/...

Although that still works, I suspect it will be deprecated. The latest version

http://api.twitter.com/statuses/1/user_timeline/...

requires authentication. That's soon going to require OAuth. It wasn't easy to find much stuff about OAuth and twitter and javascript. Eventually I did find some wisdom about how it was a bad idea on javascript, because it means putting secrets in your code.

So my work around was to create a list with the same name as the user I wanted to display on our corporate twitter account, add that twitter user to it, and use

 http://api.twitter.com/1/user/lists/...

instead. It doesn't require authentication, so works fine!

Morriss's law

2010-05-19T08:08:00.003Z

Whilst using our corporate wiki, Confluence, I thought of a new law:

"Every program attempts to expand until it becomes Twitter."

One of the recent new versions of Confluence incorporate status updates, and "following". It's based on:

Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment (also known as Zawinski's Law) relates the pressure of popularity to the phenomenon of software bloat:
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
—Jamie Zawinski,

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski.

Things I'm missing about Lotus Notes having moved to Outlook

2010-04-27T13:06:00.009Z

If you hit "reply" and you meant "reply all" you can add the extra recipients with a single click.
You can double click on a day in the calendar and create a reminder, appointment or meeting request. With Outlook if you're on the calendar I haven't found to create tasks, you have to go to Tasks first.
You can save an email as a reminder or an appointment.

On the other hand I'm really appreciating:

Integration with OneNote
Decent italic font
If you save a draft it doesn't just silently disappear into the Drafts folder, but shows as unread.

10 years full time for Wycliffe - looking back

2010-04-23T08:05:00.003Z

Tomorrow I will have been working for Wycliffe Bible Translators for ten years full-time. Before that I was part time for 18 months, in a software development role. I started a week before we were due to go live with The Raiser's Edge, a fundraising/donor relations system, if you haven't heard of it. We also went live with a new Nominal Ledger system at the same time.

On my first day the Finance director and his assistant came to my desk and said that we couldn't go live without 5 reports being created. After talking with them we agreed that one of the reports was for the end of the month, and so could wait. So I had a very busy 4 days (I started the Tuesday after Easter Monday) working on those and a million other things. It was also my then boss's first day on his job. As you can imagine it was quite hectic with going live with two systems simultaneously, but we got there in the end.

One of the aims of my job was to move the many different address lists we had around the place into Raiser's Edge. When we went live the two biggest lists - donors and recipients of our magazine Words for Life, had been combined. Ten years on and I've still got legacy systems to move into the right place. I still have four more databases to go, three of which are in progress.

I haven't spent the past ten years just working on importing address lists. We've also switched our Finance system to Sage, changed the way we send money to other Wycliffe organisations around the world, adopted a new group of inter-organisational systems, including a personnel system and re-launched our website twice.

Who knows what the next ten years holds?

RIP Lotus Notes

2010-04-21T15:53:00.002Z

I am shortly to have my mail client changed from Lotus Notes to Outlook. When I joined Wycliffe Bible Translators back in 1998 Notes was our system for information systems development. Not long after that though a strategic decision was taken to move away from it. It remained as our email client though, as there was no good, easy alternative.

The email client always felt like a bit of an add-on to the rest of the system, rather than being designed specifically for email. However the rest of the system was pretty impressive at the time. There was no need to create a database when starting an application, you just designed a form and the data was stored magically somewhere. Things like security, encryption, access control and replication Just Worked, without too much effort, so it seemed. You could point your web browser at the Domino server and you got a basic web version of your application without having to create extra stuff. However it never really took the corporate world by storm, although I can imagine there are a lot of committed users.

Ray Ozzie, the man behind Lotus Notes (that article needs a lot more filling out, doesn't it?) has an interesting career. Notes was bought by IBM. He left and created a similar-but-different product called Groove, which was bought by Microsoft. Now it exists as Sharepoint Workspace.

Things I won't miss about Lotus Notes email (at least in v6.5 which we are using):

The way when a new email arrives it puts a little button at the top of the email folder to say "click here to see your new messages". I don't want to have to click, I just want to see them!
The way when you log in it tells you about all the reminders it's already told you about for the past few days, not just the ones since you last logged in.
The way you can't open two emails side by side.

Not paper is not cheap

2010-04-20T14:29:00.003Z

A hiccup with my email provider recently left me with very little incoming email. I didn't realise there was a hiccup for a few days. When I did, and fixed it, I released a flood of emails into my personal inbox. Some of those are PDFs of paper documents from our church - a weekly notice sheet and a monthly magazine. The church has started sending them out as a way of saving money. I also get various other documents via email. The small flood made me wonder how I could easily catch up with my reading.

