Blog
My sister Debbie got married yesterday! What a fantastic wedding, on Oudekraal beach in Cape Town, with the mountains and the sea ... the wedding just seemed to reflect Debbie and Jonny so well. Celebration, Worship, Community, Joy.
they danced by the light of the moon
Preached at Jubilee last Sunday night on building with gold, silver and precious stones - how we build the church.
Included this great version of the three little pigs ("Wolf-Side story"?) and a picture of the Taj Mahal, contrasted with the Cardboard House mentioned last week on Slashdot.
What kind of church are we after? Something temporary or something permanent, something functional, or something of beauty? We need to build Love, Obedience, Passion for spreading God's glory (Jim Elliot quotes) as well as Persistent Prayer, Faithfulness and Commitment, Sacrifice and Suffering and Discipleship. We need to avoid building mere structure. Building on the precious foundation of Christ, building for eternity means we cannot settle for less. And God supplies the materials by his grace (v10) so we don't ever have to settle for less.
Felt like it was delivered OK, people encouraging afterwards. Presentation here [dead link] and low-quality MP3 here.
In Tanzania for the training camp. Has been pretty interesting discovering how the Swahili Localization Project works.
They have a pretty thorough team incorporating top experts on Swahili from Universities and research institutions and tehnical people. They have worked hard on generating a glossary first before translating software which is a good approach. They are just beginning to translate OpenOffice.org and are finding many of the same frustrations and challenges we found when starting to get into this.
Have had good talks about the localization process in a third-world context with Alberto and Louise and have persuaded them to learn Python, so hopefully they will be able to contribute code... (this is actually a hint in case they read my blog)
Bandwidth is better than I expected (we are at the university computing centre) but is a real limitation when you're trying to localize projects that have high bandwidth expectations, and power goes off from time to time and you need to start again ...
Did a session yesterday morning on how to use our tools, fairly basic, explained the procedure for OpenOffice.org and Mozilla using oo2po/po2oo and moz2po/po2moz, did a demo.
me doing my talk, complete with diagram