Mission Information

I met someone at lunchtime today who told me about a couple of projects of interest to those involved in missions and information:

The Harvest Information System is a cooperative effort of several organizations who share a desire to facilitate the task of taking the gospel of Jesus Christ to all the peoples of the world. HIS assists mission sending groups in fulfilling their portion of the task, by improving the sharing of information through the standardizing of categories and codes.

It has a rather bizarrely arranged website, which for some pages requires you to download .mht files, a Microsoft archived web page format file. However anything that helps missions work together better is a good thing in my book.

The second project is Open Petra. This is a project arising out of OM's need to develop a system to manage their office information. There's an interesting history on their website including an abortive attempt to use Delphi. They've since started work on an open source solution they hope will be of use to other non-profit organisations.Something worth watching.

A day to find out about IT in Wycliffe

I wrote an article on the Wycliffe blog yesterday: A day to find out about IT in Wycliffe. In my first draft after announcing the name of the event Check IT Out, I put "(Did you see what I did there?)". My editor suggested it might not be clear, but I think the audience for this blog might recognise that grammatical construction as indicative of a pun.

New intern in IT

I've pleased to say we have a new intern starting in the IT department today. As I've written in our current prayer letter, now the department is short-staffed, rather than being really short-staffed. I've updated the IT Support Assistant advert to take out the fact that it's available under the intern scheme, as we only have one intern place. However if you can commute to the High Wycombe area, and you don't need paying, we'd be glad to have you!

From OpenID to SAML

A colleague read my post about OpenID and pointed me towards SAML. Whereas OpenID handles authentication, SAML also handles authorisation. My questions about OpenID arose out of a user's perspective, but it looks like SAML might be useful between the separate Wycliffe Organisations.

Funding projects - a blog post I never wrote

It's good to work in a team. I fired an idea off to one of my colleagues who writes for our website, and a few days later out pops a blog post on funding projects.

Whilst possibly not as interesting as hearing about ex-pats working on Bible Translation, the fact that more "nationals" (to use the jargon) are involved in Bible translation means more money is needed, as the local church often can't support them.

Making to do lists into a game

Following up on my post Being more organised is less fun I came across this item from Pulse Laser, the blog of a company called Berg who seem to have fascinating work to do. They link to a website called Chore Wars and an app called Epic Win, both of which turn to do lists into games.

Lazyweb request - help me understand OpenID

I have some questions about OpenID that I plan to find the answers to one day, but maybe someone will heed my lazyweb request and supply them.
Here are the questions:
1. Does it matter which provider you use?
2. What if the provider goes out of business? Are you stuck?
3. If I switch OpenIDs what do the sites I've logged in on the old one need to do to help me switch to the new one?
4. Is that part of the spec or does it depend on what the sites do with my OpenID?
5. When I log in what information is my OpenID provider passing on to them?
6. What implications does it have if I tick the "log me in automatically" option available on myopenid.com?

As well as finding out the answers to those, I may put in something about Microsoft Hailstorm on wikipedia, as it doesn't have its own page.