Activities of a wandering media guy

Kindle edition

2011-01-15T14:37:00.000+02:00

It's almost 12 months since I wrote on this blog. I definitely should get back to doing so.

I finally got the Kindle edition of my book published. Available both on US and UK Amazon sites: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004J176AS http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004J176AS. I priced it at the lowest that Amazon permits: $0.99 or £0.74. Any idea what would be a good price in the UK? The aim is to get people to read it rather than make money (all the money goes to the charity anyhow).

In the image... of a creative God

2010-02-07T00:01:00.003+02:00

For the last two years I have been writing a book. Well, it hasn't been continuous work but the initial writing and re-writing happened a couple of years back and then it's been the last year doing the layout, proofing, proofing and more proofing. It's now available on Amazon:

Below is the introduction to the book... to hopefully show you where it's going.

Introduction

For many years I have been involved with trying to share the Good News of Jesus Christ with people: young people through the youth groups at various churches, and others through media in the UK. More recently it has been through media in the Middle East and, of course, directly with the occasional person I might talk to about Jesus: everywhere from a transatlantic air flight to a meeting in the street.

I don’t think I do it well. Looking around, I’m not sure many of us do it very well.

Some people I know are much more open and will talk about Jesus with almost everyone they meet… even with a stray customer coming out of the same restaurant in a same lift or elevator. But it’s not how often we share Jesus that matters so much as whether we really do communicate.

When we try to explain who Jesus is to Muslims, it’s pretty hard. And most of us feel we don’t do that at all well.

I started writing this book as a result of attempting to develop methods for evaluating what we are doing in our media communication of the love of God to Muslims. The following methods were developed by a Muslim Background Believer with whom I shared my thoughts. In the process we became friends.

For some time the group I am involved with had been longing for a set of tools to help us evaluate what we do. Someone from another group worked with us for about six months, trying to get his head around the problem. He wrote, we talked, he thought. He talked with Arabs and he tried different methods, but it just didn’t ‘come together’.

However, something in the chemistry of having this friend from that background in our office every day for six to eight weeks worked, and we ended up with something we have found helpful. One of our aims, as a group, is to act as a catalyst for sharing the Gospel with Muslims through media. My colleague Peter said this should not just stay with us, but be shared further with others trying to do the same thing. So I started to write a book.

As soon as I started I realised that I wanted something out of it myself. Even if it never gets published my desire is that it will accomplish the second aim. That is, to help me think through the issues relating to communicating Christ in a post-modern Muslim context. I added the word post-modern because I think it’s relevant for two reasons.

People have talked about this being a hinge generation, passing through from one established world view to another. Though the implications are very different in East and West I think something similar is happening all over the world.

As I see some post-modern attributes in the youth of the Middle East, I also see examples of pre-modern thought among the older generation there. There are two results of this: Firstly, there is a major culture gap between generations in the Middle East. Indeed, I would see the difference between a young person in the Middle East and their parents as being similar to the difference between a young person in the West and their great-grandparents.

Secondly, there is another significant culture gap when Western modernists attempt to communicate Christ to a simultaneously pre-modern and post-modern Middle East. It is as if people from the West attempt to sail through the gap between the two world views, without really making contact.

Much is written about post-modernism in a Western context, but almost nothing is being written from the point of view of the Middle East. So this book is a journey for me to research, and think through, and see what new things God is doing in the region. God is, as He always has been, creatively dealing with the world.

We need to catch some of that creativity in communicating Jesus. This is a journey that can particularly influence the way we communicate the Good News to people from the Middle East.

There has been talk of an ‘online church’ linking believers from the Middle East together in secret. We have been working towards building online communities who have decided to follow Jesus. However, despite many reservations about the institutionalised church, I am not sure how the body of Christ can be anything other than incarnational. We are commended to meet together, and an online community lacks much that we gain from face-to-face communication and physically shared worship.

There is a third aim in writing this book for me, and that is to re-discover my place in the Body of Christ.
Recently I have become somewhat disillusioned with traditional evangelical church structures and communication techniques, tiring of its output of modernist verbiage. Though I am comfortable sharing the Good News about Jesus, I am not sure that the church is very good news for me, let alone the average Muslim.

Philip Yancey shares a similar path, though his disillusionment and re-finding happened when he was younger. GK Chesterton and CS Lewis were the two authors who he felt helped him along the path.

Although separated from me by a vast expanse of sea and culture, they kindled hope that somewhere Christians existed who loosed rather than restrained their minds, who combined sophisticated taste with a humility that did not demean others, and above all, who experienced life with God as a source of joy and not repression.1

In answer to the question Why did I return? Yancey explains:

My career as a journalist gave me the opportunity to investigate people… who demonstrate that a connection with God can enlarge, rather than shrink, life. I began the lifelong process of separating church from God. Though I emerged from childhood churches badly damaged, as I began to scrutinise Jesus through the critical eyes of a journalist, I saw the qualities that so upset me – self-righteousness, racism, provincialism, hypocrisy – Jesus himself fought against, and that they were probably the very qualities that led to his crucifixion.2

If we are to communicate the love of God to the people of the Middle East, we will need to find ways to separate their preconceived ideas (some of them painfully true) of the ‘Christian message’ we communicate, from the person who is both our and their Messiah.

While you are reading this, you will find that there are areas I leave open to discussion or debate. Sometimes those are in places where I cannot personally see a clear Scriptural direction. Other times, I do see a clear Scriptural direction, but know of other Biblical followers of Jesus who see things differently. One of the major differences between following Jesus and being a Muslim is the acceptance of diversity. We should celebrate this. It’s part of our freedom in Christ. He treats us as people with whom He wants a relationship.

Post-modern Christians frequently object to didactic - formal, structured, unidirectional teaching. They do not talk about a set of doctrines, but about a dialogue. This book, then, is an attempt to start such a dialogue.
Richard J Fairhead
Autumn 2007
1 Soul Survivor – Philip Yancey – page 41
2 Soul Survivor – Philip Yancey – page 42-43

Frustrations

2010-02-04T19:53:00.002+02:00

Every Monday the team gets together to review the previous week and plan the next. Dena, one of the key team members felt that there was a word from God: 'Hang in there' for this week. When we had come into work on Monday had found that there were notices on all the cars telling us there was going to be a power outage from 8:00 to 13:00 hours on Tuesday.

So because I was the duty person this week I came in early on Tuesday to turn off all the servers. The duty person is one of the three of us who receive SMS text messages telling us any problems with our servers. For the week we are on duty that person is the key person for all maintenance and the other two [hopefully] get an undisturbed week to work on other projects.

I started powering down all the servers at 7:45, and at 7:56 CLUNK... the power went off. Very unusual for Cyprus to be early. The final server was closing down and the battery backup system gave it enough power to close down neatly. Well, there was nothing to do so for the morning I went off to the boat to put a coat of paint on her.

I arrived back after lunch and the power was already on. So I powered up all the servers. One had a hard disk problem which I manually corrected, but the main Internet connection wasn't working. Diagnosed it with a colleague to be one of the Cisco routers that might or might not be working. This isn't like the router you have at home, its a much more complex rack mounted piece of equipment that when new was a couple of thousand dollars (we bought second hand through ebay). It's a complex unit - we have two of them, which we need to replace soon.

Cisco routers have a terminal connection that you can connect a 'dumb terminal' to and check their status. So tried that and found that the programs we used to emulate a dumb terminal didn't seem to work and so we were then scrabbling around to try and work out what was happening.

Peter arrived in an hour later and said it looked like that when the power had come back on there was a surge which had blown the power supply. We keep spares for some things and did have a spare Cisco power supply so we then had to take it out of the rack to change the power supply.

At that point we found a layout logic problem with the rack. All the cables from the switches to the patch panels went across the routers. This meant we had to remove all the cables in the bay before we could remove the router. This meant all the cables needed labeling so they went back in the right place.

Now detail is not my middle name so it took three attempts to label the cables correctly. We then unplugged them all, and changed the power supply and the router started up correctly. Sounds nice and easy... well... we also had to remove the rat droppings from a vermin attack last year that we had not seen before!

We put it back in the bay and some things started working. Well... most things started working. There had been about 40 cables to label and then plug back in the right place. I had misplugged some of them and mislabeled one of them! I told you detail was not my middle name.

Eventually between all three of us (me on duty and the other two who should be doing other things) we got the system back up and running and everything working again.

I say everything... come Wednesday and totally unconnected with this there was a problem with email on one of our servers in Germany and Peter had been working on this problem and thought it was a problem with the security certificate. So he ordered another one. Unfortunately he put a password into the certificate when there should be none, so when the certificate was authenticated and delivered it didn't work. So he tried (with me across it, as I am the authorized representative of the organisation) to get a replacement.

That failed, coming up with a 'security failure' - so then I am trying to phone South Africa to talk to the company that issues the security certificates and find out what is happening. No answer from the company and tried sending emails/response forms... still now answer. All the while this means our and other companies email is not working!

I'm frustrated. I hate computers. Peter and I ended up talking about the future. I realised I spend my time approximately the following way:

80% Technical
10% Writing proposals
15% Organisational admin
25% Partner interaction
10% Media

Those of you astute will realise the total is 140%. Yes, that's right I spent more than a working week each week working! The bit I enjoy is the media. The bit I hate is the technical. Of course, if I have too I shall continue this pattern, but I would really like to somehow get more time for media.

I try to get the technical to be a smooth operation - it's not smooth, we have more work than possible for the team - and that creates a burden for me.

So, why don't we just drop the technical? Or reduce it?

When I say technical, what I mean here is the system maintenance. Maintaining more than 10 servers as a platform to enable the media work to proceed. Many different organisations rely on these servers.

Pete and I looked at the different servers and realised that if we just cut back to our core media project we would still need to maintain almost all of the servers just for that one project. We would save very little time. And... the partner contributions from many different groups actually help us to run those servers which then creates the platform for the main media project we want to achieve. Sort of Catch 22.

Come Thursday and I am still 'Hanging in there', but frustrated.

I get an alert (I'm duty person remember) about the temperature in the server room. The air conditioning in the server room is not working. No problem... obviously didn't restart when the power went back on. Walk round to the server room and press the remote.

Nothing happens.

Oh, must be flat batteries on the remote, since we leave it on 24/7 and don't change it. Find another remote for the same type of air conditioner, test it to make sure it does work on the other air conditioner... take it to the server room and press the remote start.

Nothing happens.

Obviously something else blew up when the power went back on.

Frustrating.

When Dena (our administrator) is back in on Monday I shall have to get her to arrange an air conditioning technician to come and sort out the unit. This being Cyprus, who know how long that will take.

Anyway in all these frustrations we realised we had two needs:

A Finance Director
About size young people Media/IT literate

With both those two needs met then I would be released to spend more time on the media. I'm not looking for 100%, coming up to 50% is what I would like. And I'd like to bring my working week down to about 120%.

Mopping up operations

2009-10-22T21:44:00.003+03:00

No administrator means... when things go wrong, we fix it. Well... actually having an administrator means we fix many things anyway, but lots of things the administrator checks up on and sorts out before we get water everywhere.

It's still pretty warm [34C] here in Cyprus and the water cooler is an important part of the office. So, when David came in and found it leaking everywhere it was not cool... well, the water was, but it was now all over the floor.

But the good news is we have an administrator who will hopefully start next Monday. This is definitely and answer to prayer, and she has gifts in other areas too... she has worked professionally in photography and has an interest in art, so maybe there will be more pictures coming out of the office to show you what is happening.

Recession, web 2.0 and the way forward

2009-10-13T21:18:00.006+03:00

While I was in the UK I got the chance to visit the CEO of a very big group doing similar work to us, except their budget is approx 200 times bigger than ours. I like them a lot and there is a lot of synergy with them. Because we are in the non-profit area we act as partners rather than competitors.

When I visited I was shown a new integrated social networking and media platform that they will launch in a few weeks. It's close to some of what we had talked about as a group early in the spring. They had the budget to execute it very well. Not that some of the projects we do aren't done well. There is a very creative project we are also about to launch within the next few weeks... but... overnight and today it set me thinking.

This group are also involved with another very large project for audience interaction that I went to see in Australia at the beginning of the year. It's excellent, but very 'heavy weight'. We are working on a module to integrate SMS into that system right now. I have two programmers working on that for the next two weeks.