Now I'm not a big fan of paper. There are 3 pieces of paper on my desk at the moment, and first thing this morning there was one. However it does have its place. A few years ago a colleague was arguing for not giving people a paper copy of the internal phone directory, on the grounds that it was available on the intranet. My argument was that it was much easier to find someone on paper than opening a browser window, finding the intranet, finding the relevant page, finding the surname etc. I said that I could beat him in finding anyone he cared to mention. He didn't take me up on it and the paper copy still has its place (also available as a PDF though!).

However there is a cost to not having paper. For me reading the paper copies of those church documents is something I do when I have a spare moment. Time spent reading my personal email is orientated towards getting things done and clearing the inbox, not reflective reading. So while it's convenient to get electronic publications through my email for the sender it doesn't suit me. What I need is some sort of electronic device which I can pick up easily, starts up quicker than a laptop, and lets me read those documents. However that wouldn't be cheap...

The best article I've ever read about cloud computing

2010-03-24T09:17:00.003Z

Cuts through the hype and explains what it's really about.

And most importantly if you suddenly realize that you need 50 new machines, then you simply didn’t do your job well.

The cloud is great. Stop the hype.

Clever four part form

2010-03-17T15:07:00.003Z

I have just finished converting our online "enquirer" form so that it uses our new site template. The previous version hadn't been updated since it was created and didn't even match our old site (c. 2005). I can't take any credit for the form, as someone else designed it. However it is quite clever. It's a bit like a tabbed dialog as you can move between the different parts and it remembers what you filled in. When you get to the last part and submit it only then does it see if you've filled in required fields and take you to the first field that you need to fill in.

As I say I can't take any credit for it. It's a good example of what can be done. Hopefully it gets enough information from people, whilst putting off those who aren't really serious.

Search box on wycliffe.org.uk

2010-03-17T12:11:00.005Z

Before we launched the new wycliffe.org.uk site we realised that despite several people looking over the proposed design, we'd missed out a search function. So I had to squeeze one into the top navigation bar.

The way I did it probably wasn't original, but I can't remember where I'd seen it. When you click the search link a text box opens up, obliterating the labels to the right.

You can view the source on the pages to see how it works, so I won't reproduce the code here. I just use a bit of jquery to show the hidden search box and hide the other labels. The other challenge was to make it work for people who don't have javascript enabled. The way I did that was to make the search text a link to a dedicated search page, where you could type in your query. If you have javascript the jquery changes that link to run the bit of code which shows the search box etc. If you don't have javascript you go to the dedicated search page.

I like jquery.

Weather report and tax information

2010-03-11T14:19:00.002Z

I've recently sent out a report to a number of our workers asking them for some information about tax matters. In amongst the replies supplying the information I got this:

Weather hot (=40C) and dry (10-20%) for the moment here. I am imagining the Wycliffe Centre with snowdrops and chilly breezes. Enjoy!

My reply was:

Yes we've got both. And frost, but lots of sunshine. I'm enjoying it, but not so much for the few minutes I'm on my motorbike!

It's good to remember the variety of situations in which people working for Wycliffe Bible Translators find themselves.

OSCAR's 10th birthday

2010-03-01T08:54:00.005Z

I don't carry any advertising on this blog, but I am happy to promote, for free, OSCAR, with a badge on the bottom right of the page. OSCAR is "the UK information service for world mission". (It's just occurred to me that I don't know why it's called OSCAR, maybe I'll find out today.) This is a very useful website if you are a missionary or a mission agency based in the UK, packed full of all sort of information. It's their 10th birthday today and they are having a virtual party. Why not drop by and say hello!

As well as the main website they also have an interactive community hosted by ning.com: OSCARactive, with the usual social networking facilities - groups, chat etc.

Redesigned Wycliffe Bible Translators website for the UK

2010-02-01T09:06:00.004Z

With a backroom job like mine it's not often that anyone gets to see the fruit of my labour, but last week I was involved in the launch of the redesigned wycliffe.org.uk website. Credit for the look goes to the agency that did the design, Frieze Design. It all went fairly smoothly when it came down to it, and there a few things to tidy up still.

You can't have it all

2009-12-22T09:41:00.005Z

I've just finished compiling a list of places where we duplicate information. It struck me that software engineering is like any other engineering, you can't have it all. You can't design a car that is fast, cheap and reliable. You can pick any two of the three and design a car to fit those criteria.

