Work for me!

We're advertising a Business Systems Assistant job to help share my workload. If you've come here after being there, then full marks for doing your homework. Mention this blog post should you be called to interview and you may get bonus points.

If you think that a Macbook is standard issue, then I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. That's stock photography for you. I don't much talk about what I do here, because it's mostly behind the firewall. However, with moving to Salesforce and launching a website (within a couple of days of each other) last year, and with moving to SunSystems and Workday later this year, and next year, there's a lot of work to be done. Plus we're doing a lot more in terms of fundraising, which means that people are hungry for data. So I've got enough work for two people, which is why we need another one!

Emojis are a serious matter

Emojis are increasingly popular. ✏ If you can see a pencil before the word "If" then the device you're using has some support for them. They may seem like a bit of fun, but the fact that they have been included in the Unicode standard since 2010 means they are actually pretty serious. Or rather, that they are a valid means of communication which the Unicode Consortium has recognised.

😁 I don't see an emoji Bible coming anytime soon though (someone did have a go at creating a Kickstarter project for one).
🚀
The Unicode standard has new characters introduced at every revision, and for some revisions this includes new emojis. If you can see a chilli pepper here then you're up to date: 🌶. If you're wondering how they decide whether to include emojis then they've written a document on that.

There is a review process to introduce characters, and often some of the preparatory work in Bible Translation will feed into this review process. One of the early things in Bible Translation is to work out which script should be used. Some languages have never been written down before, and so there's a process involving the people who speak the language to see what they want to do. If it has been written down and some of the characters which aren't in Unicode then they will be submitted to this review process.

SIL, who do a lot of work on language technology have a group called the Non-Roman Script Initiative (NRSI) which has been working on technical issues do with fonts and writing systems. They recently celebrated their 20th anniversary.

MissioMaze - a new app for Wycliffe Bible Translators UK

Much of what I do is behind our office firewall or password protected websites, but I've been working on something recently that people with an iOS device will be able to see.

Back in 2013 I came across an app called iHobo, which puts a homeless man on your phone for three days. You interact with this homeless man from time to time over the three days - it's not something you do continuously. I thought that same approach could be used with a game which has been round for many years "For those back home". This is a game designed to be played within a group setting. You have a series of choices to make, a bit like the old "choose your own adventure" books. In that game the aim is to get as many converts as possible. However situations come up where you have to choose between what your sending church and what local people might want.

I started by rewriting the questions, as the approaches used in Bible Translation have changed in the 20 or so years when that game was written. For example, many new translation projects in related languages are done in parallel with an overall "cluster" project*. The measure of success changed from number to percentage of the church engaged - how much the local people gain a desire to have and use the translated Scriptures.

As I'm an IT person I got some people who know what they are talking about to review what I'd written. At that point the project stalled due to lack of time and money. Then towards the end of last year it was revived again and I started work on developing the app, while other people worked on refining the questions.

As I had previous experience with the Marmalade framework I used that. I used Marmalade Web which wraps up HTML/Javascript into an app. This was because a requirement was that the game could also be played on a PC at an exhibition stand, and so I wanted to use something simple. For iOS Marmalade Web lets me write an extension in C++ which calls a routine to send a (local) notification after a number of minutes or hours. This is necessary because iOS could close the app when it's not in the foreground.

What's not easy to see on the website, is how you can't get do everything you need to on Windows. Whilst the environment simplifies a lot of the work involved in cross platform building, when it comes to uploading to the Apple App store, you need to use a Mac. I used macincloud.com for this bit. You can rent a Mac for $1 an hour. For ad hoc work you have to buy 30 hours credits, and they expire after a while. That's not a bad price if all you want to do is upload your app.

It's currently going through beta testing - let me know if you want to take part. Keep an eye on the MissioMaze web page for when it's released (we're aiming for March/April).

*From Not too remote

A language cluster refers to languages that may be linguistically related, and/or from similar geographic regions or cultural backgrounds. Speakers of these languages work together, sharing expertise, training and resources, to develop their languages and work on translation into each language.

