A picture of a radio programme in the making

I don't often point to other blogs, because you might as well just read them, but this one was worth highlighting. David Ker has put a photo on one of his blogs showing him at work producing a radio programme with Bible material. Click on the picture to see what the numbers in the stars mean.

Expedia no longer supports Passport/Windows Live id

I've searched blogs and looked on techmeme.com, but I can't find any reference to this. I got an email today from Expedia saying they no longer support .Net Passport aka Windows Live id.

When you click on the "Why?" link you get this. Which isn't really a satisfying explanation.

An old hard disk and a new video

A few months ago someone from Wycliffe Canada contacted me. There was an old hard drive in the UK that had some music on it that he wanted to put on a video that he was producing. He wanted me to get the music off it and send it to him on a new hard drive.

The hard drive possibly hadn't been used since 2002. The hard drive was sent to me, and because it was in Mac format I got a colleague who used a Mac to help me get the files off. The drive span up OK and we started getting files off it, but then after 15 minutes or so it died mid-copy. It was pretty terminal and I couldn't get it to work at all after that. Not all of the original files for the music were there, but, thank God, the final mix of all files was there, including the song that was required.

This song now appears on a DVD. Here's the preview, but not with the song though:

Optimistic search button

This bike spares had an "I'm feeling lucky" button next to its search box, but then it changed on one page to this:

Sign Language Translation in Wycliffe Magazine

The Wycliffe UK magazine "Words for Life" is out and the focus this month is on Sign Language Bible translation.

Validating Direct Debits with Blackbaud NetCommunity

There's a bug in NetCommunity 5.1 whereby it lets your donor specify a one-time Direct Debit payment, which when it is brought through to RE doesn't work properly as it isn't a Recurring Gift.

In addition, we don't want the donors to do recurring credit card gifts as the current version of RE - 7.85 - stores Credit Card info in the database. (An upcoming PCI compliant release won't do this.)

So I've written a bit of Javascript to check the frequency and payment type and give an error message. Unlike my previous script, it doesn't have a hardcoded prefix which is needed to find the ids of some of the page elements. Instead it looks at a variable which is part of the donation form to get the prefix. This may mean it won't work in other versions of NetCommunity.

<!--//--><![cdata[//><!--
function xyzCheckDD()
{
var xyzPrefix = '';
var ErrorText = 'Please use \"One time\" frequency with credit cards, 1st or 15th with Direct Debits';
try{
//We look at one of the variables that's defined to find out the prefix for this page. If they go into four digits
// e.g. PC1001_ then this will need to change.
xyzPrefix = Page_Validators[0].controltovalidate.substring(0,6);

//Check frequency and Payment option. It doesn't have a unique id, so we find the checkbox, go up to the parent

bRecur = document.getElementById(xyzPrefix + 'Recurrence1_ddlFrequency').selectedIndex != "0";
bDD = document.getElementById(xyzPrefix + 'DonationCapture1_rdoPaymentOption_1').checked;
//This does an XOR - true if they are different
if( bRecur ? !bDD : bDD ) {
alert(ErrorText);
}
}catch(e){
// Put some debug here if required
}
}
function runit2(){
Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager.getInstance().add_endRequest(xyzCheckDD);
}
runit2();
//--><!]]>

Wycliffe Staff Conference

We had our annual staff conference at the end of last week. The main part of the conference consists of reports from selected people on what they've been doing. As it happened I'd heard most of the people before for various reasons, but they all said some new stuff.

Afterwards we had discussion groups. One of the things that our group mused on was the fact that the speakers were saying how they were using ways of getting Bibles to people in non-print form (e.g. recordings and mobiles), because literacy rates aren't high. We commented how we are in what you could call a "post-literate" society, where people don't read much and so the same methods would be useful in getting the Bible into the hands of those who don't "consume" print media. The difference though, is that those in the UK who choose not to read have the opportunity, whereas those in countries where literacy isn't high don't have the opportunity.