In my previous job in an electronics firm the engineers had to explain to the management why we couldn't produce products in a short space of time, that were powerful and yet cheap. "Pick any two", we'd say, "and will manage those".

In our information systems we'd like them to be integrated, handle complicated information and be easy to update. One of the places where we duplicate information is where we've previously chosen integrated and complicated whilst having to put up with not easy to update. However the ease of update is has become more important so what we've sacrificed instead is the integration - so the data is partly duplicated in a custom system that handles the complicated data nicely.

In another place we have data entered by hand which exists elsewhere in a spreadsheet, so we can do a quick mail merge to get the data out in several ways. In that case we've sacrificed integration because the effort to type it in was easier than the gymnastics in getting the data out in those several ways.

Fortunately the list of duplicated data is quite short because the data is mostly fairly simple and so can live in the integrated system (Raiser's Edge).

Pies and Bible Translation Statistics

2009-12-16T09:08:00.001Z

How could a blog with pies in the title resist linking to a blog post about pies and Bible Translation - with pictures!

A review of "The Website Owners Manual"

2009-12-15T11:32:00.001Z

My review of The Website Owners Manual:

This isn't a manual for web designers, it's for those people who are responsible for a website in any way. It covers pretty much everything non-technical you need to know - setting up a project, overseeing direction and design, testing, launching and monitoring. From comments I've heard Paul Boag make, as a web designer he wrote this for his clients, so he wouldn't have to keep on answering the same questions over and over!

Each chapter has a helpful introduction, and at the end some actions points as to what to do next. This is useful as there's so much information in each chapter that it can seem a bit overwhelming, especially if you've been landed with the job of managing a website without much previous experience. I really can't find much to criticise in this book - it has a really wide coverage of most of the things you need to know about.

Digmission - first post

2009-12-03T14:59:00.003Z

Two days ago I went with a couple of colleagues to Digimission (recordings) which aimed to "explore how technology shapes faith, church and mission". I can't find the quote that got me interested, but it was something along the lines of the subtitle for the book that was given free to early bookers: "Flickering Pixels - How Technology Shapes your Faith". That was one of the themes of the day - the message is affected by the medium it is transmitted through.

The people there were a diverse group - from a variety of organisations, or leaders of churches. One of them was Jonny Baker, whose blog I have been reading for a few years now. I'm looking forward to seeing the powerpoints because the only thing I wrote down from his talk was the phrase "mainframe Christianity".

There was a plug for Faith Journeys from Christian Research (not sure which is their website) which is interesting. It's built upon a platform used by major companies to research what people think of their products. It gives people a chance to store, possibly just for their own benefit, stories about their faith journey. However it also gives Christian Research a chance to ask questions about their faith to answer questions about how gradual the process is, what age milestones happen at etc.

Someone showed a YouTube video of Ricky Gervais talking about the Bible on his Animals tour. It has adult language at one point, so I won't link to it, but he talks about Genesis in a very fresh way.

I'd like to draw some conclusions, but the thoughts are still rattling round in my brain, so I'll probably do that in another post.

Links to other articles can be found on twitter: #digimission

Three of the speakers on the panel discussion:

Mark Meynell, Maggi Dawn, Jonny Baker

Lessons learned from a book collaboration

2009-11-26T13:27:00.002Z

A new book is out: Social by Social, "A practical guide to using new technologies to deliver social impact". It's available as a free PDF download as well as a non-free dead tree version.

At a quick glance it seems full of useful stuff, along with some familiar things if you've followed blogs with the word "social" in the title.

The bit that grabbed my attention was the stuff in Chapter 9 about the making of the book. As someone whose job it is to make sure people can use the tools provided, some things struck me about their choices and the problems they had. (It's good to see such honesty in the first place too!)

The group was, as a whole, pretty technology savvy – or at least that was the assumption. This assumption led to the first major mistake [emphasis theirs]: not enough thorough evaluation of each participant’s level of social media competency and experience.
...
We ended up defaulting to e-mail quite quickly for two reasons:
firstly, because everyone was definitely using it; and secondly because we trusted it to give us our own record of what had been said that we knew we could rely on.
...
The project wiki was useful for collating content together, but it became cumbersome and ineffective for editing the final document together: it was too text-focussed and wasn’t useful for showing layout and graphics to the designer, and also it wasn’t appropriate for delivering to the client at NESTA and inviting formal feedback and signoff. We ended up collating the final handbook in Microsoft Word and using e-mail and tracked changes – which worked very efficiently but broke our collaborative approach in favour of getting the job done.