IT and Bible translation

An article I wrote on IT and Bible Translation has been published on the Kingdom Code blog. Andy Geers approached me a while back and asked me to write it. I'm just waiting for a flood of email to my inbox now.

Translating tech jargon

A tech-related post on our Wycliffe blog - cookies, caches and cows - made my metaphorical ears prick up. It's about translating tech jargon into many different languages. The Economist article that it quotes says Firefox uses 40,000 words, but that sounds too high for me. I dug a bit into the Mozilla website to check it out. The process of translating words used in interfaces is called localisation or localization, depending on your locale, or l10n (that's L ten N as there are ten letters between the l and the n) to keep everyone happy. I suspect that figure is either the number of strings of words that need translating for Firefox, or for all the Mozilla products (including websites).

Space travel and Bible Translation

(These opinions are my own - who else would want them?)

One of the problems in getting people interested in Bible Translation is that it's such a long job, taking 5 to 20 years to translate a New Testament. Other worthwhile causes that people support take place on smaller timescales. So when I was reading about another human endeavour that took place on similar timescales I wrote a blog entry for the Wycliffe blog: Which takes longer - a space mission or Bible Translation?, drawing parallels between the two processes. Our wordsmiths sprinkled their fairy dust on it and it was published this morning.

Kingdom Code

Awesome to have 60 people at Impact Hub last night for the "Kingdom Code" Christians in Tech event #kingdomcodeuk pic.twitter.com/BTZKenssIp
— Andy Geers (@andygeers) June 17, 2014

You can see me on that picture if you look very closely.

Kingdom Code was an event organised by Andy Geers and others:

Are you a Christian in tech? This event is being held to draw together a foundational group of Christians who work as developers, UX / UI designers, data geeks, product manager or entrepreneurs and who are excited to see mobile and tech used to serve Kingdom purposes. One output of this group may be to organise a Code for the Kingdom Christian weekend hackathon in 2015. 

The event was really well organised. After a bit of mingling we moved into a room with chairs. There was a brief introduction from Andy and Rupert Edwards and a big of plugging from the sponsors. We were then told to chat to the person next to us, and a bit later, to the person on the other side. There was a pre-event questionnaire asking about what people hoped to get out of the event and what sort of work they were in. There was a wide variety - not just developers and designers, but digital marketing people, business developments and entrepreneurs. I think I put myself down as jack of all trades. Some people were doing not specifically Christian type jobs (I hate the term "secular job"), but had Christian related side projects, in the way that Andy G does Prayermate on the side. Some people were visionary types who could see potential, e.g. in the internet playing a similar role to Roman roads which enabled the growth of the church after Jesus' death and resurrection.

We then split into 8 groups according to those types - I went with database/IT. After a bit we were then asked to mix about talk about this possible Code for the Kingdom event next year.

There was a plugging spot, where about 20 people got a minute to plug the thing they were involved in and ask for help, mostly volunteers or funding. There was a variety of visions for, say, easy software for administering churches, or helping those turning 18 who are forcibly returned to the country they sought asylum from, or getting the Bible out via mobiles. I plugged the paid job I blogged about recently. There was someone from Scripture Union who won the "oldest organisation" award, in contrast to the new ventures that people were working on. I think we came second.

There's another event planned in October, but I left before the end so I didn't hear much about that. Update: It's Monday 13 October.

Update2: Andy's written a post about it, though I blush to link to it.

I met a couple of people with links to Wycliffe:

• someone who did a short-term placement with us a couple of years who is part-time working on Tyndale House's online scripture tools. Update: they've launched a new version of the site now.
• Jason Ramasami who did this great picture for our magazine:
Post by Wycliffe Bible Translators UK.

It will be interesting to see what this event has started.

New website with info on IT in Wycliffe worldwide

I recently found out that there's a new website with information on IT in Wycliffe worldwide. The previous one (IT World of Wycliffe) has been replaced by Check-IT-Out. Check IT Out, geddit? (More accurately the website for the Check IT Out events has been expanded to include more information.)

