Coding/Translating: Best Practice can slow you down
I enjoy reading about software development (and rocketry) and often find something that makes me think a little more about Bible Translation and how we do it. The last few years several of us have been thinking seriously about the quality and processes of what we work on, developing and thinking through implementing ‘Best Practices’ …
Quickly building (Keyman) Predictive Text keyboards
The excellent Keyboard App Builder helps you build keyboards for Android devices, wrapping the very clever Keyman Android Engine. I’ve been working on a keyboard for the Nigerian languages I know and one feature I’ve been experimenting with is predictive text, where the keyboard suggests what it thinks you may be saying so you can …
Improving [Hacking] Paratext’s Interlinearizer
Some people who look at my Paratext interlinearizer window are somewhat surprised by the display. What I really like about the Interlinearizer in Paratext is that you can adapt the HTML which powers the display by adjusting the files in the C:\Program Files\Paratext 7\Interlinear folder. Here’s what I’ve changed and why:
Tech note: Upgrading a VMware Windows 7 installation to Windows 10
Ever since the Windows 10 upgrade was announced as free I have tried off and on to install it in a copy of my Windows 7 Virtual Machine (that I run on my Mac). At least I can get on with work and life while trying major OS upgrades that way. Unfortunately it’s not worked …
How one slash slashes your website: WordPress .htaccess file preventing access to password-protected directories
Very helpful article from hostgator here http://support.hostgator.com/articles/specialized-help/technical/wordpress/wordpress-preventing-you-from-password-protecting-a-directory shows up a problem which can drive many people crazy if they’ve got WordPress installed at root alongside other CGI password-protected folders. In short, there’s a missing / here: RewriteRule . /index.php [L] which would be better being RewriteRule ./ /index.php [L]
Lessons from Software Engineering for Bible Translation
Some time I may get round to writing a paper on some cross-disciplinary lessons that Bible translators can learn from Software Engineering. (This is essentially trying to integrate my former and current career paths.) My attention was caught by a slightly overblown headline on favourite irreverent geeky news site The Register: Most developers have never seen a …
Fixing the fix for NTFS drives on Mac OS X (10.10 Yosemite)
A friend had a troublesome external Hard drive that wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t mount in Mac OS X, having some corruption issues and being an NTFS format drive. Disk Utility helpfully said: Verify and Repair volume “xxxxxxxx”Repairing file system.** /usr/local/bin/ntfsfix has been disabled because of volume corruption issues. ** If you still want to try …
When FieldWorks & SayMore installations struggle with a DotNet issue…
Several SIL tools like FieldWorks Language Explorer (Flex) and SayMore depend on the dotnet framework. (That’s a bit like Microsoft’s answer to Java.) Unfortunately it sometimes falls over. So I found a rather handy blog post that explains what to do when you try installing DotNet 4.0 and it sits still for ages then responds …
Glossy open source project opened
For those interested in the Glossy project and who might want to contribute ideas and submit improvements, there’s now a project on bitbucket. Thanks for Milt Jones and others for suggestions. There’s more that could be done, but I don’t have time at the moment to work on it. I’ll try to put together ideas for …
Vimeo oembed fix for WordPress (again!)
Either Vimeo or WordPress has changed something, but oembeds weren’t working for me with Vimeo. Some helpful people had produced patches in the form of plugins but they didn’t work either. However, they very nearly did. Here’s my corrected version of the plugin. /* Plugin Name: Vimeo oembed hotfix Plugin URI: Description: Enable https vimeo …