I'm not surprised they ended up using email. Even though it's not very good for collaboration, there's no obvious replacement (I wonder how they would have got in with Google wave?). Wikis are very text orientated, so you can see why they wanted to use Word for layout. But multiple copies of a document with track changes is still a bit clumsy. There must be a need for a good tool to do that sort of thing.

It's worth reading that chapter to hear what the other three major mistakes were.

Bug fix to blog post - a meta post

2009-11-25T13:55:00.002Z

It's not often that you write a blog post to report a bug fix, but I put one on the Wycliffe Bible Translators UK blog recently. The bug was amusing, but probably not many other bugs I found would be even vaguely interesting to anyone.

Weather forecast via twitter - wycombeweather

2009-10-20T12:47:00.003Z

Ages ago I thought it would be handy to have a local weather forecast delivered to my phone, for free. Then twitter came along and it looked like that might provide a possibility. By this time I'd come across the BBC weather RSS feeds.

I tried a couple of "RSS to twitter" services and both worked once and then never again. Google app engine looked like a good way of finding a server to do the stuff to join RSS to twitter. So I cobbled together bits of Python code and came up with this. (Update: September 2010 - updated to use oauth library. You'll need to register your app via dev.twitter.com to get the four keys below. )

(Paste in code from feedparser.org. Comment out the main program stuff.)

(Paste in outh stuff from http://github.com/mikeknapp/AppEngine-OAuth-Library/blob/master/oauth.py)

# Cobbled together from
# http://highscalability.com/using-google-appengine-little-micro-scalability
# http://pydanny.blogspot.com/2008/04/feedparser-does-not-work-with-google.html
import wsgiref.handlers
import urllib
from google.appengine.api import urlfetch
import base64
import feedparser
import StringIO

from google.appengine.ext import webapp

def getWeather():
   content = urlfetch.fetch("http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/2111.xml").content
   d = feedparser.parse(StringIO.StringIO(content))
   if d.bozo == 1:
   raise Exception("Can not parse given URL.")
   return d['entries'][0]['title']

class WeatherText(webapp.RequestHandler):
def get(self):
self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'text/html'

self.response.out.write(getWeather())
self.response.out.write('
supported by backstage.bbc.co.uk')

class UpdateWeather(webapp.RequestHandler):
def get(self):
self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'text/plain'

message = getWeather()
# self.response.out.write(d['entries'][0]['title'] )
# message = datetime.now().ctime()
payload= {'status' : message,}
# payload= urllib.urlencode(payload, True) Removed when switching to oauth client
# Get rid of degree marks because they turn out as question marks in the final tweet
# payload = payload.replace('%3F','') degree marks work on twitter, appear as "deg" in txt, still wrong when main URL viewed
# self.response.out.write(payload)

# Your application Twitter application ("consumer") key and secret.
   # You'll need to register an application on Twitter first to get this
   # information: http://www.twitter.com/oauth
application_key = "im_not_telling_you"
application_secret = "nor_this"

   # Get these from http://dev.twitter.com/apps/your_app_number/my_token
user_token = "this_is_a_secret"
user_secret = "this_is_definitely_a_secret"

   # In the real world, you'd want to edit this callback URL to point to your
   # production server. This is where the user is sent to after they have
   # authenticated with Twitter.
callback_url = "%s/verify" % self.request.host_url

client = TwitterClient(application_key, application_secret, callback_url)
result = client.make_request("http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/update.xml", token=user_token, secret=user_secret, additional_params=payload, protected=False, method=urlfetch.POST)
# Removed when oauth implemented
# base64string = base64.encodestring('%s:%s' % (login, password))[:-1]
# headers = {'Authorization': "Basic %s" % base64string}
#
# url = "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml"
# result = urlfetch.fetch(url, payload=payload, method=urlfetch.POST, headers=headers)
#
self.response.out.write(result.content)

def main():
  application = webapp.WSGIApplication([('/', WeatherText),
('/updateweather',UpdateWeather)],
   debug=True)
  wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler().run(application)

if __name__ == '__main__':
  main()

You can see the results at twitter.com/wycombeweather and wycombeweather.appspot.com. If you want to do it for your local UK weather you'll need to change the figure 2111 above and use your own twitter account.

Presentations and Powerpoint

2009-09-29T16:13:00.001Z

My colleague, Phil Prior, and I did a session this morning on presentations and use of Powerpoint. He has written up his thoughts on presentations.

