Language maps

I chucked at idea at a colleague to add maps of language areas to one of our websites and he did some investigation and found this language maps site. Interesting...

My first google app engine creation

I've just created my first google app engine creation - a list of quotes. You type in a quote and then get a random one for the rest of the list.

Have a play (but play nicely).

Institute of Fundraising IT Special Interest Group Conference

or the IOFITSIG conference.

(One aside: on the train up I noticed that hardly anyone had a tie on, just suits and open necked collared shirts. As I'm not a regular commuter I must have missed the memo saying that we don't have to wear a tie.)

I found this very stimulating. Not being a fundraiser I found the initial session from Alan Clayton of Cascaid (that's the agency, not the careers people) very interesting.

(Update: I missed out the Social Media Game. That link is about the session that I went to.)

I went to a session which had someone from Comic Relief. Obviously that's very big scale stuff, but some of it is applicable to even an organisation like us. For example, we've been getting people to run events recently.

"A Best Practice Framework for Managing a Big, Sophisticated Fundraising Information System" was about a Raiser's Edge implementation at Help the Aged. Much bigger than us, but good lessons to learn.

"Social Media feel the fear and do it anyway" gave me my to do list to take to the boss.

As an aside, it's interesting that the Fundraisers have their IT bit. The Charity Finance people have their IT bit. Where are the Charity IT people? There's CITRA, which is owned by several organisations, including those too. However their website has events from 2004 and 2005 on it, and nothing in the future, so that doesn't inspire confidence.

Game creator on Popfly

I tried out the new game creator on Microsoft's popfly site over the weekend, including introducing a couple of my children to the art of game creation.

I've tried popfly before. It can be compared to Yahoo pipes for getting web stuff working without programming, but is more powerful. What I didn't appreciate until I tried to install it on our Windows 2000 PC is that it's based on Silverlight not Flash. After two unsuccessful attempts (because the unhelpful error message didn't say it failed because of browser or OS) I tried our Windows XP machine. I guess the whole point behind MS giving away all this functionality is to get us hooked on Silverlight. Which is fair enough in some senses. However, given that Flash and Firefox both work on Windows 2000, it's annoying that their Windows operating system lifecyle (i.e. we don't support Windows 2000 any more) applies to all their software that they could probably develop for Windows 2000 relatively easily.

Minitab statistical software

We have a couple of copies of Minitab lying around and I'm selling them on Ebay. It seems to be pretty full featured statistical sofware. It's a timed listing, going out later today (12 May 2008), so if the link doesn't work, try later.

Unicode isn't so bad

This afternoon I produced a file with this in it:

šovský

I was filled with dread because I knew it meant I had to delve into Unicode which I don't feel I understand enough. However with a bit of digging, and this article on Python and Unicode I got there without too much trouble. I had to tweak my code as different original sources were in different formats, but I got there in the end.

Get an MA where I work

Our training organisation is now able to offer an MA. So you can come to our lovely centre and get a Masters degree.