Yesterday I had an email from the external partners co-ordinator for this project. He challenged us 'Given the rapid changes occurring in social media, this may need to be more a loosely aligned organism rather than a complex system to cope with these changes.' That is what really set me thinking. How and why are projects so difficult to achieve?

We have not always succeeded by a long way, but I always try to be 'fast and light' rather than 'big and heavy' since the world is changing. My target is that if it is not achievable within 6 months then its probably too complex. The Desk Top Publishing [DTP] war is an example of what I mean:

Originally there had been two DTP programs head to head: Aldus Pagemaker and QuarkXpress. By the mid 90s QuarkXpress had become the world leader with Aldus/Adobe Pagemaker a second runner. Both were big complex programs. By 1997 Quark was in version 4.0 and so slow was development it took till 2002 to release a 5.0 version.

Adobe purchased Aldus and then released InDesign in 1999. InDesign was a small simple program with many, many plug-ins. So radical and stable was version 1.0 of InDesign Quark were forced to bring out a 4.1 version within months.

I think that is the way of the future and allows rapid and evolving development. I think their model is right: a small simple core with plug-ins that can be upgraded easily and quickly to do the majority of the work.

I'm looking at one of our projects. It has been excellent with very good audience feedback. It was that project that I mention that in the spring said we needed to integrate social networking into the core of the project. At the moment there is a large amount of interaction, but it still has a significant publishing aspect to the project.

Globally we have two things happening simultaneously:

A recession leading to a post-recession
I believe that early next year there will be a second dip, the upturn will be for the Christmas period only, and will then be approx 12 months before we see a real upturn from the recession.
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 will permanently change the way we do things. Publishing is dead, long live self-publishing. Well, maybe that is a bit strong, but it is the direction of the future.

One respected media consultant put it this way 'While traditional media isn't going away, you basically have two choices: Evolve, or disappear.'

So that's the challenge I have been thinking about today. Chatting with Peter he mentioned that his brother, who is a software developer, said their company only does projects that are achievable within 4-6 weeks. That was exactly what I was thinking about: Light and fast. RAD. Rapid Application Development. And that's the model Adobe took with InDesign.

We have to change - we have to develop a method of working that allows every project to be achieved in 4-6 weeks. Its a different way of thinking. RAD implies developing a prototype very quickly and then evolving it into the final product using customer feedback. So the specification is inevitably light, not tied down.

This doesn't mean that it's flaky - let me quote the media consultant I have been reading again: 'Are People More Creative or Productive Working without Limits? No. Absolutely not. Boundaries matter. One of the biggest threats to not reaching your goal is working without limits.' For us the boundary needs to become time.

When I worked for the BBC many, many years ago I used to work on TV news. The 6 o'clock news went out at 6 o'clock. Plus or minus no seconds! I remember well dubbing a film [yes, we shot film in those days] which was number three in the running order while number one in the running order was going out. At the same time I was listening to production talkback, and hit the rewind button on the telecine machine which would allow a few seconds grace by the time it had rewound ready for play out. The 6 o'clock news went out at 6 o'clock. Plus or minus no seconds!

In so many ways we have lost the concept of deadlines. And computers have caused this. When I was dubbing that film I did the best job I could, then grabbed a few extra gramophone records with sound effects, ran to the studio and added the extra effects live as it went out. It was the best we could do and the audience would have believed all the sounds were real.

But 'the best job I could' doesn't work for computer programs - they either work or they don't work. Looking nice but not working is useless. So we have become used to massive overruns and time slips to make it work.

Somehow we need to change our approach and methods so that we can return to the concept of making something workable within a limited time frame and within a limited budget. But something that is nevertheless good enough that the audience accept it, enjoy it and interact with it. The combination of the recession and web 2.0 are forcing that upon us. We have to embrace it and 'evolve or disappear'.

October? Where has the summer gone?

2009-10-07T20:18:00.003+03:00

October already... where has the summer gone? It's difficult to catch up with a blog 2 months old, but I'll try.

Normally we aim to spend approx 3 months doing security stuff for our servers per year. This involves upgrading the applications and looking at new ways of doing security better. Sometimes it might also involve rebuilding one or two servers completely. That we did over the new year, from November to February this year. It was more painful than we expected, but worthwhile.

We were expecting a new colleague and so some of the extra things we hoped to do were put off... 'David can do that when he arrives...' Well, David has arrived and getting him sorted out has taken time too, and he is now taking some of the load, but... we had three security problems this year which meant that we didn't actually get much break from security and we are still doing it 10 months later!

That's not good news for me as the technical stuff I don't really like. I'm hoping that this month will be the turning point from the technical and I can get back to some media work. We'll see. The big thing we are doing is integrating 'dual factor authentication' to our systems. Dual factor authentication is where you have two 'factors' to get into the system - this is something you know and something you have. Banks use this: Often you log in to an online bank with a username and password [something you know] and a pin number generated by a little keyfob device [something you have]. Our system is similar, but its a really huge job doing it.

In between all this I have been working on the scripts and getting equipment for a pilot for a serious of short films we hope to make next year. If all goes well we will shoot the pilot this November. I'm really looking forward to this as media production is much more what I enjoy and get a kick out of.

September, we went back to the UK for 3 weeks. It coincided with my son's 21st birthday and also allowed us both to meet friends and have some business meetings in the UK. It was good but tiring.

Now, less than a week back we have two programmers out from the UK, working on new code to upgrade our SMS [mobile phone text message] system. One of the programmers has been out before - he developed the original version of this system - and with him is another programmer working on 'web services' to integrate the system.

Web services is a strange, but very helpful new concept where servers go to and read web pages themselves to communicate with each other. In this case it will allow servers to send and receive text messages. Servers sending text messages themselves? Whatever for? Well... one use is for a server to send us a text message to tell us it is having a problem and please could we fix it!

I still have an unbelievable amount of email to catch up with... I HATE EMAIL... well... no I don't really but it seems to be that the volume of communication has increased exponentially and I am having problems keeping up with it.

So that's about it. Not the most exciting summer [you'll have to see my other blogs about other activities which were more interesting] but worthwhile and hopefully moving.

Work expands to fill the time available?

2009-05-30T12:16:00.003+03:00

We now have an extra person working with us. He's a professional System Administrator from the USA. He's with another group, but on placement with us for two years, spending approx 80% of his time with us and 20% with the other group. His character is laid back and fits in pretty well with Pete and me. So far he has just started... but...

We have had many attacks against our systems recently so have been involved in upgrading the security systems for all our servers. One of the primary ways of doing this is through what is called 'dual factor authentication'. OK, that's a horrid techie phrase, but what does it mean? Here's the problem:

Normally we use a username and password to log into the systems, be that email or website admin or whatever. But if there is someone listening across what we are doing they can capture our user name and password and impersonate us and use it themselves. We have had this happen twice from one of our partner groups in Egypt.

The solution is simple - change the password every time you log in! Sounds simple but complex to administrate in a way that works for normal people. So what we actually do is have the normal user name and password as an identifier plus a password that changes every time. That changing password is either displayed on a little dongle that the user caries or is something you plug into your computer to send the password automatically. The dongle you remove when you are not using it. This latter solution is what we have chosen.

But now we have to get it all to work. This means integrating with all our various systems on 9 live servers. So although we have extra help, we think we need extra extra help. In fact, looking at what is happening worldwide we know that cyber-security will only get more complex. Indeed yesterday Barack Obama launched his cyber security plan. Acts of terror today, he said, could come "not only from a few extremists in suicide vests, but from a few key strokes of a computer - a weapon of mass disruption."

Alongside this we are planning a pilot series filming some illustrative stories almost allegorical, but not quite. At the end of last year we had some funds available to purchase hardware, so have invested in a new camera system. We've not bought all the equipment needed yet for the series, but will have enough for filming a couple of pilots which we hope to do this summer.

In between this, our administrator has left, so there is more admin to cope with. And I HATE COMPUTERS. Yesterday I tried to update our accounts package. It took ages and was complex and the problem I thought would be fixed with the upgrade [some of the statements were refusing to print] are still there. So I have to talk to technical support about that.

Another month gone by...

2009-04-28T00:04:00.002+03:00

We have spent the last week trying to get an end of year report completed for Companies House in the UK. Hopefully by the end of next week [when she returns] it will be complete!

One big task we have completed is a complete 'asset register' - that's a list of all the things we own for the non-accountants amongst us. Every year it has been a bit of a nightmare - we get given things, we buy things and we scrap things. Now of course those of us who work here know which thing is 'SATA 300 Gbyte Hard Disk' or a '4x4 812 filter' but financial whizz kids don't and so there has always been a difficulty correlating them. OK, so some of them have little value as far as the accounts are concerned, but they do have value as far as replacing them... so all the things we have around the place have to be listed for calculating the insurance value.

Well... to cut a long story short we have upgraded what we do by attaching a 'asset register number' to each and every significant thing around the office. This means that we can look at a chair with a label that says it is 'item 386' and know on the list what it is and how much it is worth from an accounting point of view and how much it is insured for, or a server... or a 'SATA 300 Gbyte Hard Disk'. It didn't take too long but it will allow us to grow in the future.

I started this company about 8 years ago from a borrowed office [I was caretaker while the owners were away] and a broken laptop [if you can get it to work you can have it]. When I started my aim had been to be 'equipment light' - have as little as possible/necessary since I'd seen the headaches of owning too many things from other companies. Now looking at the asset register I realise that God seems to have had other ideas - there are things all over the place... hundreds of them... I'm amazed and what we have here. Within the last year we have been given loads of pieces of equipment... and taken over responsibility for distributing loads of DVDs since another company closed down.

Our internal auditor looked at the 'to do' list on the whiteboard just as we were about to leave the office and asked how many were still needing to be done. Sadly I could only wipe one of this long list off the board. One item illustrates how frustrating things can get at times - when we first started here the company didn't exist, so everything was in my name, bank accounts, lease, utilities, domain registrations etc. Now we are trying to unwind all that and make it all in the name of the company. Not easy... so I write emails, I fill in forms, I phone and so on. Some I need others for... like the utilities have to be done with the accountant from another company and me at the electricity company at the same time... and then all the emails, forms and phone calls.

One of the things that got into this state were the bank account statements for the organisation. It took ages [emails, forms, phone calls etc] to eventually get access to the online banking and when we did I found that I could only look at the last 45 days record of transactions. So I talk to the bank [see the various blog entries about how bad banks are] well when I say talk I mean I write emails, fill in forms, phone them [quite a few times] eventually... eventually... they said last Tuesday they could send me copies of all the statements. They would be 'sent out today, but the postal service take 7-10 days to deliver them' Really? I thought first class mail was overnight! No, for sure it will take longer than that 'definitely they will be posted today, its just the postal service that takes so long'. We need those statements to complete the end of year accounts.

One the good side, we [Peter and I] had been chasing a problem with email security and it appears that we cracked it this afternoon...

Next week a couple of couples [that's 4 people] are coming out from the UK to do some maintenance work at the office. They are staying at the office guest flat. There is repair work to be done in the bathroom, to the alarm system... basically all around there are little repair jobs that they will be doing.

And... the following Tuesday a new family from the USA will join us. David will be taking over much of the technical support for the servers! They have 3 kids and its the first time living abroad for them. It will be a big step.

And finally... Our administrator has retired now in preparation for the family moving back to the UK. So we have no administrator. She has done huge amount of work. We really really need an administrator. A couple who are early retired came out from the UK to see what it is like out here [and to have a holiday] - they are pretty experienced in finance and administration so could be ideal. Their comment was 'well... nothing we have seen has put us off...' Also a friend of mine [we sail together] said his wife might be interested in helping with the admin. So... well... we need someone urgently and one comment our past administrator made was that she felt the administrator needed some accounting skills.

That's all for now.

Back from Oz

2009-03-30T23:59:00.002+03:00

Here is update on what is happening...

Peter and I are somewhat frustrated at the moment.

1) We are getting technical problems that interfere with going forward... Peter is trying to upgrade the security of all our systems, which involves putting in a new system called IPSEC. The server concerned keeps crashing - we suspect hardware even though its only 12 month old. Because he is testing for incoming connections, this stops incoming connections working, including our phone system!

2) This is only part of the security upgrade which we need to do this year. We had already planned this, but as a result of Peter going to ICCM in Holland earlier this year it has become a bigger priority. He met with folk from another similar group and in discussions with them security became a larger priority than it already was.

