Many Pies

Many Pies

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Geoffrey Hunt and sign language

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.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Now Facebook thinks I talk Pidgin

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.


Wednesday, May 13, 2009

What is prayer?

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


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.

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Sign language project has a website

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

(Via the Wycliffe UK blog).

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Useful pictures

Labelled drawers of envelopes

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.

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Twitterings at Wycliffe

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.

Friday, May 01, 2009

NetCommunity API and VB Express 2005

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.