We did a more advanced course last week. On that one I covered a number of steps to ensure things go smoothly. I hadn't practised what I preached (run through it on the actual equipment beforehand), and when I opened up clip art the PC froze so I had to borrow a laptop from one of the participants and carry on from there!

My 1.5 seconds of fame

2009-09-24T11:39:00.005Z

The BBC Digital Revolution people (putting together a 4 programme series on the web and stuff) asked on Twitter if anyone had questions for Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty.

Her answer:

Original blog entry: Tim Berners-Lee and Shami Chakrabarti interview clips (Video): web privacy and obsession

(cross posted to my personal blog)

A picture of a radio programme in the making

2009-08-28T07:35:00.002Z

I don't often point to other blogs, because you might as well just read them, but this one was worth highlighting. David Ker has put a photo on one of his blogs showing him at work producing a radio programme with Bible material. Click on the picture to see what the numbers in the stars mean.

Expedia no longer supports Passport/Windows Live id

2009-08-27T14:49:00.005Z

I've searched blogs and looked on techmeme.com, but I can't find any reference to this. I got an email today from Expedia saying they no longer support .Net Passport aka Windows Live id.

When you click on the "Why?" link you get this. Which isn't really a satisfying explanation.

An old hard disk and a new video

2009-08-21T15:11:00.005Z

A few months ago someone from Wycliffe Canada contacted me. There was an old hard drive in the UK that had some music on it that he wanted to put on a video that he was producing. He wanted me to get the music off it and send it to him on a new hard drive.

The hard drive possibly hadn't been used since 2002. The hard drive was sent to me, and because it was in Mac format I got a colleague who used a Mac to help me get the files off. The drive span up OK and we started getting files off it, but then after 15 minutes or so it died mid-copy. It was pretty terminal and I couldn't get it to work at all after that. Not all of the original files for the music were there, but, thank God, the final mix of all files was there, including the song that was required.

This song now appears on a DVD. Here's the preview, but not with the song though:

Optimistic search button

2009-07-27T14:16:00.005Z

This bike spares had an "I'm feeling lucky" button next to its search box, but then it changed on one page to this:

Sign Language Translation in Wycliffe Magazine

2009-06-25T13:24:00.001Z

The Wycliffe UK magazine "Words for Life" is out and the focus this month is on Sign Language Bible translation.

Validating Direct Debits with Blackbaud NetCommunity

2009-06-16T13:55:00.003Z

There's a bug in NetCommunity 5.1 whereby it lets your donor specify a one-time Direct Debit payment, which when it is brought through to RE doesn't work properly as it isn't a Recurring Gift.

In addition, we don't want the donors to do recurring credit card gifts as the current version of RE - 7.85 - stores Credit Card info in the database. (An upcoming PCI compliant release won't do this.)

So I've written a bit of Javascript to check the frequency and payment type and give an error message. Unlike my previous script, it doesn't have a hardcoded prefix which is needed to find the ids of some of the page elements. Instead it looks at a variable which is part of the donation form to get the prefix. This may mean it won't work in other versions of NetCommunity.

<![cdata[//><!]]>

Wycliffe Staff Conference

2009-06-08T10:53:00.002Z

We had our annual staff conference at the end of last week. The main part of the conference consists of reports from selected people on what they've been doing. As it happened I'd heard most of the people before for various reasons, but they all said some new stuff.

Afterwards we had discussion groups. One of the things that our group mused on was the fact that the speakers were saying how they were using ways of getting Bibles to people in non-print form (e.g. recordings and mobiles), because literacy rates aren't high. We commented how we are in what you could call a "post-literate" society, where people don't read much and so the same methods would be useful in getting the Bible into the hands of those who don't "consume" print media. The difference though, is that those in the UK who choose not to read have the opportunity, whereas those in countries where literacy isn't high don't have the opportunity.

Caught on Camera

2009-06-05T11:35:00.001Z

From That's Life....

Supporting Deaf Sign Language translation

2009-06-04T08:13:00.003Z

This is a bit old, but here's an interview with Dee and Shawn Collins about their involvement in Sign Language translation. We met Dee and Shawn when they came here a couple of years ago, so there's a personal interest in what they've been doing.

Geoffrey Hunt and sign language

2009-05-28T11:09:00.001Z

Geoffrey Hunt is the man behind sign language Bible translation in one of our parter organisations. Here's an article about him and sign language Bible Translation.