3) Coming back from Australia I am still feeling I am catching up. Australia has left me feeling I would be happy not to get on another plane for quite a few years - but expect I will have to - I really need to visit a couple of countries in North Africa soon. Australia was good - meeting with another group that is very similar to us and maybe have some projects together. However the main purpose was to meet with a group who have developed a replacement audience follow-up system which we need to replace pretty soon. It was good meeting with them, but concerning in that IF we partner with them and a group others here in the Middle East to roll out the system in Arabic it will mean committing one of our two programmers for a few years to the project.

4) The economic issues are affecting our programmers - one of our programmers is facing the challenge of trying to get a second job paying equal too or more than we pay to try to support his retired parents. There is no adequate pension in the Middle East! This means two things - firstly he will be less available to travel and secondly he aims to be working about 16 hours per day to get the money he needs. Its a nightmare really for people in this economic crisis.

5) I bought a new camera for the office in Brisbane [cheaper than UK or Hong Kong strangely] and have been getting all the extra bits needed [some on ebay] to make it do what we want since returning from Australia. I look forward to making the short pilot films we have planned for this year. I hope I don't get sidetracked by all this boring techie stuff... I am finding all the techie stuff wearing me down.

6) On a personal note, last week I sprained my arm moving the boat [I still feel 18 inside even though I'm slightly older than that] and didn't rest it and was climbing over the lighting grid at the youth theatre, and moving a table to the office guest flat and doing more lighting and then sanding down the seats for the boat... silly really... but left me with a VERY painful arm on Saturday - almost too much pain to sleep. It is getting better now, but I must rest it. Rest is not a word I really understand.

That's about it

Email... I hate it

2009-03-01T15:24:00.002+02:00

I was recently chatting online with a colleague from Egypt and mentioned that I had spent the trip out to a series of meetings in Australia trying to catch up with my email. Well, I've been here 3 weeks and I have just spent the evening filing some of the emails that have arrived and been dealt with since I have been here. I am beginning to hate email... and flying but that's another story...

Anyhow, he mentioned that he couldn't find a suitable way to file his email into folders. I'm sure mine is far from perfect, but Mac Mail has a great search function. Anyhow he asked me what my system was - it is firstly person name for those I deal with quite a lot, then alternatively company/organisation name for those companies that I deal with partly anonymously and partly when I don't have relationship with a person so might forget their name and finally I have some general topic folders for emails that don't fit into either of the other two categories.

But it is so big and so tiring dealing with emails. OK, so yes the emails to and from my family when I'm traveling are not tiring to deal with I like them... but the rest. I currently have about 450 individual person folders for people I deal with fairly regularly, 180 company folders and 40 general folders.

One of the things we deal with at the office is spam... creating methods of reducing it. Currently over 95% of the emails we receive at our server is spam. We have various methods that we employ to reduce that, so we get almost no spam into our email boxes. However the quantity of spam is increasing and increasing... and it looked like it might get to the stage where the world could not cope with the quantity of spam circulating and email would cease to function. Sometimes in my heart of hearts I privately hope this might happen... then at least I would not have to deal with them all!

Out of the bubble...

2009-02-03T20:07:00.004+02:00

Years ago I had a friend who as a psychologist who used to work among media people in Southern California. One of the phenomena he talked about which rang bells with me was the 'bubble effect' among media people. When they were working on a project they went into a bubble and were not like normal human beings, emerging as [relatively] normal people from the bubble when the project was over.

As a result of the attacks we had in October 2008 we decided to upgrade two of the servers. These servers would be three years old this January. They have a life span of approximately three years before needing an upgrade. Each time we upgrade, it's not just a case of new hardware and put in the CDROM and type install but we have to think through of the needs, particularly security needs, for the entire life of the server. So, Peter and I thought through what we felt we needed for the next three years.

The last time we did an upgrade it took Peter and I approx one month - ie two man months of labour. This time we then brought a colleague over from Egypt and between us we hoped that in one month we could get the new hardware and software working to replace the old. We expected that three man months would be about right... but it wasn't... it has taken approx nine man months of labour to do the upgrade!

Why so much more? We were adding many extra security features which proved very much more complex than we expected. In fact, the added security was somewhat frightening for me. I was thinking back over the steps to get here... from the original servers... to the upgraded servers... to these new servers. The complexity seems exponential. The upgraded servers were about twice as complex as the original, and the new ones about four times as complex as the upgraded ones. Hence I'm already getting edgy about what it will be like in time years time... sixteen times as complex as these new servers?

The main security issue is for each application within the server to be isolated from every other application, running in a virtual server with its own security. That way an attack on one part should not affect the whole. So in reality it's like going from two servers with eight primary applications to having eight servers with one major application each. But they cannot be totally isolated and we then had to work out secure ways that each application could talk to the others that they needed to. Yipes... yes, horribly complex and hence why I was concerned about the future.

Over Christmas we had another colleague and his wife over so that he could have extra training and to plan together the next step of the project he is working on. So... having been in the upgrade bubble and not completely out of it, it was straight into another bubble. Not that it was bad, but it did mean we didn't get a break at all.

We also had end of year calculations to do and create budgets and plans for 2009. Actually doing this took Pete and me out of the upgrade bubble for a while and did enable us to see the 'wood for the trees' which was helpful. But budget planning is not one of my favourite pastimes. Just before the end of the year Peter remarked, 'You know, I wouldn't do this if they paid me...' I had put into works exactly my thoughts!

Then we discovered that for various reasons we had to upgrade one of the other servers that is only one year old. We lease the hardware, so strangely enough because of the drop in price of hardware the new server will be under 2/3 the price of the old one! We had to wait for delivery of the hardware which was handed over to us yesterday. Yes, that means we are still in the upgrade bubble.

One Egyptian colleague is still working with us on the upgrade process, which we hope to complete by the end of February. It should be quicker now on the extra server as we know roughly what we want and can copy the two we already have working.

So does that mean its all straightforward for a while? No, not entirely... tomorrow Peter is off to Holland for five days to attend a conference and then next Wednesday I fly off to Australia for about a month, partly to attend a conference, partly to evaluate some new software and to see if a partnership with an Australian group will happen and partly to visit other organisations and... but... its not coming together easily...

A couple of days after I had finally booked my tickets I heard that there will be a delay on the new software, which means I shall probably have to go back to Australia sometime later in the year. It's both a huge expense and a huge cost in my time. I am not best pleased to put it mildly. There is only one light at the end of the tunnel as far as the trip is concerned. If everything works out I shall see my son for a couple of days on the way back through Manila.

So there we are... it almost seems like we cannot get out of the bubble, but the bubble is expanding to keep us inside it!

2008-10-30T19:36:00.004+02:00

Most men, so I'm told, are glued to the TV when either the football or Olympics is being shown. Not me. I'm happily fairly oblivious to either. But now... it's the Volvo Ocean... and why do I mention it? Well, my team is currently in the lead. And, to make things even better, they have just beaten a world record.

Torben Grael and the crew of Ericsson 4 swept into the history books yesterday as the first monohull to breach the 600-mile barrier in 24 hours. They’ve been chased by men, machines and the elements in the last 48 hours – and nothing has touched them.

They had been lying fourth behind but battling it with the leaders - Green Dragon, Puma and Telephonica Black. But its pretty dreadful weather they are sailing through as Mark Chisnell puts it:

In their foaming, boiling, 25-knot wake the fleet lies scattered as the devil and the deep blue sea picked off the hindmost one by one – the cold front sweeping over them with a mix of murderous squalls and ugly waves in a pitch black night. We’re almost down to the last man standing.

If you're as gripped as I am you can follow the race online, even through a 3D virtual simulator, where the boat's instruments, when they are working, relay everything via satellite to your computer at home... almost in real time. But they don't always work. In fact, Ericsson 4 have equipment failure now.

So back to reality for me... over the past couple of weeks we have been battling murderous squalls on the technical front. Three weeks ago I wrote about the DDoS attack. One of the outcomes of reviewing this was a decision to upgrade two or more of the servers. They are three years old now and so replacing them is about due. But its not just a case of copy the files and off you go... it will take about three of us at least a month to move everything over and upgrade all the systems on the new servers. A very big job, which is why we only try to do it every three years!

Having decided to do this we brought Raed over from Egypt to help and then ordered the new hardware. We lease the servers rather than buy them, leaving the leasing company responsible for the hardware maintenance. On Monday they will pass them over to us, with a bare operating system on them and we will start the task of checking them and installing all the systems and moving the sites across.

In between all this the attacks have continued - like a cold front sweeping over us. We watch the attackers in real time, and have defense mechanisms set up to rebuff them. But trying to second guess their moves is difficult, so we have set up what is called a 'honey trap' to try and lure them in to showing their methods. This will give us some indication of how much they know about us and why certain sites are more attacked than others.

One of our partners - with a site for central Asia - was online chatting with me today and they want to increase the facilities, to start online broadcasting to their region. Another site - for the Middle East - will have new facilities and a new design before the new year. A further new site - also for the Middle East - should be live before the new year. So it feels like a 'foaming, boiling, 25-knot' race downwind barely in control of what is happening. I am looking forward to Christmas - which I hope will be the end of this leg of our race and the sites and new servers will all be behind me.

DOS attack

2008-10-03T10:01:00.006+03:00

Most of day yesterday we suffered what was called a 'Distributed Denial of Service' or DDoS attack. This meant that web sites on one server were unavailable at times. The problem will have shown itself as either the server appearing to run slowly, or unavailable or problems within the website that looked like a MySQL problem.

So what is a DDoS attack? Well in our case all of these were caused by a whole load of computers sending invalid file requests many times per second - or at their slowest many many times per minute. What this did was to start extra instances of the web server to respond to these requests, till the server ran out of resources and failed to deliver. Normally the 'load of computers' are Windows computers with viruses [usually called a botnet] that allow them to be controlled from a master computer or robot system. All automated. Against us.

Peter eventually wrote a new rule into our automated response system to stop this happening by blocking users who try the same method of attack. Within seconds they were being blocked.

Fortunately it was a relatively minor attack. We recorded only 59 computers attacking us from the time we turned on the rule in the automated response system to block them. Today this has dropped to a trickle of 26 still attacking us in the first 8 hours of the day - all being blocked. Some botnets are huge - for instance, this August the Dutch police shut down a botnet of approximately 100,000 [Windows] computers infected and controlled by two people.

Oh, the the problem on Wednesday turned out to be a faulty cable. How come a faulty cable did all that? Well, the switch connecting to a workstation in the office, which, by the way, was turned off, sensed something strange on the cable and decided to keep trying to sort it out many thousands or millions of times per second. It also decided to tell the entire LAN about the problem [a broadcast message] again many thousands or millions of times per second. This broadcast message affected other switches and affected the server. Cable fixed, fault disappeared!

In case you're thinking that sounds rather like the DoS attack we suffered, it was. It was a type of DoS attack. The difference being that one is accidentaly, but from the evidence in the logs we can see the other was malicious.

Yikes its a bridging storm?

2008-10-01T22:29:00.004+03:00

Today is a public holiday... so I should be off. I had hoped to go sailing with a friend.

Alert on my phone: All the connections to the FUP system are down... in fact sarah is down [sarah is the name of one of our servers]. This needs urgent attention. So I speed to the office.

It appears that one of the transceivers on one of the routers has failed. So I change it. No difference... but one part of our system starts to sort of work. So I check all the cables... and find that some that I need to know what they are are not labeled. [We have copious free time for labeling... not!] So I label all the cables, plug in the critical ones and everything looks fine.

I plug in the rest and... one of the servers has totally locked up. What? Crazy... cannot happen. Spend next few hours sorting out the server and everything looks fine... for a while... but my notebook cannot get an IP address. Why? So I unplug all the non-critical cables and... my notebook gets an IP address. Everything looks fine.

I plug in the rest and... one of the servers has totally locked up. What? Crazy... cannot happen.
OK, this time I learnt my lesson. I leave all the uncritical cables out, reboot and sort out the server and leave for home [dinner time now].

After dinner... I get an alert. One of the servers is not connecting. So I go back to the office... and find that in all my plugging an unplugging one of the cables has become lose. So fix it and plug in and go home.