It's got lots of good, up to date information about all the different ways IT is used in Wycliffe. Why not have a look at it? (Did you see that I resisted using a cheesy phrase there?)

Virtually sitting at a meeting table

I'm taking part in some meetings via video conference at the moment. (This picture is from when I did it a couple of years ago, this is what I looked like as I was "sitting" at the table with the other people. I didn't know my photo was being taken so this is my concentrating face.) The meeting is with the steering group of the Polder Consortium. We're looking at how we can help all the organisations in the Wycliffe Global Alliance take part in seven streams of participation, mainly through a technological viewpoint.

Part of the reason we are able to do this is because of the expanded scope of the Polder Consortium to include other things than just identity issues. However identity, and trust are essential foundations for organisations working together, so they will play their part.

New office - furniture and rolling display

There's a good post with lots of pictures of our new office on the Wycliffe Centre move blog. I've been involved in the office layout planning since near the start of the process and one of the things we needed to consider was which office furniture to get. Because our previous furniture was from all sort of different sources it was very mismatched, so we wanted to spend money on getting new desks. (We managed to reuse a number of other bits of furniture, such as non-desk chairs, bookcases and some cabinets.) In the end we went with furniture company called Ofquest. Even with a generous discount it wasn't cheap. What we got for our money though was solid construction, a degree of reconfigurability, and really useful features, like a cable tray under the desk and clip on cable guides for the legs. It should last us a number of years, and survive another office move should we move before it wears out.

One of things of lesser importance that I've worked on with Ruth, our content person, and Stuart and Andy, my IT colleagues, is the TV display you can see above. Stuart and Andy got a Raspberry Pi going booting into the Chrome browser and displaying a page from our intranet. The page changes every few seconds and as well as showing prayer items shows things to praise God for, internal notices, the picture of the week from wycliffe.net. For that page, and another one which screenscraped our own wycliffe.org.uk site I used a bit of  XPath, obtained via Chrome's web inspectory thingy, which makes it very easy to get at HTML content. Here's a fragment of the code I used:

$pageHTML = file_get_contents($url);

if ($pageHTML) {

$dom = new DomDocument();

$dom->loadHTML($pageHTML);

$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);

$entries = $xpath->query('//*[@id="image"]/img');

if ($entries) {

$tag1HTML = nodeContent($entries->item(0), true);

}

}

The user-editable pages were done with Perch, a very neat content management system. It's not suitable for large sites, probably defined by complexity of navigation rather than number of pages. It's very quick to get going on though. I used the API to write a custom app which removed items from a page when an associated expiry date had passed. As you've got access to the source code as well as the API documentation I was able to write something which delved into the Perch innards without too much effort, once I understood factory classes. When I needed support I got a quick response (_/- confusion - doh!).

A time of "lasts"

So we're moving offices and Tim has written a good post Goodbye Wycliffe Centre. I've just been on what might be the last time I walk around the outside of our grounds. Yesterday we had the last of our weekly "Tuesday fellowship" meetings. (In future we'll meet monthly.) It's a time of lasts.

Update: in fact I took two more walks.

15 years with Wycliffe Bible Translators in the UK

My previous certificate of long service - for 10 years

15 years ago I went part-time in the job that I was doing. (I was surprised how there wasn't too much fuss when I asked to go part-time. Either it was because they wanted to see less of me, or because it was better than losing me altogether; I don't know which.) I then spent two days a week working for Wycliffe. One of them was in the office, which meant getting up at 6am to get onto the M25, and one was at home.

After 18 months of that, in April 2000 I went full-time as Business Systems Manager, one week before two major systems went live. That was a very busy time! In July 2004 I went from being a member to being an employee. Apart from a more steady income, it didn't make much difference at the time. In June 2010 I became IT Director whilst continuing to be Business Systems Manager.

Those are the major milestones - more detail will have to wait for my autobiography or my CV, neither of which I plan to write in the near future. The big thing on the mind at the moment is our office move, which will take place in two weeks' time.