Now Facebook thinks I talk Pidgin

2009-05-18T15:53:00.003Z

This dialog popped up when I clicked on my online friends list in Facebook today:

Somehow it thinks I talk Pidgin. At least I know what Pidgin for "offline" is.

What is prayer?

2009-05-13T13:42:00.003Z

No, this isn't a philosophical question. On our vacancies page we classify our jobs into various areas we call domains. Internally we have 37 different domains, but that's too many to put in a dropdown list so map them to things that make sense (we hope) to people outside. For example anthropology, ethnomusicalogy, sociolinguistics and translation are all grouped as "language related".

Recently some new domains were setup, like Sign Languages and Vernacular Media (i.e. media in people's own language). Until I get the word from the people who worry about these things I have mapped these to "language related" to. But what do I map "prayer" to?

For the sake of preventing an error message I've mapped it to personnel. What would you choose?

Facebook lets me talk like a Pirate, but not in British English

2009-05-13T11:31:00.003Z

Facebook have got a project going to translate their site into various languages. They have been getting users to help with this. I was checking out the settings on my Vision 2025 countdown app and I noticed that I could specify the app was in the language "English (US)" or "English (Pirate)" but not "English (UK)". I guess translating into Pirate is more exciting than translating into British English.

Sign language project has a website

2009-05-07T08:03:00.003Z

The WordSign project that I mentioned previously - Update on Sign Language project - has it's own website - wordsign.org.

(Via the Wycliffe UK blog).

Useful pictures

2009-05-06T10:26:00.001Z

A picture is worth a thousand words they say. Well, each of these little labels is worth a few. Instead of "C5 envelope with the flap on the short side" we have a handy little picture.

Twitterings at Wycliffe

2009-05-05T13:31:00.002Z

I've done a trio of twitter related pages for Wycliffe UK:

Latest tweet from various Wycliffe people, myself at the top of course (I had just mine for testing, and added other people afterwards you see).

As above in reverse chronological order.

Tweets mentioning #wycliffeuk.

NetCommunity API and VB Express 2005

2009-05-01T14:09:00.003Z

I've just managed to get the NetCommunity 5.1 API samples to build with VB Express 2005 (no longer available for download).

There were two reasons it didn't "just work":

No NetCommunity on my PC
For some reason one of the .vbproj files (SampleParts.vbproj) was rejected with the error ".vbproj is not supported by this version of Visual Studio".

I got around it by creating a new project and importing the files. I also tweaked the references in the other project files to the BBNCExtensions.dll and the Service dll to the following:

C:\Program Files\re7\Custom\Shelby\BBNCExtensions.dll
C:\Program Files\re7\Custom\Shelby\Blackbaud.NetCommunity.WebService.Interfaces.dll

Note that RE path is where our RE lives - yours may be in program files\blackbaud\the raisers edge or something like that. That works because I have the dlls in my RE installation, probably because I have the plugin. Because our RE lives in a non-standard place I had to copy the bits and the end of the .vbproj files where it copies things to a the shelby directory quoted above. To deploy onto the real server you have to copy them out of there anyway.

Update on Sign Language project

2009-04-29T08:50:00.002Z

I've been following the progress of a project to develop tools for producing sign language Bibles and there has been little external stuff to point you to though I have where I could. Now however the latest issue of the JAARS (the technical bit of our organisation) magazine Rev 7 (PDF) has an article about it. It has a name now - WordSign and there are more details on this sign language project on the JAARS website.

Twitter is big

2009-04-28T08:48:00.004Z

If you went back in time 25 years ago and said "in 25 years time the geeks will be cool" I think no-one would believe you. 25 years ago geeks like me were fiddling around with the BBC B and the cool kids had guitars.

A few highlights over the years:
I worked for a company that was on the internet before the web was invented and we had gopher and wais, but most of all Usenet. Then Mosaic came along.

A bit later I heard the internet mentioned on the Radio 4 News Quiz (still going). Then URLs appeared on adverts. The internet was becoming mainstream.

There were online journals and then Peter Merholz invented the word "blog". I was reading his blog at the time.

Blogs became mainstream and Gary Lineker said during the World Cup 2006 (I think) "what's a blog?". He probably knows now.

In 2006 Twitter was launched. It was called twttr at first because we were short of vowels in those days (see Flickr). I was the 791st person to sign up. Now there are millions of users.