Then the strange bit. I speak to Peter. He esplains [hope I get the jargon right] that we may have a 'bridging storm' going on. Basically its this... we have more than 50 devices [servers, routers, phones, workstations etc] in the office on 3 different physical LANs [ie networks] connected to about 16 'switches'... connected to 2 Internet connections to the outside world.

Switches are the things that connect all the devices together and talk to each other making a tree with one being the 'boss' [I'm sure Peter had a more technical word for that]. And the master switch talks to all the others telling them where in the tree they are and how to behave. If one of them wants to become the boss then an argument starts and can result in a bridging storm where some switches [and thus devices] are cut off. Why so many switches? Well, three reasons - firstly it's difficult and expensive to cable every point from a central location, secondly we have many extra points we need for testing and research and development and finally manufacturers [including manufacturers of VOIP phones now add a switch in the back of their devices.

So how would this make servers lock up? Well... we have some clever software in that to make sure that either the main or the backup is up and working. This is roughly the same language as the switches talk and maybe, just maybe, the bridging storm makes this go really crazy. Well... it makes me go crazy anyway.

A duck paddling upstream?

2008-09-29T11:22:00.002+03:00

Another month has gone by and I am re-reading what I have written in the past couple of posts... and thinking sometimes I feel like a duck paddling upstream in a river: There appears almost no activity on the surface and under the water the poor duck is paddling like mad to make progress against the current.

The annual report is now almost finished. I keep hoping it is finished and then there are more small changes to make. The annual report has taken a lot of my time, plus a lot of a couple of other peoples time in the UK. The overhead of red tape these days seems enormous. Gone are the days of getting on with the task and being trusted that you are getting on with the task [whatever that task is]. It's sad really - like the whole world has suddenly lost its innocence and has become a frantic fast moving bullet train.

We have also been struggling with personnel problems. One part time worker [who had been writing for us] causing us a large amount of time and effort. Since this person is part of the reason why we're here we couldn't just drop him like a lead balloon and duck and hide while the pieces fell everywhere. The fallout is still having effects on both time and energy.

In between that I have been doing some technical stuff for a new website we hoped to have up and running by October. We'll miss that deadline. The new website is 100% interactive - what people call 'Web 2.0' - very different in look and feel to anthing else we have done. The person who had been the developer on it is now on another project with us, so we have taken on a second developer to work on this. We're pretty sure we will have enough work for two developers over the next 12 months, but still this is a step into something bigger.

We have now taken on responsibility for an office in one Middle Eastern country, so that too is a step bigger. Both developers will work from this office. Its a good step and one of the plans is that the two developers will also be trained to take on the system administration for all the servers. They are starting to do this and have already relieved some of the pressure on Peter and myself. But this also means we need to train them - we did some training in August and have seen since then them taking on some of the responsibility for the system administration. Peter and I really like it when we find out they have sorted out a problem or installed something without having to come back to us for extra help information.

But... the big new Web 2.0 website does need our help and that has consumed some of my time over the last month. We heard that we should [hopefully] be getting an extra full time member of the team in January. A western trained System Administrator who will take over supervising and co-ordinating all the systems administration for us. Initially that is creating extra workload for me - getting the Job Description and other paperwork done, and trying to sort out how a visa will work for him. He will be based at out Cyprus office. We already have a desk waiting for him - a couple of weeks ago we were given some extra office furniture from another organisation here in Cyprus.

And on the change front, the office flat [used by the various Middle Eastern workers when they come here] had to be changed as the block that it was in will be pulled down this month. We have now found a new flat and moved everything to it. The new flat will be nicer - it's smaller and more compact, but much better quality. That change too took up time in my month.

My next month? Well... it will be a catch up month. Get the visa for our new worker sorted, get the web 2.0 site live, get other facilities working on our 'flagship' site, finally send in the annual report [must be by end of October] and hopefully have a slightly quieter month. Peter and I want to try to get some time for thinking/brainstorming together. Last Autumn we did this and it helped for what we did in 2008. We have a couple of things to add to it this year - one is a 'Risk Management' policy, the other a 'Reserves' policy. The reserves policy should be easy, but trying to work out risk management on what we do and how to reduce those risks, well... that's a different issue altogether!

As some of you know that I love sailing. Over the summer I have been lent an outboard motor. I used it yesterday when the wind was too light for sailing quickly back to the club. Now... if I can only find an 'outboard motor' to fix to this duck paddling desperatly upstream I'm sure we'll make more progress!

Writing... writing... writing...

2008-08-22T20:50:00.002+03:00

One thing I found out when I was in the UK was that for our Annual Report to the UK government bodies I had to have much more information than I thought I would. I had been expecting to just print out the figures and say 'Here you are...' but they require and extensive narrative to go alongside this. My brother-in-law helped show me and we downloaded one from another organisation as a template. His advice as 'keep it as simple as possible...'

So I came back to Cyprus with a writing task. I read through the template and started drafting our own. But as I read I became convinced that I needed to check out all the government guidelines too. So I downloaded them and read the 150 page book (in detail) to check I was doing it right. That book referenced other materials... which I also downloaded and read.

The reading/writing/reviewing/checking took about 10 days in all. I hope its correct now. What I thought would be about 2-3 pages has now turned out to be 17 pages... and that is following the advice of 'keep it as simple as possible...' I found it mind stretching - checking that I was following all the regulations. The red tape these days is phenomenal!

During this, I had the author of a series of short stories we are developing (eventually a video series) over and have been spending time with him honing them. Writing a short story is almost more difficult that a full blown novel in that the story has to be complete in itself within 1000 words.

I read somewhere that Sir Winston Churchill [about the only British politician I have any time for and he's dead now] said something like this 'If you want me to speak for two minutes, it will take me three weeks of preparation. If you want me to speak for thirty minutes, it will take me a week to prepare. If you want me to speak for an hour, I am ready now.' Doing some research I now find the quotation attributed to Mark Twain, President Taft and Woodrow Wilson! Whichever, the point being that short takes longer than long in writing.

In between the all that writing I have been reading Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell it's a great book and I highly recommend it. Doing more research online about Rob Bell I came across the statement of faith from his church was was not a propositional statement like most but what he called a 'Narrative Theology'. You can read the Mars Hill Narrative Theology for yourself and see what I mean. Anyway, this seemed to fit with some of what I have been writing in a book recently and so I wrote [you'd think I'd had enough writing wouldn't you] my own 'Narrative Theology' which you can read on another of my blogs. What intrigued me was that you can summarize the entire story of the Bible in one A4 page. Doing so actually expessed completely what we believe in a way that a propositional statement of faith misses.

Summer slowdown... not!

2008-06-30T18:48:00.002+03:00

For almost a week we were chasing round trying to record extra video inserts and printing leaflets on our laser printer and getting other leaflets printed by the local printer. Why? Lots of the people are leaving for some weeks for the summer.

First to go was Sue and Tim. Tim is starting another university course and Sue went with him to help settle him in. Then two days later Peter and his family left for 6 weeks... then the following day Paula and her family left for 8 weeks. Then... summer started... the following day I am told it hit 40C... and guests arrived from Egypt for 10 days.

So I am left 'holding the baby' for 3 weeks. And today one of our main servers crashed. It appears one of the fans may be faulty so I will have to replace it before too long. Peter had been doing more of the technical stuff recently which had relieved me from that chore. But he has been finding it very much too much of a chore and so we want to find a 'interesting' task for him when he gets back in August. After that is he runs a beginners System Administration for Linux servers course, starting the day after he returns!

Today a colleague flies in from another country and we will be discussing the stories he is writing [50 short stories] which will eventually become a series of 10-12 short video programmes. He will also be proof checking a new version of the Gospel we are publishing. It's not enough for it to be readable, even all the diacritics have to be correct for Arabic. He'll also be helping lay it out for internet and PDF files.

Alongside doing some graphic design for that project and supervising it, I am trying to get a new audio and video chat system going for one of our websites. I haven't done anything on this yet and it needs to be running asap... and certainly before I go to the UK for a couple of weeks in mid July.

Alongside that I am trying to get things ready for a new programmer who will be joining us in August. He is coming on the System Administration course that Peter is running then I will have him for a week to brief him on a major website he will be programming for us.

Alongside that I need to chase up a grant application for funding from the USA... which seems to have gone very quiet.

Alongside that I need to evaluate and plan to meet people in Wolverhampton about a new database system we are considering.

And of course with Sue away I am looking after the house, cats, guests...

Our biggest need right now is for more people. I keep getting encouraged to spend more time doing people related things. And I would like to, but there are tasks that cannot be ignored so I cannot spend the time I would like on people related things.

Live video link

2008-06-12T20:52:00.004+03:00

Last Sunday I did a live video link from our offices back to the UK. I set up the camera and put on the autocue at the front so that it could carry the output of the camera so I would know how well framed it was as there was no cameraman - basically move myself to fit into the frame rather than the camera!

We used Skype in one direction and then a mobile phone link [into an earpiece] for me to hear the questions. It worked well. It was slightly difficult talking at times as in the UK it was being put on a large projector for many people to hear and my voice put through the PA system. This meant I heard my voice coming back all reverberant a second or so later. It was quite difficult thinking and talking in that case... well maybe its just because I am normally behind the camera rather than in front of it.

This week we have been thinking about TV as we are planning a series of short video programmes to shoot early next year. The plan is to write stories and get feedback from them, choose te best and record them as radio dramas and get feedback from them and then from those choose the best and film them as short video dramas.

We also had one of the web developers over here for about a month. This was his final day here and he returned to Egypt today. He has done a huge amount of work on our big web project and I am very pleased with the way it is going.

This weekend is cataclismos - the weekend when the Orthodox church remember Noah's flood. This means that Monday is a day off and that is the annual regatta of the sailing club. Frankly I am very pleased to have a day off and go sailing, the last month has been somewhat tiring.

A non-entry

2008-05-25T21:46:00.005+03:00

Normally I don't end up writing because I don't have time. I generally think through what I should write and write the blog entry in my mind before starting on the computer. I have been going over and over in my mind what to write. Never coming to a conclusion. I still haven't but my wife reminded me that people wanted to know...

Life at the office has been the kind of normal rough and tumble of things... In turning the blog entry over in my mind I was thinking about what I do . About 15-20% of my time is financial administration, another 15-20% is general administration, 30-40% is technical, 20-30% is promotion/publicity/fundraising, 20-30% is project administration, and 20-30% is creative project work.

If you add up the worst case scenario you get 170% and best case 120%... the trouble is I never have a best case week! So what do I drop? The administration/fundraising and the technical are necessary to enable the creative to take place and projects to take place. If I dropped the projects my workload would become sensible [80% best case, 110% worst case] and I would go nuts within a few weeks.

Oh... and we lose Paula our administrator in a years time. She will be returning to the UK with her family. We very much need to replace her. Tomorrow she will be spending some hours with immigration department hopefully sorting out a question about a visa for one of the people coming over to help us. If she wasn't doing it, I would have to. She sorts out all supplies for the office, does some of the accounting, office cleaner, resources etc etc... before she joined us these were either adding to my list or not getting done.

We have had a programmer over for a few weeks and he has been working on our most significant web site. The new developments are going well. I spend on average between half an hour and an hour per day working on different aspects of this site with the programmer, and have over the past couple of weeks spent over an hour per day communicating with the content team on this site.

We want to improve the interaction with the visitors to the site - many of them have expressed an interest in knowing more about Jesus, we now have to enable that to happen. Its not just as simple as 'OK, here's what its about, make your mind up...' That would be the western propositional approach. Within the Middle East it is a relational approach that is needed. Having said that, the post-modern generation are more relational than propositional. Facebook is an example of this social networking. It allows individuals and groups of people to interact.

I'm reading a book at the moment by Thomas Freidman entitled The World is Flat. In one chapter he talks about visiting Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. He asked what the most frequent searches were. No surprise that sex hit top of the list, but the second was God and third jobs. Our aim is to create a social network of people searching for God and let them interact with followers of Jesus so they can come to know the God who first went searching for them. The fact that we've had over 1400 people asking for Bibles shows the thirst.

There are times recently when I feel overwhelmed. There is too much to do, and too little time. I end up chasing things that don't bring fulfillment but are necessary. I sit and wonder why we lack so many human resources. Jesus said 'Pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers...' We do that alright!

