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.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February 2005.
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…
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.
Extreme Anglicanism: A Liturgical Guide to the Sporting Year
In this book, Catherine Fox suggests a completely new liturgical year, starting with the Season of Football (colour: black and white stripes), then passing through Rugby (blood), Cricket (white with grass stains) and Wimbledon (clergy, white; laity, purple and bottle green). High days include the Feast of the Blessed Jonny Wilkinson, and, for our friends Down Under, Billabong Sunday with its unique liturgy (”yeah, with you too, awesome priest dude”). She also identifies several biblical sporting heroes, such as Jonah, who took swimming with dolphins a whole step further. As the author’s elder son observes, there are three kinds of people, those who can count, and those who can’t. ‘Extreme Anglicanism’ will help you score in the Great Game of Life.
I’ll add it to my list of books to have a look at when it’s published.
Short article discussing the state of conservative/post-conservative theological dialogue – next-wave > church & culture: The state of the debate by Steve Bush. Bush uses the recent book “Reclaiming the Center”, a response to Stanley Grenz’s “Renewing the Center”, as a starting point for looking at where fruitful (and not so fruitful) conversation might take place.
The next step for postconservatives will have to be to challenge the evangelical obsession with epistemology, which in turn reveals a privileging of theory over practice and philosophy over cultural, economic, and political theory. Yes I know everyone is afraid that their kid is going to stop believing in Absolute Truth, and soon thereafter convert to satanism and start doing drugs, but there are other things to talk about.
Steve Bush blogs over at Harbinger which looks an interesting read.
As the start of the undergraduate academic year looms I’ve been playing around with Moodle - an open-source learning management system (LMS) that will support students I’m tutoring this semester (as well as for other courses). I’ve been pleasantly surprised with its features and hopefully it will allow me (and others) to bring together learning material online in a much more integrated way than in the past. From the blurb on the Moodle web site,
Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a software package designed to help educators create quality online courses. Such e-learning systems are sometimes also called Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). One of the main advantages of Moodle over other systems is a strong grounding in social constructionist pedagogy.
Moodle is free to download, install, modify and use and runs just fine on my iBook (for testing). If your Windows system supports a web server and PHP then you can run it on there too. So if you’re looking for something that can support a group of students, or a wider enterprise, then it may fit the bill for you. I’ll blog again at the end of semester when I’ll be more familiar with it and I’ve seen how it’s held up under the student load.
In the past I’ve installed and used Discusware (both free and pro versions) to support distance student interaction. If you want a purely discussion-based system that has its origins in education then that is useful too.
Is it wrong to want to write an imprecatory psalm about spammers? Or to carry out the wishes of said psalm upon the physical bodies of said offenders.
Cost for a new printer drum for my laser printer ($243)
Cost for a new printer including the same drum, a (small) toner cartridge & warranty ($248)
Welcome to the disposable society - please place your old printer in the landfill on the way out the door.
And we wonder why concepts of stewardship are hard to teach.
Paul Teusner, who I met at the Virtual Theology colloquium, has some interesting material over at Crossing Over or Crossing Out? where he’s collating material relating to his work on “The Media’s Influence in Young People’s Religious Language and Imaginings.”
He’s also blogging at Slashing through the Information Jungle, which I think is an excellent name for a blog.
Check it out.
I’m always on the lookout for new material that I can use with our house group. With it being Lent I wanted to focus on the person of Jesus and how we should live. In looking for resources I came across Spirituality of Jesus by Jon Horne (Agapé) (scroll down the page).
A series of modules looking at John’s Gospel and how one might be “at home” with God. The book is aimed primarily as an evangelical tool to connect with people in the workplace but we’re adapting the material to work with our more devotional group. The things about it that struck me positively included:
- It is presented in an engaging fashion - mixing text, images, activities.
- It treats the people using it as intelligent persons.
