Still looking at why the CSS breaks in Windows IE. It’s bizarre, but because I’m going to revise the overall layout of the site anyway I’m not going to beat my head against the wall over it. Now I’ve got the “printer-friendly” template working I’ll be moving to a new layout (maybe three columns) and I’ll make sure the CSS doesn’t break in the new one. Built my first home page way back in ’94 and always thought that the tools would improve debugging pages – but at the end of the day printing out the source for a page and actually looking at the code seems to catch the errors that automated tools ignore.

Usability and the Harris Teeter’s self-checkout carousel . Felt like this at the library the other day when the self-service scanner fails on every third book. From Heal Your Church Web Site : Teaching, rebuking, correcting & training in righteous web design.

Contemplating changes to blog style to fix the Windows IE image/css problem. In looking around I came across css Zen Garden. Just spent some idle minutes clicking on the styles here. I’m seriously impressed.

Some helpful comments on Brian Walsh’s With and Without Boundaries: Christian Homemaking Amidst Postmodern Homelessness over at andygoodlife : Exclusion and embrace Pt 2. It follows on from Exclusion or Embrace where some thoughts are posed on the most excellent Paul Fromont’s posting Baptism@the borders and other thoughts on church membership.

Okay. Now in the last couple of posts I’ve uploaded and embedded JPEG images in the blog postings. On my iBook in Firefox and Safari they show up. On the Windows XP Acer they show up in Firefox. But in Internet Explorer on the Acer there are just blank spaces where the images are meant to be. They still link if they have hyperlinks attached to them but no picture. If I just view the image URL on its own it shows up. So what’s happening that’s breaking IE? (insert deluge of IE bugs here). Alignment? Image format? Stylesheet problem?

Really annoying, because I don’t often check with WinXP – I just assume JPEGs get displayed.

Any clues?

Update: The images display fine on the individual archive pages – just not on the main page.
Update 2: And if I remove the “align” parameter from the “img” tag then they display – which is odd because IE knows what the alignment is and makes the space for the image in the right place. In the meantime I’ve just turned off the alignment – yuk! It looks like it might be a CSS clash/problem.
Update 3: Switching back to the default MT stylesheet caused the problem to go away. Looks like the interaction of container, content and blog styles. Time to update the templates and stylesheet, I think.

Followed one link about the release of the whole of Today’s New International Version (TNIV) of the Bible (previously only the NT was available) and ended up following all sorts of discussions. In a couple of the discussions people raise good points about how adding section headings to the biblical text adds interpretative layers to the text. For the same reasons I went out of my way to find copies of Bible translations I use that don’t have headings (nor “red-letters”).

Anyway because I’m interested in questions of translation and interpretation of texts and the cultures of interpretation that go along with them I thought I’d make a list of the different postings/sites to put it all in one place for my own reference. (Some of these span months, if not years)

• TNIV official web site
• Full TNIV PDF available here
• Pros and Cons of NIV (The Grace Pages)
• NIV, TNIV, and Ephesians 5 (Hugo Schwyzer)
• The Religious Right Strikes Again… (Lauryn at Feministing.com)
• Words and the word (3) (Maggi Dawn)
• Gempf in shock book-banning threat! (Conrad Gempf – TNIV translation consultant)
• TNIV Resource Center (basically CBMW’s list of what they think is wrong with it)

As always there are some really good comments at some of the blogs (as well as some not so good ones).

Sometimes I just don’t want to read anymore books or papers on robots or virtual reality or cyberspace or transhumanism or the imago Dei. Just want to read something different to refresh myself. So today I dipped into the desert fathers and mothers, partly to look for something for another project and partly just to imbibe their wisdom. This passage struck me,

John said that a hermit saw in a rapture three monks standing on the edge of the sea and a voice came to them from the other side saying, ‘Take wings of fire and come to me.’ The first two did so and reached the other shore, but the third stayed where he was crying and weeping. Later on wings were given to him also, not of fire but weak and feeble so that he reached the other shore with great difficulty, sometimes in the water, sometimes over it. So it is with the present generation: the wings they are given are not of fire, they are weak and feeble.

You can make of it what you want but thoughts that struck me were what are the wings of fire we are being offered today and will we take them and fly to the farther shore? Or do we wail and gnash our teeth at the world, the church, our lives and settle for something less. The parable of the talents also springs to mind.

It’s that time of year again with the rugby Super 12 starting on Friday. So in a brave (foolhardy?) move I predict that the Hurricanes should get to the semi-finals this year. A weakened Queensland on Saturday followed by the South African leg (where they play better than most away teams) and then a stack of home games. Given the number of players who played well on the end of year All Black tour there should be something to hope for this year. But we say that every year…

Neural Interfaces

Cyberkinetics, a Massachusetts company, has launched the first human trials of their new BrainGate neural interface. This won’t be for console cowboys trying to make their big cyberspace break, but for the physically disabled needing communication and activity.

Therapy, Enhancement and the Augmented Society

This is also another step forward in the ongoing process of figuring out how to use digital technology to augment human abilities. This is not the only research on how to make machines “listen” to nerve signals. And while the point of the research is (quite appropriately) figuring out ways to assist the disabled, the history of adaptive technology shows that augmentation for therapy usually leads to augmentation for enhancement.

WorldChanging : Another World is Here : Digital Curb-Cuts is a blog post about using computer graphical user interfaces if you’re blind. The argument being that effort put into making computers easier to use for minority groups benefits the majority in both the short and long runs.

Chances are you’re not blind, and you probably don’t even know someone who is. Why should this be important to you? Because accessibility improvements nearly always make life better for all users, not just those with specific impairments.