At our Friday evening group one of the members was talking about a leadership seminar she had gone to recently. She felt that they had mistakenly confused management with leadership. When she said that, it was like a light going on in my head. That's the problem we face. Peter and I are leaders but not managers. We need a manager. The problem is that managers want to control and then lead... this is the dilemma the church has got into when it confuses management and leadership. I have observed all over the place this happening. The Lord inspires a leader or leaders. They need managers to help. The managers eventually take over the leaders and everything dries up, running like a well oiled machine but going nowhere.

So I come back to not writing because every time I start to think then the thinking takes me in a different direction. I miss a clear thought that I want to put down what we are doing at the moment. Tomorrow I will start another week... will it be a 170% week or a quiet 120% week I wonder.

Banks... hmmm...

2008-04-30T20:08:00.002+03:00

OK, so another week another bank. Actually my rants about banks have gone quiet for a while.

I have been trying to complete our end of year balance sheet and I&E sheet. One of our bank accounts in the UK should have internet banking but doesn't. I have called the bank a few times. Each time they say they have sent out the 'welcome pack' and we should have it. We don't. Today they said 'Ah, its too long now, you will have to re-apply'.

It shouldn't be a big deal, but it is because my partner in the UK moved house at the back end of the year and two of the statements were lost in the move. So... aiiiieee... oh well.

I've also been preparing budgets for projects this week... along with gantt charts for the project planning. I feel like I am trying to put together a jigsaw to get the projects to interleave correctly. Well, more like trying to put together six jigsaws at the same time. Now, if you ask my family they will tell you I don't like jigsaws. I rarely do them. I find them frustrating. I found this planning frustrating. Oh well... another week...

In between I have been discussing stories with a script writer for a series of short films we hope to make in 2009. That was enjoyable, though I actually prefer the next stages of film making [shooting and editing] more than the story planning. And that brings me back to the start. We need funding for these films, the funder needs our end of year balance sheets and I&E , and I cannot complete that till I get the bank reconciled and I cannot do that till the bank gets Internet banking working for me...

Publicity, success and failure

2008-04-22T09:35:00.007+03:00

This morning I was sitting reading some information from a big Christian organisation. It was the organisation that my son works with. He has been visiting us for 3 months and today he returns. We may not see him for 2 years. Its always hard for parents to say goodbye, but saying it to your 21 year old son, knowing its likely he will be 23 when you next see him was difficult for me.

As I looked at the publicity for this Christian group I remarked to my son that though we needed it we don't have anything like this. 'Oh, you must be a more spiritual group', he replied. Christian publicity is always jam packed with success stories. Cover to cover. We're so busy we don't have time to write our success stories. Even if we did it would feel uncomfortable. Not that we aren't successful in the way that other Christian groups measure things. Earlier in the year we did some calculations and found we had more interactions with our audience than the most successful Christian TV station in the region. But we don't write such things generally. Why? Partly because we don't have time and partly because we don't think it was the way of the person we follow.

Yesterday I was looking at the description for a new sound mixer on the Internet. Along with the specification there were quotes from many of the 'power users' of the system. One of the target audiences for this mixer were 'houses of worship' and the audio director of a large California church was singing its praises. Specifically he liked the ability to integrate to the recording system and produce a 'best of worship' each month. The technology was neat, but I didn't know what to feel about the thought of a monthly 'best of worship' album. I sat and wondered what the carpenter of Nazareth would have made of this. What fishermen called from their nets would make of this.

When we share the love of God with people who don't know His grace we are challenged to consider how to do it. Some people don't think about the how, they just rush in like a bull in a china shop claiming their way is justified in the Scriptures. Others mix and match so that the style is barely discernibly different from the culture of the people they are trying to communicate with. In a sense if God says 'do it this way' then regardless of what we feel we should 'do it this way'. But I think Scripture shows us clearly that God wants us to be friends not automata. I have a pinochio string puppet in my office that I use to illustrate that difference. Friends talk. They discuss. Abraham remonstrated with God over the people he was concerned about. He was a friend of God.

We are planning a video series now, hopefully to complete within the next 24 months. A series of stories that communicates the love of God in a way that will encourage people to think and to respond to Him. Its taking a lot of discussion and planning. There are two aspects to this - the planning of the content and filming and finding sponsors to help with the costs. The first part is interesting, the second part a chore. A necessary chore. Not that I dislike meeting people and telling them about what God is doing, but I feel distracted from all the rest of what we have to do. And our publicity is nothing compared to the group my son works with. We are small. We struggle and struggle to do what we do and frequently feel we are failures more than successes. We are overwhelmed with what we have to do in the areas of administration and technical support.

As I sit here thinking and chatting with our Father I wonder... what did He feel when he let His son go to this earth knowing it would be 33 years before He was with Him again? He was not overwhelmed with the work like we feel, yet he couldn't sit back and wait for his return, He still had work to do. I wonder about His measurement of success... no colour brochures, no history of success followed by success. Indeed read the Scriptures prior to His son coming and it reads like the script for a disaster movie with sparks of success followed by troughs of failures.

When we say we follow His son, I wonder how much we really do. And the trouble is... I like successes: I tend to be enamoured by the big flashy offices of the successful Christians... and I sometimes feel like chucking it all in and joining one of the success stories, even though I know in many ways they are only a veneer. I am tired of spirituality being measured in terms of 'blessing'. Job is one of my favourite books. I am fearful of following the Messiah. His road led to death. That's how God measures success. And its painful.

Next weekend is the time eastern Christians remember the death and resurrection of the Messiah. His success was to leave behind a small group of frightened failures... failures who turned the world upside down as they communicated the simple truth - God loves us. He always has done and always will do so. Nothing we do can change that. He doesn't ask us to do anything. He doesn't measure our successes and failures. He just asks us to turn to Him. He did it all. 2000 years ago.

Today we walk with Him. And He walks with us. Success or failure. And we need to communicate the simple truth with our generation: God loves us. He always has done and always will do so. Nothing we do can change that. He doesn't ask us to do anything. He did it all. 2000 years ago.

Flying forward

2008-03-31T14:48:00.000+03:00

I'm sitting in the airport waiting to fly to Beirut. It's 00:30 - just past midnight. It seems this is the first free moment I have had this year. I am way behind on my blogging. Last night I completed the blogs for my sailing... I try to record each trip so I learn how I am getting on. But my media work is less similar. I guess the only thing I can learn is that we need more people.

So what has happened in 3 months? Working backwards from today...

We just said goodbye to Luke. Luke is from Canada and is helping out another media team. He came to us for a week to work on a new scheduling/playout system for Internet radio. When we first developed Internet radio playout we were thinking of the radio sounding much like the BBC World Service, where there are scheduled programmes and people tune in at a certain time to listen to the programme.

What we have found over the years is that people tune in ephemerally... and for short periods, usually in the order of 15 minutes. Since most of the programmes are 15 minutes long this means they catch the end of one and the beginning of another. They don't get a single programme from start to finish. If they want a whole programme they go to the 'on demand' stream where they hear it from the start when they want to hear it.

Anyway the upshot of this is that instead of streaming to a schedule which takes a long time for the programme presentation department, we will be doing a more eclectic mix of programmes based on a rule based template where the computer will chose which programme to put out when. Luke will be programming this system for us and our partners.

This last month we have had John out from the UK. He spent the entire month watching TV. Sounds like a teenager's ideal job, but John is retired and the TV watching he did was copying loads of master tapes to hard disks so we can make DVD masters and stream the programmes on the Internet. It was a labour of love for him, as the programmes are in Arabic or Farsi and he doesn't speak a word of either language, but the tapes had to be monitored as they were copied to make sure there were no problems.

Actually there were problems and sometimes it took two or three attempts to get each one on the hard disk. The problem is partly due to the age of the master tapes and partly due to the fact they have been stored at room temperature. Room temperature in Cyprus can easily exceed 30C during the summer and sometimes gets close to 40C. This is not good for magnetic tapes. Or DVDs.

Before that we had Alison and her family out. Alison came for a busman's holiday: She is an accountant and came to do our end of year accounts. It was quite a task -we had changed accounting systems during the year and so it meant pulling figures from both systems and merging them together. But first there were end of year currency variations to enter, end of year write-offs and accruals to deal with and so on... and we changed currency on 1st January from Cyprus pounds to Euros. Still it was all completed, even if it did take longer than expected. Without people like Alison, I'm not sure where we would be!

Alison brought with her the equipment for a new telephone system for the office. Our old one had been causing grief for some time. The new one is VOIP based and much much better. When the equipment came I was the person to get it all going on one of the new servers...

...new servers? At the end of last year I had tried to upgrade one of the packages on one of the main servers in Cyprus. Only I couldn't, because that version of the Operating System was now out of date [the version of Linux we use is only upgradeable for 24 months]. So I installed a new version on a spare server, intending to migrate the pair of servers that were now out of service date across. Only I found that we had a hardware problem with the spare server.

So at the beginning of the year, Peter and I decided to replace both of these old servers with brand new ones [they were about 3 years old anyhow and lacking power]. So that involved a lot of work for both Peter and I in the upgrading.

In between all this we were trying to bring online a new Flash Media Server in our main cluster. This is going well, and we are seeing how good the new Flash Video Streaming will look.

Oh, and I forgot [but shouldn't] we had a programmer over in Cyprus for a month working on one of our web sites...

Well... if that sounds like we have been sitting around idle, I also did a short trip through the UK to the USA early in the year. The trip was both planning and visiting a major donor who we hope will fund two projects this year. One of those projects is an apprenticeship programme we dearly need to free up Peter and I for other things.

What is reality?

2008-01-07T18:16:00.000+02:00

The last month, apart from time off for Christmas, has been focusing on four things:

Planning for 2008
Budgeting for 2008
Completing the update on one website
Planning next stage on another website

One problem we have found in 2007 is that we don't have all the people we need for doing the system administration on the servers we have. I have probably complained about this before... but these servers are the backbone of what we do and the backbone of what some of our partners do. Within this region there is only one other person we know of able to do this support.

In order to move forward and do the important rather than just maintaining things for others we determined we needed to do two things: 1) train one or two other people to help 2) cut back on the things we had been doing for other organizations. The trouble is this would have a significant detrimental effect on other organizations - we shared this with one and they were not sure how they would get round the problem.

We had two colleagues over from Egypt for a couple of weeks working on the update for the website and the planning the other website. The update is to create a themed feel to the site so that we have Christmas and other seasonal themes, rather like Google. It gives the site an 'alive' feel. We also had some extra facilities to integrate, allowing chat rooms and other interactive features to be brought into the site. It worked well and we are very pleased with the result. We now have over 7,500 members - that's people who have signed up to regularly participate in the site - so we are very encouraged.

One of the colleagues we had over was really concerned about the cutting facilities for other organizations. He suggested we look at expanding the training, making a fully fledged apprenticeship programme. Well, we looked at this and it did seem a wise and helpful way forward. We then looked at funding it and assuming all the partner organizations agree to help with will move forward into 2008 with 4 apprentices. By the end of 2009 they should be able to have taken over the lions share of supporting all these facilities.

Peter and I had been doing lots of planning and budgeting anyway - this was an expansion rather than something totally new on our agenda. Planning and budgeting is one of those amazingly important and time consuming activities that seems to get nowhere, but without being done you really do get nowhere! What it has left me with is a number of grant applications to complete before I go to the USA later this month to share with funding agencies who have already expressed an interest in our activities.

The other site we were working on is a totally new one - a web 2.0 site. What's web 2.0? It's almost 100% interactivity within sites. No longer to you read, listen and view material - your interact with it. In this case the site will look at feel more like a virtual reality computer game than a website. But it won't be virtual reality it will be actual reality. We have no idea about the reaction it will get - so far people who have seen previews are very impressed. For us its a big step into seeing if people who prefer oral culture find it easier interacting with this sort of... well... not a site really, more an environment. Watch this space!

One of the colleagues will be cominng back here in February to work further on the site with us [he is continuing in Egypt now] with an aim that it will be launched in March. In the mean time, Peter will fly to Egypt to look at setting up the apprenticeship programme there. I am making a quick trip to Jordan and then over to the USA... so in actual reality we are doing a lot of traveling too. I enjoy traveling, but sometimes I think the virtual reality of being able to travel at the speed of light would be really helpful!

Another banking wally...

2007-12-19T23:08:00.000+02:00

Another bank gets added to my 'wallies' list...