A year or so after that I heard twitter mentioned by a radio DJ, but it didn't have a high profile and it was still in the realm of us geeks. Us geeks love to rush around saying "jaiku!" "friendfeed!" "diggit!" and other Latest New Things. However Twitter is now mentioned regularly on TV, radio and dead tree media so I think I can safely say

Twitter is big

Coffee and the internet - full circle

2009-03-19T08:48:00.003Z

Back in the early days of the internet when web pages had a grey background by default (really), I came across the Trojan Room Coffee Pot. It was a (what we now call) web camera pointing at a coffee machine. The idea was that you could see if there was any coffee in the pot from your workstation (this was before PCs were mainstream) without having to go to it. In fact the setup predates the World Wide Web.

Fourteen years later when my Firefox browser starts I see this message from Phil, a colleague, on Twitter:

Phil77 morning all, going to see if water's now boiled for coffee. Didn't notice boiler was off on first attempt #wycliffeuk
7 minutes ago

and I know that if I go to the kitchen I should find that the water boiler has reached temperature.

So the internet has come full circle, our need for coffee (well, not really a need) has been met with technology. The difference between twitter and the Trojan Room Coffee pot is that twitter is more versatile. For example, our Wycliffe UK twitter account can tell you things like

wycliffeuk Engage summer teams are almost full. If you're still thinking of applying please contact us immediately! http://is.gd/6AW0

Like the coffee technology, it's very time sensitive information, so if you're reading this anytime after mid-March then you are probably too late.

Using media wiki for internal documentation

2009-03-17T09:49:00.006Z

Many months ago I did an update on my quest to find a wiki for doing internal documentation.

Here's another update, following an installation of media wiki.

Even though I've edited pages on wikipedia, which runs on the media wiki software, it was useful to do an installation to get a flavour for what it might be like using it for real. The system I'm moving away from is a Lotus Notes out-of-the-box "document library". When I started editing wiki pages it made me realise what Lotus Notes gave me as standard:

WYSIWYG editing
ability to paste from formatted Word documents and retain formatting
automatic compiling of table of contents
easy linking of documents
easy embedding of images

Apart from the internal reasons for switching away from Lotus Notes I had to remind myself of why I was doing this:

easier access for remote users
email notification when a page changes
version history maintained

The problems with embedding pictures is something that web applications haven't overcome as far as I've seen.

Our corporate wiki software has good help with linking and allows the creation of child pages, and can do a resulting table of contents of child pages. It also does WYSIWYG editing.

Pasting from Word documents is a double edged sword. I've seen another WYSIWYG editor that allows it, but gives you the resulting horrible HTML that goes with it. Wikis don't tend to do that because of the difficulties in converting to the underlying wiki format. Why don't I use our corporate wiki you may ask? Among other things, its because procedure manuals don't fit with what the wiki is for.

One thing that I have got working with media wiki, is linking the logins to our Active Directory, to save people having yet another login.

So the question is, can I put up with a couple of shortcomings for the good things it does? Time to see how other wikis compare I think.

So what does Wycliffe actually do?

2009-03-11T09:59:00.005Z

I've been thinking about how to present what Wycliffe UK (aka Wycliffe Bible Translators UK) does to the world. As I'm not a marketing/PR/communications person you're not going to get a polished answer, but my thought processes. One of the reasons for thinking about this is because of the recent change ("Vince's change") that Google introduced recently in the way they work out what to give you when you search. It's a problem because we aren't as high in the search results for things like "bible translation uk" as we used to be

The thing is, although our aim is to translate the Bible into every language that needs a translation (with partners, to start by 2025), in practise not a lot of our people are actually doing translation. The best people to translate a language are those that have it as their mother tongue, and we can help the process. So when we're recruiting we need a lot of other skills other than just being good at learning a language and then translating.

As well as the Google problem the other thing that got me thinking was our weekly "Centre fellowship" at which we heard from people who work on what we call "Scripture Use" worldwide. One of the reasons we do more than translation is that our aim is transformed lives, and a translated Bible can't change anyone if they can't read it (so we do literacy work). Other materials also help people with the Bible, like Bible reading notes, songs etc. Developing this material is part of Scripture Use.

One of the things we heard yesterday was the very practical work of help people who have undergone traumatic events to apply the Bible to their situation, which we call Trauma Healing.

So bringing these things together, our problem (fortunately not just my problem) is that a) we want people who think we just do translation to realise that it's part of a bigger picture and
b) we want to present that bigger picture in such a way that when people look for "Bible Translation" in Google, they still find us!

CauseWired review

2009-03-05T13:57:00.003Z

CauseWired, subtitled "Plugging in, getting involved, changing the world", is a book about online fundraising by Tom Watson. Here's a two minute review, not because I think you don't want to spend more than two minutes reading it, but because I don't want to spend more than two minutes writing it.