- It shows its “exegetical underwear” (Thanks to Steve for the metaphor)
- It had a sample chapter I could download to have a look at. (http://www.agape.org.uk/workplace/downloads/soj.pdf)
- David Wenham (NT Scholar) consulted on it and I loved his little book The Book of Signs : John’s Gospel : Good News for Today
- Inside the cover it says “Multiple copies of this document may be made for group use.”
- It respects the literary devices and imagery in the text.
We took a stab at it for the first time last night and it seemed to go well. I don’t know what the other Agapé stuff is like but this book seems like a good resource for getting into John’s gospel.
At the Virtual Theology I mentioned in passing the series of User Friendly cartoons that talked about auctioning advertising space on your body for cash. (http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20050205)
Now reality(?) catches up with virtuality in NZ with a pregnant woman doing just that via the main NZ online auction service. NZ Herald : Mother auctions her bump for advertising space
Reminds me of a clip I saw once over at Adbusters a while back called “Human Branding”. Cameras in a shopping mall focusing on all the different brands people paid to advertise. (It was submitted as part of a competition and it may still be floating around the internet.)
The colloquium was great. Some really interesting people & papers. Will post more later. Need to clear the head cold I came down with over the weekend first. Tim took the picture below at lunch (From left-to-right: Peter, Ian, Paul, me and Ann).
Just had an excellent late breakfast and coffee with Phil, a fellow PhD student in the School of Theology. Always good to catch up with someone else who’s walking a similar path to yourself. Good food, good drink and good conversation. A nice way to start the day and to try out a new café over on Te Atatu Peninsula.
Phil’s question to me today - “How would you define or describe forgiveness?”
Then, after reading some more interesting VT papers, the Virtual Theology Colloquium kicks off with dinner tonight. Time to meet the people who’s work I’ve been scrawling online comment on (and vice versa). The tomorrow we start unpacking our papers. The discussion should be stimulating. I’m looking forward to it. Time to meet some new people and catch up with some old faces.
Now this looks excellent. Just heard about it on the radio. An online encyclopedia of New Zealand put together by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage / Te Manatū Taonga.
Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand
In Māori, Te Ara means ‘the pathway’. Through interlinking text and image trails, the Encyclopedia takes you on a journey of discovery. Beginning with the theme of Peoples, it will eventually present a comprehensive guide to New Zealand – its natural environment, history, culture, economics and government.
Would have thought it would be called “Te Ara : The Encyclopedia of Aotearoa New Zealand” though.
Came across this the other day. A Star Wars fan film made, of all places, just down the road (New Lynn is a location). Described as,
a parody of fandom set in the heady days of 1999, a couple of weeks before the release of ‘The Phantom Menace’. The world is excited, people are queuing up, fans are dusting off their old jedi costumes and Jar Jar looks pretty darn cool.In the middle of all this madness, young Star Wars fan Markus walks in a daze. After living and breathing Star Wars for most of his life, he’s having trouble getting his head around something the magnitude of a whole new movie. One of his fondest wishes is that it could all actually be real, that maybe there really are Jedi Knights, Corellian scoundrels and beautiful but deadly mercenaries. And maybe, just maybe, they need his help…
I thought it was funny (but then I’m tending toward “fanboy” status myself for a few things.) Be aware that it is a big download so probably not for non-broadband users.
More info at: Fanboys - A Short Film by Peter Haynes
Came across this today while tracking down information about the Star Wars fan file “Fanboys”.
Already. It’s still 25 degrees Celsius in the office and it’s midnight (ignore timestamp on posting - NZ daylight saving confuses MT). Did the pancake thing tonight with house group, talked about traditions, Lent and Jesus’ time in the desert. Leading into dipping into John’s Gospel as we journey toward Easter and autumn.
If Lent is linked with “lengthen”, as in days heading into spring, should the Antipodean equivalent be called “Short”, as we lose the sun a little more each day. Looking for some Aus/NZ Lenten poetry that captures this.
Interesting post on the teaching/researching tension: What Now?: Teaching release and release from teaching
This year I’ve ramped the teaching down so I can finish the thesis by the end of the year so it was interesting to see this perspective.
Via Maggi Dawn.