When I was back in the UK I went into Abbey to close my business bank account. In a branch, face to face with a nice human being who did everything needed before my eyes and got me to sign all the relevant papers. She (of course) also tried to dissuade me. Well, actually, she accepted it because I told her that I had already opened an HSBC account to change to. She said they would close it and send me a cheque for the balance. The balance at that stage was just a few pounds and paying this in to my Cyprus account would have cost more than the value of the cheque.

Next thing I find is that somehow I have money coming into this account [Ooops, I had forgotten to tell someone the new bank details] and the bank are still sending me statements. Irregularly. Strange, since as part of the closing procedure they had removed me from the Internet banking system.

Yesterday I phoned the bank. All the usual security questions. Including 'What is the number on your bank card?' I don't have a bank card any longer, I destroyed it because I should no longer have this account!

'We have no record of you requesting the account to be closed'. Is this another method of keeping customers? But you closed my Internet banking correctly. 'Could you go into your branch please and do it again'. I am in Cyprus, so, no that's not possible, can I FAX you the instruction? 'Yes, no problem, here's the FAX number'.

I immediately go and type a FAX, sign it and add a copy of my passport - I don't want them then coming back wanting evidence of my identity. In the FAX I ask them to FAX back confirmation that it is all done.

No FAX reply so today I phone again. Same security questions. Except new one 'Can you tell me all the recent transactions on this account?' No, because that account should be closed and all the deposits are in error. I can only tell you transactions from when you irregularly send me statements as I don't have a card for the account, which should be closed, and cannot access Internet banking any longer. Eventually they accept I am who I claim to be.

I then ask them to tell me the status of the instruction I FAXed them yesterday. 'We don't have any FAX from you, sir' - banks generally start using sir when they are covering up some incompetence or another. But I have a FAX confirmation that you received it. 'That's only your word against ours.' OK, can I FAX it again and will you wait on the line to confirm you get it? 'Sorry, sir' [sir again] 'The fax is not in this room and we don't have access to it'. Can you get whoever is in the room to check while I FAX it. This is the third time I am trying to close my account with you!

'Will you hold for a moment, sir.' I wait while innocuous so called music assaults my eardrums. I put the call on speakerphone so that its not quite so bad. Minutes pass. More minutes pass. 'Did you send the FAX from Cyprus?' Yes, I did, why? 'Did you use the correct country prefix?' Yes, of course I did, I also know I connected to your FAX machine since I heard the FAX tones and I have a receipt to show your FAX machine accepted it.

'Will you hold for a moment, sir.' I wait while innocuous so called music assaults my eardrums. I put the call on speakerphone again so that its not quite so bad. Minutes pass. More minutes pass.

'We think we have found it now, sir' [I wonder which pile of papers scattered around the room they had to knock over and plow through to find it... do we really trust our money to people like this?] 'My supervisor has now signed off on it and it will not take the normal 3-5 days for processing, but we will do it hopefully today or tomorrow.' Hopefully.

Well that was the irritating bank problem. Now the very irritating one. We pay our utility bills through bank transfers online. You should also know than in Cyprus they use a comma not a full stop to show the cents. Mostly. Usually. Not always. So £12,34 means twelve pounds and thirty four cents.

The Bank of Cyprus Internet banking system here doesn't have separate fields for pounds and cents like the Abbey one in the UK to ensure you get it right. When you type the amount as £12,34 the system says do you want to transfer £12.34. Yes, you did read that right. One place is a comma the other a full stop.

Not consistent. Easy to make a mistake. Today we did. By accident. Now instead of paying twenty one pounds to one utility company we paid two thousand one hundred and have all the hassle of getting the money back from them.

Just a thought... often when you call a bank or similar organization you get a message something like 'Calls may be recorded for training and...' Is it legal to record calls to a bank and then send it to them for their training?

That Monday morning feeling...

2007-12-17T10:22:00.000+02:00

Aiieee... came in this morning to find one of the servers in the cluster had locked up and the system had not automatically swapped to the the backup. First server lockup in about a year. And before that we had not had one for maybe a couple of years. Servers are supposed to never lock up. Now to find out why. What a way to be greeted with on a Monday morning!

We won't be popular!

2007-12-16T09:11:00.000+02:00

One of the things that has taken a lot of time this last few weeks [in between everything else] is planning for the new year. That involves three things - budgeting, time budgeting and prioritizing activities. Cyprus changes from the Cyprus Pound to the Euro on January 1st, so one thing we had to do was change the way we budget from Sterling/Dollars to Sterling/Euro (and Dollars). With the dollar weakening by the day we had to look at how projects that work in dollars will affect our cash flow. Also meant that except with partners from the USA we will either work in Sterling or Euros, whereas we had worked in Sterling or Dollars.

In reviewing all the finances to produce a budget we found that the most significant cost in terms of labour was not the administration of all the services we provide to partners, but the ongoing development in terms of labour for the services. Ongoing development is the upgrades to the services we need to do each year to ensure that all the security etc is working and up to date. For instance, for email it takes more than 8 man weeks of labour to do the annual upgrades. So we have decided that as a result of this we will add in an extra line to our invoices to partners to show the cost of doing this so that get a truer idea of the costs of these services.

That overlaps with looking at our time budget. Our total labour cost in administrating services is nearly half a man year and our total labour cost in development/upgrades for services is over 1 man year. When you take into account organization admionistration, vacations etc, we reckoned it basically took Pete and me working full time to keep going. And we are not here to be a service organization!

We realised that if we continue on as we are, we have no time for the new projects that are coming up. These new projects are more important to our aims and objectives as an organization than some of the projects we had been providing services for for partners. We're not saying that some of our partner projects are unimportant, to them they are, and to other people they are, and if we had time we would help. It's just they are not core to our organization. So we took a long hard look at what we are doing in the service area. It was difficult, most of the services we provide to others we need for our own projects too.

There was only one thing we could find we could cut that would not adversely affect our own projects. Its quite a big service we have been providing to five of our partners. But if we can redeem any time for the projects that are critical to us then it has to be cut. We won't be popular!

So that looks like it just might work, especially if we can expand and take on a couple more workers this next year as apprentices so that by 2009 they are starting to carry more of the workload. In discussions with one partner it looks possible we shall have funding for this to happen...

But... this week I have a couple of colleagues over from the Middle East and they have brought with them a number of other projects they want us to help with. Groan. In Europe and North America you just 'Sorry, no way'. But in the Middle East, where relationships are key this is a big problem. So, they were expecting us to increase in what we could do with them and we are trying to decrease. What's more they are looking at some of our freelance staff to do more work for them, which will make them less available for us. Aieee... just when you think life is complicated enough, it gets more complicated.

Flashed past...

2007-11-29T20:34:00.000+02:00

I have been back just one month and sometimes it seems like a year! Actually that's because so much has happened or rather so much has been done.

Having an administrator is definitely a blessing. They insist the administration gets done! So lots of the things that have been put on one site and hope they will go away have been found and are being done. What has become obvious is that too much of what happens around here is dependent upon my knowledge. And that's gotta change. And it is. I have set up a shared information system for the office so that instead of most files living on my computer they now live on the main shared information server.

Doing this was part technical and part administrative. Technically it involved setting up one of the office servers to be a samba server. Basically a samba server looks like a Windows server (and this one is set up to look like a Windows Domain Server as would be used in a secure office environment) but without any of the costs of actually having a Windows server! Alongside this I have added a Namazu full text search engine so that we can find any files on the shared server - it's no good having the information if we cannot find it! Alongside setting it up technically was copying the files from my computer to the right place on the server [all 1,538 of them] and sorting out with some sort of logic, which needed to be written down, for how we will all use the system.

Alongside this was the administrative task [which I had kept ignoring] of sending out all the invoices to our partner organizations, which should have been done within the last six months and which I hadn't found time for. Having an administrator also meant we had to make this more logical, so work out a proper budget and cost sheet etc. Great to have done and hopefully will mean that Paula can do most of the work in the future for these... as well as keeping lists of when they should be done etc.

Budget... yes, that has taken a lot of time, but we now have a 2008 draft budget, which Peter and I need to go through next week and agree how we will move forward in 2008. Cyprus changes to the Euro on 1 January, so that had to be taken into account and we are now working things out in Euros and Sterling so we can compare.

We now have a regular Monday morning meeting where we go through the past week and next week so that tasks are somewhat more structured. Of course in doing so we realise how unstructured we were and Peter thinks we need some way of prioritizing tasks.

Actually Peter has done a really great task this last month - he has researched and worked out a migration plan for changing our Internet connections. We met with the representative of one of the providers today and signed the agreement. Basically this will mean that we pay the same amount we are at the moment but will get 3 times the service - from 1.5M down and 256 up we go to 4M down and 756 up. This will help us in 2008 develop some of the video streaming we hope to do and also help us with better Skype and other VOIP calls around the region.

Talking of telephone calls, one thing that has been really bugging me has been the phone system in the office. Its really old and antiquated and takes a lot of time to keep working. One thing we are hoping to do is replace it with a new VOIP system next year when we get a gift from one church to pay for it. VOIP? Basically normal phone switchboards are analogue, using normal phones, whereas VOIP [which stands for Voice Over IP] uses digital phones that connect to the normal computer system and a server computer acts as a sort of exchange. We could really do with someone coming out for a month or two to set this up for us... any volunteers?

Today a couple of friends of Peter's arrived for a week as volunteers. One of them will be doing some redecoration - where we had a roof leak last winter the ceiling needs repainting, and the other person will be helping develop a structure for the short term projects. Short term projects? See if any of these interest you:

Creating a Linux system as fully featured router
Installing and configuring an Asterisk VOIP exchange
Creating a unified login system for us
Developing a Desktop radio studio
Evaluating some CRM software and integrating SMS connectivity
Getting a Linksys WRT54GL to act as a fully featured QOS router by reinstalling the firmware
Developing and writing up how to get WiFi to work long distance using cantenna's and satellite dishes

Oh, and I have also developed two Keynote presentations - one about our vision for showing to partners and guests and another for one of the churches that supports us. Keynote? Its the mac equivalent to PowerPoint and can be considered to be PowerPoint on steroids! Not that I'm biased or anything...

Playing catchup

2007-10-30T20:28:00.000+02:00

Well... been back at work two days and playing catchup. Pete [my co-leader of the team] is off in another country in the Middle East. So I guess I am holding the baby again too.

Paula, our new administrator, has started and I spent Monday morning working with her to try to sort out some of the recurring charges and other admin issues we need to deal with [and delegate to her]. Actually already I am seeing how she will make a difference. She is noticing things that have been falling behind for some time and looking at ways of making them work.

In the afternoon I spent time with Phyo, our trainee programmer/designer catching up with what he has been doing and helping set his next priorities. The sort out a couple of technical things - one with a printer Pete had been having problems with while I was away and another with one of the radio streams that had stopped working because one of our partners had removed a file from the server...

Today... well... one thing we have been bad at is fund raising, but I have an invitation to the USA to meet some potential funders there. I have been sent a 28 page document to fill in, and today I have been wading through it. Some questions are easy, many need quite a lot of looking at. For instance a percentage break down of how we use our funds. We don't have those figures at our fingertips [maybe in a years time when Paula sorts us all out we will, but not now!]

Miracle of miracles the Internet banking is now working [started while I was away] so that has reduced the workload for our book-keeper somewhat. However, I dare not tell you the ongoing saga of the banking problems... this with our UK bank this time which has sucessfully forgotten to reply to my FAXes, failed to send out a bank card, failed to send it a second time, then sent two bank cards to a third wrong address... one day [maybe] all our banking facilities will work... including hopefully the Internet banking on our UK account.

Of course, although the Cyprus Internet banking is now working , the Bank of Cyprus did have to show how inefficient they were as well, by sending us a new Euro bank book for an account that is now closed!

Home after vacation

2007-10-26T20:26:00.000+03:00

One of the things I wanted to do on my holiday was to try to catch up with my email. Email had been something that felt like the sword of Damocles over me, and as fast as I tried to catch up... I never got there and this 'thing' was hanging over me worrying me that I had missed something or not replied to something.

I had not managed to file emails for about a year and in the process of filing I found that I have been corresponding with 394 individuals and 136 companies and organisations.

I replied to many that I should have replied to over the year and after working hard at it managed to get down to 50 outstanding messages. I felt that was a possible number to clear over the remaining 10 days of my holiday - 5 per day. The trouble was more kept coming in and as I wrote between 5 and 10 per day, I never seemed to get down below the 50 outstanding messages. So the sword still hangs over my head!