(If the name is familiar Tom Watson is the name of a blogging UK MP, but the book is by another Tom Watson.)

Lots of stories and examples. Well researched. Nothing startling in there if you've been following the stories about fundraising organisations through blogs. Lots of people, say, signing up to a Cause on Facebook doesn't mean lots of giving. In my opinion the whole thing is too young to draw any conclusions that will stand the test of time.

Sign Language Bible translation

2009-03-04T09:08:00.003Z

The Sign Language Conference that was held here at the Wycliffe Centre is over, but some of the delegates came to visit our weekly "Centre Fellowship" meeting yesterday. It was quite a multi-lingual experience as we had three translators, all speaking English as well as a different sign language, and the Swedish sign language speaker had to speak American Sign Language as her translator didn't know Swedish sign language. They emphasised a few basic facts about sign languages:

1. There are many sign languages around the world, maybe over 400, that are as different as any two spoken languages.
2. There is no British Sign Language Bible, although work is in progress. If you're reading this then you speak English. Imagine if your only Bible was in French.
3. Sign Language translations have to be done in the context of the culture they will be used in.

There is more material on Sign Language translation on the Wycliffe International site:
Sign Languages FAQ
Innovations in Sign Language translation
The Silent Language

IT World of Wycliffe

2009-02-27T15:02:00.003Z

The task of Bible Translation needs a whole lot of different specialist skills, such as teachers and pilots. Where we need a lot of people with a particular area of skill we often have some people in the organisation dedicated to handling enquiries for that area. One such area is IT.

I've just found out that our IT recruitment people have a website just for those who are thinking of working for us called The IT World of Wycliffe with lots of information explaining how we use IT in Wycliffe and what sorts of skills are needed. In fact it was mentioned on the Wycliffe UK blog, but I didn't notice. Reading your own organisation's blog is a good idea!

Publishing the Bible online

2009-02-26T10:23:00.002Z

Another snippet from the Check IT Out day we held last Saturday:

You might think that Wycliffe would already be putting the Bibles it translates online. However there are reasons why that is trickier than you might think. One of these is the issue of ownership. I don't know all the ins and outs of this, let alone explain them, but its roughly to do with the fact that the translated Bible isn't owned by us, but by the organisations we work in partnership with.

There are also technical challenges with the original text. It may be in some old desktop publishing format. Even if we have the text, we may have incomplete information about the fonts used. Only recent work is in Unicode. Some translations aren't electronic at all (yet).

Then there's the presentation side, you can't just put a load of ascii text on a web page, it needs to be presented in a useful way. Actually none of this was said on Saturday, I'm just setting this scene! The presentation was about a project which is overcoming these hurdles.

One of the big things in getting the Bible into peoples' hands is the mobile phone. There are more mobiles than PCs and an increasing number can handle text, audio and video. So a lot of the presentation was what's happening around the world with mobiles. One thing I hadn't heard of is the company O3B Networks. O3B is Other 3 Billion. They are putting up a new network of satellites to offer cheaper and faster satellite internet connection. The same connection can also be used for mobile traffic.

The project's in private beta at the moment, so you can't see it yet.

Sign Languages conference

2009-02-25T12:02:00.002Z

I've blogged about sign languages before and I've just found out that we're hosting a sign languages conference here at Wycliffe UK this weekend.

Bible Translation mentioned in the Westminster Confession

2009-02-24T14:42:00.004Z

I took part in the Check IT Out day we held last Saturday. I'll blog about some other things on it later, but I thought I'd just share this thought from one of the other speakers.

The Westminster Confession from 1646 mentions the need for Bible Translation in Chapter 1 (emphasis mine):

VIII. The Old Testament in Hebrew (which was the native language of the people of God of old), and the New Testament in Greek (which at the time of the writing of it was most generally known to the nations), being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentic; so as in all controversies of religion the Church is finally to appeal to them. But because these original tongues are not known to all the people of God who have right to, and interest in, the Scriptures, and are commanded, in the fear of God, to read and search them, therefore they are to be translated into the language of every people to which they come, that the Word of God dwelling plentifully in all, they may worship him in an acceptable manner, and, through patience and comfort of the Scriptures, may have hope.

Text from carm.org

I don't suppose many church leaders, or leadership groups get together and say "In planning the next year or so, shall we have a quick look at the Westminster Confession to see if there's anything that we should be concentrating on, but which we've forgotten about?". If they did though, well...