andypaxo.net

In true blogger style, I’m going to have a post with nothing much more than a couple of links now.

I’ve been working on some web stuff recently, so I present you with…
Our team blog (If you’re reading this now, you know what a blog is)
Our team wiki (Kind of a collection of documents, nothing that interesting for non technical readers yet)

Also, I thought I’d just throw out a link to Shanon’s blog. There’s some cool photos from events around Calgary.

Look forward to seeing you soon!

It’s quickly getting to the time when I will be back in the UK. It’s both happy and sad to think about coming back. I’m really looking forward to seeing everyone back home again, however I have been trying very hard to stay here in Canada (I’ve just passed the 50 résumés sent mark).

Right now, I have a ticket home booked for the 5th of May.

I realise that I have posted very little about Bible translation itself on this blog, so I’ll share a story I heard from someone who has worked on a translation project…

During a translation project, a team experienced just how important it is to carefully check that the potential readers of a new Bible understand the translated text fully. When translating the gospel message, they wrote about how John accused the Pharisees of their sin, and how he baptised people in the water.

The passage was read to a few people from the group receiving the translation. Afterwards, the translators asked the people to explain it back to them… “John drowned the people in the water because they were sinners”.

Thus proving that Bible translation is far from straight forward. (The solution in this case was to be more specific in the phrase used to describe baptism. The team also stated that John took the people out of the water as well as putting them in, the passage was understood.)

Hi all, thanks for your comments and e-mails, all your support is very much appreciated. It really helps to have you all praying and writing.

Work at Wycliffe is coming along well - as ever it’s hard to show you any progress, but every day we are closer to a new piece of working translation software. Recently, I have been working on allowing users to type using complex input methods. This means that we will soon be able to get text from languages like Thai into the program, where the specialised Wycliffe software can do it’s stuff in accurately displaying the characters.

On a completely unrelated subject, I’d like to share an expedition from a couple of weeks ago.

Occasionally, Shanon and her family go out to help the homeless people living on the streets of Calgary. They went out a couple of weeks ago, and I joined them.

We made many lunches, and headed off into town. There several areas of downtown where there are many people in need, we only went to one. We hadn’t been all the way through that area when what had seemed like a huge stash of food had been finished.

We had many mixed reactions, from deep suspicion - to deep gratefulness. What I was not expecting was to hear thing like “Jesus loves you!”, and “If it wasn’t for God, I’d would have been dead long before now.”. Although some of these were offhand remarks, there were definitely one or two there with genuine belief - even in what seems like a hopeless situation.

For me, what remains is the knowledge that, while the occasional lunch run is good, there is an immense need for much more to be done. Not only that, but it is my responsibility (along with everyone who belongs to God) to do something about it.

Work

I got moved out of IT and back into software development where I belong near the start of this month. My work on the low power computers for the developing world is over for now, and I have transitioned over to the main ‘meat’ of my placement here at Wycliffe. The Fieldworks port.

The what port?

Fieldworks is a set of software tools used by translators in Wycliffe. It covers gathering cultural information, exploring new languages, and of course – writing translations in many different scripts. You can find out more details at the Fieldworks website.

The Fieldworks what?

One issue with Fieldworks, however – is that it is only available for Microsoft Windows, which is an expensive piece of software, and has tight restrictions on copying and distribution. ‘Porting’ means moving computer programs from one system to another. In this case, we are moving Fieldworks from Windows to the free operating system called Linux.
Linux has virtually no restrictions on copying, so Wycliffe will be able to, for example, make a special edition of Linux with all the translation tools already installed and send it to all the translators for free. Or to anyone we wish to demonstrate the software to. In fact, anyone who gets a copy will be able to make copies of the whole system themselves and send them to whoever they want to. Cool eh?
(As a side note, Wycliffe has already done something similar with a ‘Complex Scripts’ enabled word processor for Linux)

Play

I’ve had a chance to see some more of the sights and sounds from in and around Calgary.
Last weekend, myself and a couple of guys I met through Wycliffe took a canoe from Banff to Canmore, Northwest of Calgary. It was some kind of ecological mission, involving stopping every so often to eliminate patches of invasive foreign weeds threatening to take over this corner of the ‘frozen north’. But just gazing at the scenery was the main event of the expedition.

Also, I’ve had a chance to visit the world famous (?) landmark of Calgary - the imaginatively named Calgary Tower. Another little adventure that yielded some fantastic vistas.

Work

This week I have been loaned to the IT department (seeing as the rest of my department (software development not IT) ) have gone off on their hols).

As such, I have taken on a few of the small projects that have yet to be taken care of in the web and IT departments. This doesn’t make them any less valuable, mind you, there just are always more projects that need doing than there is time to do them in.

So I have been fixing and polishing up bits on the Wycliffe Canada website, and writing a little program to keep an eye on the temperature of our server room so that we know if it is likely to catch on fire (which is never a good thing).

Oh, and also adding a bit of ‘flavor’ to the Wycliffe website’s error messages.

Error 9012: Something has gone terribly wrong with Andy!

Stampede

Last week was Calgary’s “Stampede” week. Which of course meant lots of stampeding around, or something like that… Anyway, We (the international students group) spent the weekend taking it all in – or as much of it as possible – it’s a huge event.

Let me just show you some photos:

Parades!

Dancing horses!

Dancing people!

And fairgrounds, and military exhibitions, and all sorts of stuff. Most of which involves hundreds of horses – I guess that’s why they call it Stampede.