The holiday has been really great - basically just hanging out with Daniel and at times his friends. Yesterday we managed to get a day sailing - the doctor from the ship he is on, Daniel and I rented a Hobie 14 [14 foot catamaran] and took it out for a couple of hours sailing. We were sailing in the South China Sea and the wind was light. Its a wonderful place to sail. I wish we had more opportunity to sail there.

Daniel is a natural sailor and I look forward to the time he will be back in Cyprus for a few months, when hopefully he and I can go out sailing at least once per week.

We also helped with the International Night for the ship - this is a presentation, this time done in the local Anglican Cathedral about what the ship is all about. Because so many people wanted to come they wanted to do a video relay to another building. Talk about following in father's footsteps... Daniel was directing the video relay and I was one of the camera operators.

It was great to see the vitality of the young people from the ship in this presentation, though like many church things they couldn't allow the creative presentation to stand on its own as a form of communication and had to have a talk as well. I guess nothing is perfect... except God!

Biggest problem they faced was lack of equipment - they had about 25% of the equipment they really need for this sort of presentation so everywhere people were trying their best... and struggling. Nevertheless, the audience enjoyed it. It would be interesting to see what these young people could do with the right equipment and the time and opportunity to develop the presentation fully.

By the time you read this we will be back in Cyprus. We're not really looking forward to the trip back. We have a 3 hour flight to Kuala Lumpur, a 12 hour layover in KL, an 10 hour flight to Dubai, 3 hours in Dubai and finally a 5 hour flight to Cyprus. The flight from KL to Dubai is overnight... famously called the 'red eye' due to what the passengers look like at the end of it.

I guess it will be back to trying to feed the email beast now we are back in Cyprus... looking at what I was filing I think I read more than 22,000 emails per year and write at least 2,500 emails per year. Admittedly that is less than it used to be as so much is now done with IM. I haven't logged on to any of the IM systems while I have been away, though urgent messages have come via SMS [didn't count these, but more than 50 of these] and direct email to my phone [52 of those].

I was hearing how the the officers of Daniel's ship, like the officers of most ships these days have loads of emails back and forth to the company. Gone are the days of the master of a ship BEING the master. Accountability means communicating and involving decisions. The same is true in most lines of work these days. I wonder how much more we would achieve if we trusted people to make the best decision before God they can and didn't have all these extra layers of communication and accountability. My bet is we would gain between 1 and 2 days per week and possibly more.

Hong Kong National Day

2007-10-02T15:28:00.000+03:00

Yesterday was Hong Kong National Day. Some shops were closed, but many still open [to make money, a primary concern of most people in Hong Kong]. The ship that Daniel was on had to go out and anchor in the bay as a cruise liner was coming in to use the berth that they had been using. Apparently they get cheaper berths if they do this.

The reason I think the cruise liner was there was for National Day. It was absolutely ideally situated for the fireworks in the evening. I think the Chinese invented fireworks and certainly this display was the best I have ever seen, the the crowd control by the Hong Kong police was excellent... except that it meant we had a less than ideal view of the fireworks! However, the event was brilliantly organised, with visitor/tourist desks at street corners manned by people who told us why streets were closed off and where to go to be able to see what we did see.

Today was Daniel's day off this week, so we went over to Hong Kong island [we are on Kowloom now] and went up the tram to the peak. I'm not sure if Sue had her eyes closed for the tram up the mountain... she had threatened to do so if it got too scary. As we left the wind came up and we almost felt like we were going to be blown off the peak.

When we came down we visited Stanley Street looking for a camera for Timothy. We failed in the quest, but did manage to find a drawing tablet for Daniel which will be part of his 21st Birthday.

The ferry between Kowloom and Hong Kong is amazing... not much different from how it was 100 years ago. Great fun to see the harbour from the ferry, and to see Daniel's ship from the harbour.

We have come aboard Daniel's ship for the next 12 days and its wonderful to be in a cabin with space to sit and crash out, type on the computer, make coffee... and a bathroom with space to turn round in!

Hong Kong

2007-10-01T15:48:00.000+03:00

We're now in Hong Kong, visiting our son Daniel. It's good to be here. The trip was not good though.

We flew Emirates from London through Dubai to Hong Kong. There were a number of flights shown as connecting flights one with a 2 hour layover in Dubai and one with a 9 hour layover in Dubai. Because flights that are shown as 'connecting' normally have accommodation provided I assumed we would get accommodation for the longer layover. No... we didn't. So we spent a long and boring night in Dubai airport, kind of drowsing, Tim somewhat sleeping on the floor, Sue curled up on a chair and me feeling very stiff and very painful in my back.

Why so painful in my back? Well... as soon as we got onto the aircraft in London I found the chair was horribly, terribly uncomfortable, with a bar across the back sticking into my kidneys/spine. Sue said this was the most comfortable airline chair she had ever sat on with support for her back whereas normally it wasn't. And she felt mine and said it was the same as hers. So I assumed that for the first time ever she has a comfortable chair and mine was painful.

I tried jamming the pillow below this bar, and that relieved it a little. I tried folding the blanket and jamming that below this bar, and that was slightly better. Both were still very painful. It was sufficiently painful I was gritting my teeth from the pain for part of the flight to Dubai. Since it was comfortable for Sue, maybe at least she would get a good flight.

Second flight from Dubai to Hong Kong, we found that the chairs had labels on the buttons... and one of them controlled this bar that digs into the bottom of your back (or makes it comfortable if your body is like Sue's and not like mine). So I could move the bar back and reduce the pain in my back. I couldn't eliminate it totally, but it was significantly better, and with a pillow below the bar it was nearly comfortable.

We finally arrived in Hong Kong. We had had problems finding appropriate accommodation. What we wanted was a good basic, cheap hotel/guest house, nothing fancy... and something that took bookings online. We had the Lonely Planet guide [great, we highly recommend these] and we were using that coupled with searches on Google.

Looking online and in Lonely Planet there seemed to be two choices: cheap or expensive. Nothing in the middle. Last year in Singapore we managed to find a couple of low/mid-priced hotels that were very good, but here in Hong Kong there seemed nothing in the middle at all and the expensive were very expensive. So we booked a couple of rooms in a cheap place... also we wanted en suite bathrooms rather than shared bathrooms. Oh... and we wanted it to be close to where Daniel's ship was moored.

The booking confirmation email was slightly alarming with warnings about people accosting you outside as you went in. Daniel visited the place and his comments were something along the lines of the place being basic.

We arrived... very very tired... could have slept anywhere.

The double room for Sue and me was 1.5 metres by 2 metres (5 foot by 6.5 foot) with an en suite bathroom [including toilet, wash basin and shower about 80 cm by 80 cm (2'6" by 2'6"). The bed was 4 ft wide which means there was a 1 foot gap to the wall alongside and 1 foot 6 inches at the end. Never mind... we slept.

Following morning Tim and I went out to check out another place up the road that was in Lonely Planet didn't have online bookings. Much better... still very very basic... we booked a room for that night but we would have to move rooms again the following morning. There was a bunk free in Daniel's cabin and so Tim moved in with Daniel and we moved to the new place.

Hong Kong seems like a dirtier, busier, very much more expensive version of Singapore. We have been here 5 days now. It's nice to see Daniel, but Hong Kong is nothing very much to write home about.

In order to do email/web we have to go to Starbucks as we bought a 30 day Internet card that works in some branches of Starbucks and some other locations which we have yet to find.

Starbucks here is cheaper than Cyprus or Lebanon, but still pretty expensive compared to other places, and the coffee nothing very much to speak of. In fact I think I shall be pleased if I don't have to visit another Starbucks for another year after this trip. One of the branches has plastic columns with millions and millions of coffee beans in them as a display. I thought what a waste... well maybe considering the quality of the coffee its not, but that's another story...

I am beginning to feel pretty fed up with the waste I see everywhere. On the ship Daniel is on they have had to change from containers for the margarine to individual sealed portions in plastic. So every meal there are hundreds of plastic containers thrown away.

I understand this on the aeroplane, as a necessary evil, but on the ship its ludicrous. And whenever we have one of these Starbucks coffees there's also loads of waste too... the plastic cup, the lid, the heatproof sleeve. And if its a cold drink then add a straw to the list [keep the heatproof sleeve so that you don't get frostbite on your fingers].

Why can't we wash things up and use them again?

Two weeks in the UK

2007-09-24T15:46:00.000+03:00

It's a strange time coming back to the UK and doing talks and things telling people about my work. I had just over two weeks in the UK doing this. In some ways I love it and in other ways I hate it.

I do enjoy telling people about what I do, because it shows what God is doing in the area. I often tell people how we are just almost running alongside while God is doing things. Because we are working with other people who speak the languages, we are doing primarily technical, production and guidance on content. The actual content is written, recorded etc by others. So we cannot evaluate fully what it is like. We partly evaluate through the popularity or otherwise of the material we produce, and the response to the material. Those are both encouraging.

We have also recently evaluated, by getting ours and other people's material evaluated content-wise on a system that we developed to score how different materials hit their target audience. That too was encouraging.

So if all that's encouraging when I tell people about what we are doing, why do I hate it? The reason is that I feel I am telling only half the story, yes, I tell some of the struggles too, but not the long term emotional struggles.

Quite a bit of the time I feel that I am creatively stunted in what we are doing and in what I see others doing. Because I feel that we are not really being as creative as we should be I feel that I am not telling the whole story. Some of what we do is creative, but lots is not. Lots is boring.

And that overlaps with the talks that I give to people about what we do. Often I fall asleep in sermons because they are pretty boring. When the vicar from one of the churches in the UK we come from came out to Cyprus a while back, he came to church with me and over lunch admitted to the family he wasn't sure if he should wake me in the sermon as I was sleeping so peacefully.

Most talks, most radio programmes, most TV programmes seem to be 'the Bible says this...' But when Jesus was on earth much of the time he didn't do talks along the lines of 'the Bible says this...'. He told stories. Interesting stores. Creative stories. Sometimes he took existing stories and added creative new ends to them.

So why is so much of our communication boring as Christians? We justify what we do by counting the effects... so many people heard, so many people responded. Yes, that's important. We do the same, but I have the increasing nagging feeling that we are missing out on our calling to be creative, to seek interesting ways of telling people about Jesus and to do in a a style that is good.

After all, when God created the earth He said it was good, and we are created in the image of God with the same inbuilt nature to be creative.

Banks... we love 'em... NOT!

2007-09-03T17:34:00.000+03:00

Well, I went to the bank this morning, picked up the user id and pin for both directors and one digipass... yes, you did read that right ONE Digipass. They didn't send two! Oh well, at least we can start using the internet banking. Back to the office, phone the bank [yes, because you cannot do this at the bank] and then the tedious security questions... and at last my internet banking is working.

Go to my trusty mac notebook, open Firefox, go yo the bankofcyprus.com website and type in userid and pin [having verified that what at first sight appears to be a unsecure login is in fact a secure login left appearing to be unsecure to catch the unwary]. And... it doesn't work! No, Firefox is not supported on the mac.

So I tried Safari. Got further, and if I looked it at 'view source' and copied the URL from the Refresh meta-tag... hey presto it worked. Since more and more people are abandoning Microsoft Internet Explorer, I have no idea why there are so many badly written websites around that use the 'features' that make IE dangerous to use. Oh well...

Next, phone HSBC. The company credit card didn't work last week. First time I was trying to use it. Got the interminable press * for this, press 1 for that and... yes a wonderful option 'Please enter your date of birth...' I did. The disembodied voice said 'This is not the date of birth we have on record, please enter you date of birth...' I did the same again. I got the same reponse. Am I in an endless loop, can I get out? Ahhh... suddenly I get a 'If you are a business customer, please press 1 to continue'. I do that. I wait. I listen to boring tinny music. I wait. I listen some more.

Eventually a human being comes on the phone. Ah, I will try to find out why it is blocked, please hold while I talk to the relevant department. I wait. listen to boring tinny music. I wait. I listen some more. Thank you for holding, I will now transfer you to the Credit Card Department. I wait. I listen to boring tinny music. Somebody on a distant line [are they in India or Timbuktu?] says that Yes, your company credit card is blocked. [I knew that, that's why I was phoning!] Eventually he finds that because I hadn't used it the bank had blocked it [so that when I did want to use it it would not work]. Great. Please can you unblock it? No, you have to do that at the bank. I can't do that, I'm in Cyprus and the bank is in Wales. OK, can I FAX a request to unblock it. Yes, that might work, I will find the FAX number for you.