Article from latest Wired on the development of the Firefox web browser: The Firefox Explosion
I use Firefox under OSX and WinXP. On the Mac it chugs a bit on the G3 from time-to-time but it doesn’t have any of the problems with the upstream cache that Safari has (how they [Apple] could release a browser that doesn’t have a “Refresh-or-else” capability is just nuts). On the P4 Wintel box it just works and I don’t have to worry about IE unless I need to go to a specific bit of Microsoft’s site.
I like Firefox (& Safari’s) tabbed browsing - I have various blog tab sets to load my favourite blogs at the start of a day. The RSS feed option is useful, as is the ability to add extensions. I’ve made a several search plug-ins that link into various web sites to help along the way.
But the thing that might drive me from using Firefox on the Mac is that it’s overly sensitive to the context-menu (Ctrl-click or right-click or click and hold). It’s always popping up context menus, leaving them open and I have to manually exit them. It’s like it needs a parameter to set somewhere to desensitise it but I don’t know where that is. Just a little thing that makes the browsing experience painful from time-to-time.
Hoping that the 1.1 release gets it fixed.
One of the things that annoys me about blogging systems is that they tend to be printer unfriendly. By the time a header/title and side bars have been added typical of most templates the content becomes squashed into a narrow column. Good for reading online - bad for printing out. So you end up with a first page with sidebars etc. and then many other pages with a narrow strip of text down the middle. I’ve been printing blog pages out recently while referring to things like the Virtual Theology Colloquium and its really been getting my goat.
(The font color also affects things - a medium grey on a white background is easy on the eyes on screen but doesn’t print that well - especially if you’re compressing two pages per A4 like I do to save paper.)
So I thought, on the off-chance that people print stuff off my blog, I’d fix it here first before working out how to fix it when printing other blogs. So there are now “printer-friendly” links at the bottom of each post that generates a nice, plain page in black and white for printing.
There is an outstanding tutorial by Elise Bauer - Printer-Friendly Pages - at her essential Learning Movable Type that showed me how to get started. Together with the Movable Type manual it’s the one site that everyone who’s using MT should look at.
Saw that last week TVNZ’s channel One started afternoon children’s television with a whole lot of new programmes (at least to us). They look way better than the animated commercials that seemed to populate the other channels for the past few years with drama and documentary-type programmes aimed at children. (What a radical idea - seems to be what I grew up with). Is this the effect of the mysterious Charter that TVNZ is meant to run under?
You can find the line up here: ZONE (after school) | TV ONE
As an aside, I’ve noticed that kids don’t cope so well with movies or TV dramas with real actors in stressful situations. But if the same situation occurs, say in an animated movie, then they aren’t affected so much by it. Is the generation brought up on animated fare somehow now unable to cope with the idea, the impact, of real people in dangerous or stressful situations? Have they lost the ability to deal with it, connect it to fiction and real life, and learn to engage with it? How does that affect the way they interact with other people - especially via mediated communication technologies?
From the technology section of Adbusters The Big Ideas 2005 comes the article Adbusters : Make peace with your biology. Lots of interesting quotes like,
What do you lose when your life becomes more valuable than any other life in history? When your death is something you can’t accept? When pain makes you cower in fear? You lose what every human before you aspired to: the selfless desire to sacrifice for a future generation.
Which is a good point. How much of what we do, the placing of a protective layer of technology between ourselves and the world, is motivated out of fear of suffering, fear of death, fear of discomfort that paralyses us from taking up our cross each day?
Thanks to Jonny Baker for the link to the Adbusters issue.
Interesting article in this week’s Listener (Chicken Soup of the Wallet by Noel O’Hare) which comments on doctors in the UK sending people to libraries to read “self-help” books rather than prescribe anti-depressants. The main thrust of the argument seems to be that patients get to be proactively about their situation as well as also reducing costs on the health system.
I like the comment at the end of the article that argues that if you’re reading ’self-help’ books you should also be reading a range of fiction to enter into the (simulated) experiences of others and to learn from them. It ends with a quote from Chomsky.
