How to get your own websites on a Raiser's Edge user's home page

The Home "page" that an RE user sees when they start up RE contains some predefined links, e.g. Go to blackbaud.com, search the knowledge base.

Through the RE user interface you can't edit these to take the user to the web pages you want, for example your online procedure manual.

Here's how to do it through the backdoor method.

Disclaimer: this method involves modifying your RE database. This is a dangerous thing to do. Do so at your own risk.

Through the "organise favourites" option take a copy of one of the existing web links. Name it to whatever you want.

Then through the SQL Query manager run the following SQL command:

update userfavorites set linkid='http://example.com' where description='Your description';

This will change all the favourites with that name. I haven't found a way of adding a favourite to every user without doing it one by one. Even if you set up a new user and copy user settings, it doesn't seem to copy favourites. So it's best to create them all and then run the SQL command.

tags: Raiser's Edge

Open Office "web" layout

Here's a lesson I learned the hard way: when you change to "web" layout in Open Office it doesn't just view it in a different way, it does strange things to your tables.

Wycliffe UK needs a new boss!

We need a new Executive Director as the current one will finish his term soon. Our website has a document with the details of the appointment.

New website for one of my colleagues

Mark and Laura Woodward of Habari za Mark fame have a new website.

Another pie - Perl Catalyst framework

As the strapline to this blog says, I have my fingers in many pies. One of the pies that's come my way is a project involving the Perl Catalyst framework. Although I haven't heard any talk of it outside of this project, it does get mentioned in the same breath as Ruby on Rails, Django, J2EE, Zope etc.

Another learning curve to ascend... It's fun though.

tags: Perl, Catalyst

Learning that Lasts

I was on a course we run called Learning That Lasts last week. I can recommend it highly.

One of the tenets of the course is that people learn best by doing, so the course teaches you how to teach in an interactive and hands-on way. Of course, the teaching on the course itself is interactive and hands-on. A significant part of the course is where every learner (as we like to now call ourselves - students study, but learners learn!) does a 40 minute presentation, which you then receive feedback on. It sounds scary, but isn't at all.

The course book is "Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach" by Jane Vella. Another book recommended was "The Accidental Trainer: You Know Computers, So They Want You to Teach Everyone Else". I think the subtitle says it all. I'm going to get a hold of that soon.

tags: training

Sign language project details

More details on the sign language project I mentioned earlier.

It's called WoSP which stands for World Sign Processor. It's "an attempt to
provide software to help the Deaf and others as they work on recording
sign-language data".

The WoSP notation will be a computer readable notation which contains the
component parts of signs, and also allows computers to generate rough 3d
animation and SignWriting ready for final editing. It needs to capture the
essence of signs, without missing out on detail, such as facial movements
and body movement, and without over-complicating things, such as capturing
the position of every finger to the micrometre.
Getting signs into the encoding is another challenge. "Just use motion
capture" I said to a colleague when discussing it. The trouble is motion
capture isn't a simple technology and converting lots of motion capture data
to the sign encoding is another challenge. The preferred method may be a
combination of choosing an existing sign plus some keyboard input, though
things are at an early stage.

Getting the information out again is the third challenge. Ideally you want
- static diagrams, maybe with arrows
- animated diagrams
- computer animated figures
all from the same source of signs.

There are other, smaller, challenges on the way, such as how you move from
one sign to another without the hands suddenly jerking.

Here are some more relevant links:

There's an excerpt from our prayer DVD on the subject of sign language
translations of the Bible.

For analysing sign languages for translation purpose there is Elan
- "a professional tool for the creation of
complex annotations on video and audio resources "

tags: sign language