Tech videos from Africa

Steve Moitozo II, who is a fellow member of the Polder Consortium visited Africa recently and shot some interesting videos.

I've heard of Ushahidi (crowdsourcing information via SMS for, for example, at the site of a natural disaster) before, but I didn't know who was behind it. Steve met one of the co-rounder, Erik Hersman (who blogs at whiteafrican.com) and shot a short video of him.


Erik Hersman from Steve Moitozo 2 on Vimeo.
He's also behind another thing that crossed my radar a while back Brck "a backup generator for the internet". There are a couple of TED videos about him too. He's the son of Wycliffe missionaries.

There are a couple of other tech-related videos in Steve's Africa 2013 album:

• The impact of ITConnect - video.
• Lean Digital Publishing and Distribution of Audio Scriptures. I've blogged previously about portable audio Bible players, so there's another one that's available.

Our loss is Computers 4 Africa's gain

You can find them at www.computers4africa.org.uk.

The unique way we're funded (part 2)

I previously posted about the unique way we're funded. A couple of present and future members of the department are facing issues in their funding. I'm not deliberately being invidious in mentioning these having never written anything about the rest of the team, but I thought I'd make use of the tiny readership that this blog has to spread the word.

Peter Oatley is going to be joining us in the IT Department. Over the past 15 years that I've been here we've had a series of interns working for us. We've had gaps of a few months where we haven’t had any. I counted 21 different people in those 15 years. At our new office location we won’t have any accommodation so we’re not able to offer the same opportunity any more. However Peter should be able to provide that fourth full-time member of the Department that the interns have previously provided. He also brings years of IT experience in South Asia, which he will be able to use on the “passing trade” we get.

You can find out more information about Peter and the rest of his family on their page on our website: Peter and Hilary Oatley. Now that they are back in the UK they need to increase their support.

Tim Gaved has been working part-time in the department since the start of the year. As well as being a linguist he’s also familiar with IT and some of the specialist language software that translators use. He set up the virtual environment that is going to be used at Redcliffe college now that our linguistic training has moved there. He’s also doing more general support for the IT Department. He’s married to Maggie and you can find out more about what Tim does with the rest of his time, Maggie’s work and how to support them on their page on our website: Tim and Maggie Gaved.

Laptops and our nomadic workers

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how we're not your usual IT Department because of the type of people we support.

We help all sorts of Wycliffe people out, not just those working in our offices, but people passing through from all over the world. 

Today I'm writing a bit more about those sort of people. We have a mixture of management types who are working with teams who span the globe and linguist/translator types who are working with language projects in a different country to the one they live. Sometimes we have couples where one partner is here for a specific reason and the other is coming along with them so they don't have to be apart, and because they are able to continue their work away from their normal work location.

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

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

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

A virtual computer lab for linguistic software

Today's Call to Prayer entry (the Wycliffe Bible Translators UK prayer diary) reads like this:

In January, we asked you to pray for the move of Wycliffe’s training programme to Redcliffe College in Gloucester. One of the big issues was how Redcliffe College was physically making space for the new programme. New seminar rooms have now been prepared and are being equipped to cater for the teaching programme. Continue to pray for the space needed for staff rooms and offices: the work looks manageable in the time remaining, but the final decisions and details still need prayer.

I was at Redcliffe with one of my colleagues yesterday. One of the consequences of the teaching taking place there is that there is no longer a dedicated "computer lab" with 13 PCs available all the time for teaching the software that linguists and translators need, which is what we have at the moment. What they have adopted is a virtual environment. I won't mention the provider of this virtualisation software, but you've probably heard of them if you know anything about this stuff. So we have a number of virtual PCs that you get to by installing some software from the afore-non-mentioned company which puts the screen from this virtual PC on your PC, Mac, tablet etc.

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

Work for me! Server manager needed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CheckITOut - IT in Wycliffe

I'm involved in an event called CheckITOut - a couple of hours of info about IT in Wycliffe on 6 April 2013 in Coventry. We've got a number of speakers covering some interesting areas. I did a Prezi to advertise it.