Many Pies

Many Pies

Friday, April 27, 2007

I can recommend WinBatch

A post I put on the Blackbaud User Society (Blackbus) forum recommended WinBatch, so I thought I'd expand on it here.

It costs $99.95. It replays keystrokes to the screen using a scripting language. So you can get it open records, copy fields, manipulate them, paste them back and so on.

It's idea for repetative tasks that don't need the mouse. I mainly use it for Raiser's Edge but you can use it for most applications that can use the keyboard to do things.

So for example, this script takes a list of Funds in an Excel spreadsheet and puts an X before the fund name.
delaytime = 0.5
for i = 1 to 353
SendKeysto("Microsoft Excel","{F2}+{HOME}^c{ESC}")
timedelay(delaytime)
SendKeysto("Microsoft Excel","{DOWN}")
SendKeysTo("The Raiser","!i")
SendKeysTo("Find", "^v~")
timedelay(delaytime)
SendKeysTo("Find", "{ESC}~")
timedelay(delaytime)
while strsub(WinGetActive(), 1, 10) == "The Raiser"
timedelay(delaytime)
endwhile
sendkey("{TAB 2}{HOME}X{TAB 8}{SPACE}")
while strsub(WinGetActive(), 1, 10) != "The Raiser"
timedelay(delaytime)
endwhile
next i


{SPACE} is the space bar. {ESC} is escape. ~ is return. ! means alt and then the next character. ^ means control and the next character. It can do many different things, we only use a fraction of its capabilities, but it's saved days of tedious work over the past few years.

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Thursday, April 19, 2007

Sign language conference at the Wycliffe Centre

We have a conference about sign language here at the Wycliffe Centre. You can get a bit of info from the Collins who are attending.

There is some juicy technical stuff about representing sign languages on computers that I've heard about, but I haven't got time to get it written down now.

tags: sign language

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

New mission IT blogger

Paul Shaddick, who created the ETP website, and now works for AIM International, has a blog.

The strapline is terrible - "consider IT pure joy".
via Eddie

Monday, April 16, 2007

Animated Development Statistics

All sort of interesting (if you're into that sort of thing) development statistics animated on a chart or map at Google gapminder. You can watch the CO2 growth in India and China.

HTML5

I found an article covering the same sort of ground as Simon Willison's talk on HTML5 at the Oxford Geek Night.

I wondered why none of the tech blogs I read had covered this news all last week, until diveintomark.org covered it.

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Thursday, April 12, 2007

New wycliffe.net

Our new international umbrella site wycliffe.net has just gone live. There are a few things yet to be filled out, but one thing is that the online jobs bit available on the Wycliffe UK site as well as the US and Canadian ones is also available on wycliffe.net.

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Oxford Geek Night

I went to the Oxford Geek Night (number 2) last night. The place was packed, and arriving late didn't help. There was some pretty geeky stuff, you can see the titles of the talks on the link above.

Some stuff I knew a bit about, like web fonts and Second Life (I was in a minority of those who had an account, am I leading edge or sad?), but found out more. Some was new, like the ins and outs of what's been happening in the last 10 years since HTML 4 with XHTML and the W3C. Simon Willison had up to date news (well, as of Monday) on the Web HyperText Application Technology Working Group offering all their work on webforms and web applications to the W3C.

Several things to do more investigation on...

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Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Sage Charity User group

When we started planning our installation of Sage MMS I looked around to see if there was a Charity User Group. A company called Intelligent Solutions mentioned it on their website, but they had no-one to run it, so things were dormant. Now, however things appear to be waking up. There's a page for the User Group on their website, though you won't find mention of the upcoming User Group meeting.

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Press coverage of favourite verse survey

Our survey of people's favourite Bible verse got a mention in the Telegraph.

tags:
Wycliffe