IT people needed

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

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

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

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

• 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

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

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.