“It is quite possible,” Noam Chomsky has said, “that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.”
Picked up a flyer yesterday for Creation, Crisis and Conservation : A Christian response to a suffering planet, a conference here in Auckland in two weeks time (18-20 Feb). I probably won’t be able to go to it but here’s the link if you want to find out more.
The web site isn’t great (they are piggybacking off VisionNet) and the conference brochure is in Word format rather than PDF (which meant I had to do some font munging to get it to display right as I didn’t have the fonts installed on my computer) but all the information is there if you hunt around.
Back in Greenflame: Book catalogue started I said that Booxter couldn’t handle DVD and VHS information/lookups. In fact today I found that there is a switch that allows you, as in Books, to use an Amazon ASIN as an ISBN and so you can look up DVDs and VHS tapes and pull down the catalogue information along with the cover of the tape.
Excellent. With the borrowed bar code scanner we should be up to date in no time.
Finally bit the bullet and bought Ecto so I could write posts off line and edit them more easily than in a web browser. I found that Safari wouldn’t refresh edits properly due to the upstream cache and Firefox (under Mac OS X 10.2) didn’t render the edit boxes properly. I would have preferred to go with MarsEdit but when I went there I couldn’t find a version that ran under 10.2. Ecto is available for both 10.2 and 10.3 which means that I can use it while I wait to upgrade (I’m holding off because I think it will break EndNote which is more critical to thesis writing than 10.3).
Also bought the Windows version which I’m writing this with (I’m a sucker for a half-price sale) which is now installed on the Acer. Then if Kim or the kids need to blog then we’re ready to go.
So far so good. Just need to configure it so it hums along nicely.
I used to have a copy of Kung-Log (ecto’s predecessor) which was free but deleted it before I switched to Movable Type. Now I can’t seem to find a copy anywhere on the net. Not as nice as Ecto but useful if you’re running 10.1.
Nerd Vittles has some really helpful articles on cheap web & mail hosting using a Mac Mini (as well as some other stuff). While it’s slanted toward the Mini that same thing could be done with any OSX box.
Whether or not you could get cheap net access here to make it worthwhile is another question though.
See: ISP-In-A-Box
Just had to find out whether it is “Hokey Cokey/Tokey/Pokey”. Here are a couple of variant orgins:
Finished the Virtual Theology paper finally. Definitely a start toward something larger (a thesis chapter?) and a weaving together of some strands of my research.
Had a large section (1500-2000 words) on the role of science-religion models of interaction in technology-theology engagement. It went into the paper, was removed, went back in and then was brutally cut out. Felt like I was doing the “Hokey Cokey” [Syr. mss "Hokey Tokey", Copt. mss "Hokey Pokey"]. My main problem with science-religion stuff is that the messy stuff (like the ethics of embryonic stem cell research) is left as an exercise to the reader. Too much abstraction and not enough “rubber meets the road.” Anyway, here’s the abstract.
Hacking the Divine : A metaphor for theology-technology engagementIn this paper the metaphors of �God as hacker� and human beings as created co-creators are linked with the narratives of creativity, novelty and experience within contemporary technoculture. This type of approach is envisaged as one of many that might be used to engage with technology theologically. Drawing upon the tradition of God as creator and a functional interpretation of the imago Dei in humans it aims to open up a conversation with technology. This conversation looks to move beyond mere abstraction and into existential questions raised by new technologies together with identifying how to live wisely within the everyday technological world.
Note: The term created co-creator is one that Philip Hefner developed. The idea that we are rooted in an ongoing creation yet can act as agents of change - producers of novelty - as we participate with God’s ongoing creative action.
Note 2: Also managed to fit viriditas in the too. Might print the final copy of the paper in green.
Some useful details about making your own system for collecting book details from scanning through to ISBN lookup via the net.
Shouldn’t be too hard to convert the examples into an app on the Mac or Windows.
If you’re heading off overseas from NZ and you looking at keeping online with some sort of global roaming service with your ISP it pays to check the small print on pricing.
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