Now, there's one more thing. The card I have runs out at the end of October [even though its blocked] and I would like a new one now, not in two months time as I am traveling. No problem sir, but you have to do this at the bank. I can't do that, I'm in Cyprus and the bank is in Wales. OK, can I FAX a request for a new card? Yes, that might work, you could try that.

So now I have to type a FAX, sign a FAX and send it to the bank... but wait a moment. Excuse me sir, but did you know that there was also a deposit account attached to your bank account and that since you have quite a bit of money in current account you are actually losing interest? No, I didn't know that. What is the account number? Yes, I can tell you the account number no problem... Can you transfer some from the current to the deposit account for me? Yes, no problem, sir. [Hmmm... why was the thing I hadn't thought about easy and what I really wanted to do impossible?]

One final thing, I want internet banking set up please. You have to do that at the branch, sir. I can't do that, I'm in Cyprus and the bank is in Wales. You can download the forms and send them to us. The url is www.hsbc.com/bib You only need to send us the first five pages when you have printed it.

The form reminds me of the new e-tickets for aeroplanes... you know, the ones to save paper. If you've not had an e-ticket, it works like this: The old tickets used NCR paper, approx the equivalent of 1 or at most 2 pieces of very thin A4 paper cut into approx 1/4 size of A4. The new tickets you have to print out yourself and printed on 4 pages of 100 gsm printer paper. I estimate we are now using 4-6 times as many trees for the new e-tickets than the old paper ones.

Anyhow the HSBC form is 10 sides of A4, of which actually I only need to return two pages not five pages. So I have completed the form and then scanned it and sent a scan copy to my co-director in the UK for him tom complete and take to the bank. Aieee... no, for some oddball reason the files I sent print out 4 times size and won't fit onto an A4 page [they did here!]. So... I have to take them over with me at the end of the week and hand them over to him on Saturday... yes, that means another week is lost.

I wonder how much cheaper a pair of shoes, a motor car or my weekly shopping bill would be if banks were actually efficient and I didn't waste so much time trying to get them to do simple stuff. I think I may have spent approx 1 man month on these extra banking things over the last year-and-a-half... that would be a net extra cost of approx 2000-3000 in a commercial company, maybe more... multiplied by [say] 1000 companies in Cyprus with similar problems that makes 2-3 million pounds lost to bank inefficiency. I dread to think what the costs are worldwide.

Internet banking in Cyprus

2007-08-29T18:42:00.000+03:00

After only 18 month or so of Cypriot [or maybe EU] bureaucracy we have our office bank accounts open... We are a UK registered organization wanting accounts in Cyprus. It is the EU after all. All we now needed was internet banking. Of course, that would mean more forms, I was expecting that. They haven't heard about the decimation of the rain forests for wood pulp from trees here, it's more like if you can create a form with one side as important, we'll make it 5 sides, and print it on 5 separate sheets of paper.

OK, so I fill in the form, which has to be co-signed by my co-director in the UK. I take the form away, send it to my co-director, he signs and sends it back. The form is a template company resolutions saying 'We'd like to use Internet banking'. Simple.

I take the form back, and was told, 'Where's the company stamp?' Next followed a 15 minute discussion where I explained that we didn't use company stamps in the UK. I remember using a company seal approximately 25 years ago, but not seen one since. [long phone call to aged mother in Athens, stockbroker or baby-minder... I suppose it could have even been her supervisor...] Eventually they decide that they will accept the form without a rubber stamp that I could have forged for one pound down town.

'OK, now we'll add this to your Internet bank login'. I don't have an Internet bank, my wife does, but I don't. 'Ahhh, because your wife applied we automatically added you'. But, I don't want it added, I want it separate and I don't want to have internet banking for my personal accounts, my wife deals with that and... phone call to her supervisor [well, someone else anyhow, since I don't speak Greek, it could have been her son, a priest or the prime minister for all I knew]. 'Yes, we can accept the form without the rubber stamp and I will create a new account/login for your business internet banking'. Guess what? More trees die, another 5 pages of forms to sign. 'The new login will be here in 2 or 3 days'.

A week or so later I collect the account details and my secret pin/password [and a cheque book for a bank account that I had already closed... another tree dies...] I am told 'Before you can use it you have to phone this number and they will activate it'

Back to the office [too easy to phone from the bank] and I phone the number written on a scrap of paper. 'I just want to ask you a few personal questions as a security procedure... what is your passport number?' Nothing as simple as your mother's maiden name... we all remember our passport numbers don't we... having found my passport I recite the number 'Sorry sir, that is not your passport number' It is... I have it right in front of me. 'Do you have your old passport, maybe it is that one...' Great idea using a passport number that changes every few years as an identifier...

'OK, let's try this as alternative, please tell me the bank account number attached to this login...' I tell her. 'No, sir, that is not the number...' Am I me? Have I transmogrified into someone else? I am failing the security questions badly... 'What is your date of birth?' I pass that one. I then find that in fact they have attached my personal accounts to this login not [as specifically requested] only the business ones. I politely ask them to connect the correct accounts. 'I cannot do that sir, you have to go to the bank to do that'. Bank to the bank.

Firmly [and frustrated] I say: Please can you connect the correct accounts to this login? 'Ah... I was going to contact you...' [she fumbles though a 10 cm pile of papers and finds a complement slip clipped to the form I had brought in 10 days earlier] '... there was a problem with your application' Apparently, since they had provided us with a draft resolution and they had printed in the names and we had decided to add an extra name in handwriting [it is after all our company resolution] this was causing a problem. We would have to start all over again.

Just a minute... I have my login, all I want it the accounts attached to it changed to the ones I specifically requested. [Another phone call with her cousin, primary school teacher or landlady's daughter.] 'This login is for your personal accounts' No, I never requested that, or filled in any forms for that, and specifically requested not to have that facility. So it must be for the one that I filled in the forms for, which is for my business accounts...

'Sorry, you'll have to start again... I will print the forms and you can fill them in again for this additional login...' Another tree dies. Just a minute, these forms are totally different from the forms you gave me last week. 'Yes, those must have been for your personal accounts...' But I didn't want, I specifically didn't want internet banking for my personal accounts... we spent time with you phoning [your aunt in Australia, your garage mechanic or whoever] to clarify this and that is why you gave me those forms.

I complete the new forms. I need this quickly, can I have this sent down today so that I can use it today... my book-keeper is in today and I need to use it. 'If we FAX it to Nicosia, you can have it tomorrow...' Just one problem... where we had written in the directors handwriting on the resolution we had passed as a company...

[another phone call with brother-in-law, hairdresser or local coffee shop owner... no... another bank employer comes over summoned, it was a phone call 5 metres across the office]

'Ah, Mr Richard, so nice to see you... how are you?' Discussion in Greek. Further discussion in Greek. Elongated discussion in Greek. They take out the 'white out' and paint out one place on their form that we had injudiciously written on... oops sorry, I mean our company resolution that we as directors had written on. Now they can FAX it to Nicosia and Nicosia will never know...

OK, now just one thing, it all has to be done on the computer. I peer over watching to check they do it correctly. Well... maybe. Excuse me why have you left unchecked the box for doing transfers to third parties. 'Oh... do you want this?' Yes, of course.

'You will have to buy a Digipass if you want to do that...' What is a Digipass? They explained. Its what I know as a SecureID from RSA Security, and I probably know more about them than they do as we are thinking of implementing this at the office ourselves and have spent time talking to the technical people about the implications of this system. Yes please, I'll have one of those for each director. 'Please can you fill in these two forms...' Two more trees die.

'The new login and Digipass will be here tomorrow...'

We'll see.

Thoughts from the airport

2007-08-28T09:05:00.001+03:00

I'm sitting writing this blog entry in the airport on my way to a meeting in another country. The meeting is to introduce one friend of mine to another friend of mine... with mutual interests. Sounds like a long way to take a flight to make an introduction? In this part of the world relationships are very important and making introductions can make all the difference in the world. So this sort of meeting is actually very important, and a critical part of my work here.

I have completed the multi-language DVD project at last working in Arabic, Farsi and English subtitles. I haven't solved the dual layer problem, that's for another day, but I did fix all the language/subtitle/multiple video problems. I was really pleased with that. We have now send it out to a number of people for checking.

DVD Studio Pro is a very good product and one that I am very pleased we now have. To do this project I had to use 'scripting' which is a more advanced feature than any of the other DVD authoring packages we have had in the past. We tread a difficult line: Final Cut Studio is a very expensive package indeed, but we have spent so much time fiddling about with other packages and hardware that having this really saves a lot of time.

Pete was back in the office and seeing all the things we have done over the summer... but we still have problems with infrastructure... by that I mean water! Our offices are in the top floor flat and we have been having very high water bills. Over the summer we found that the two flats were connected together. The day a friend came to sort that out was the first day of the official holiday period here... so all the plumbers merchants are shut for two weeks. They are open again this week so hopefully that will be sorted.

Also the toilet is having problems... a leak on the water inlet. We have had this fixed 3 times in the last year, but to no avail. Its just too old so we will have to replace it. In theory this is the landlord's responsibility, but because he wants to sell the property at some stage he will not do any expensive maintenance, so Pete and I decided we just have to get it done.

Second day back Pete discovered we are playing a cat and mouse game with the email spammers. Earlier in the year we had introduced a 'gleylisting' system for email which had radically reduced our email. 'greylisting' is a system which says to a new incoming sender of email 'please come back later we are busy right now' and if they do so more than 7 minutes later we accept it. The reason this worked was that legitimate email senders did come back later and spammers did not, because their aim was to dump millions of emails as quickly and possible and if they couldn't be delivered at once they didn't bother.

But... now the spammers are coming back later. Peter discovered they were coming back 10 minutes and 15 seconds or 10 minutes and 30 seconds later - presumeably because most greylisters have set their time-out at 10 minutes. So we have advanced our timeout to 11 minutes. Cat and mouse... I have no doubt they will change their timeouts too and we will be playing this game again and again.

We also started a new short term worker this week who is writing country profiles for one of out websites. So the office feels busy again with four of us in the office every day and two others in on other days.

One month... feels like one week!

2007-08-19T15:18:00.000+03:00

Nearly a month since I last posted. Seems like only a week. Peter is back this week, so will be sharing the workload again till I leave in September and he is left all alone!

Yes, we do now have bank accounts open in the name of the organisation! We have also changed the accounting package we use to SQL-Ledger. SQL-Ledger is a very good multi-currency and multi-user accounting package that runs on most systems [we are running it on a Linux server] and... its free!

I installed SQL-Ledger and then created the 'chart of accounts' to make it work and then got it printing... sounds easy? I have to have so many different skills to do this work. Actually creating the chart of accounts was tedious but relatively easy, whereas getting the system to print was frustrating and relatively difficult. But now it is working and David and I have had two Wednesdays [he comes in every Wednesday] working on the new system. I shall the whole of each Wednesday with him before we left in September so that he is comfortable with the new system...

Phyo, our trainee designer/programmer has been working on two things: 1) a new administration menu system for all our admin systems [we will use if for administration of web-sites too later on] and 2) designing logo/business cards etc for the organisation. Both have taken some of my time supervising.

Also been frustratedly trying to make dual-layer DVDs on Final Cut Studio. So far not succeeded. I have read and read online about it and some people seem to have no problems at all, others immense problems. I am one of those with immense problems. I am still working on that.

Dual-layer DVDs are like the sort that you normally get when you get a feature film, in that you can store theoretically about 120 minutes at most on a single layer DVD and up to 240 minutes on a dual layer. So a feature film with with all the extras usually needs a dual layer. But... I say theoretically get 120 minutes, this depends on the quality you want on the DVD, the higher the quality the less minutes. So for some projects I need to be able to reliably create dual layer DVDs. So far I have not succeeded.

One of our partner organisations had problems streaming video again, so we took over, again... but its Windows Media. Horrid. So unreliable. Microsoft have admitted a problem with the system and sent a patch out with a 'hack' to the registry as well... which is documented 'at you own risk'. Our partner says they will move all the streaming to Scandinavia in September... good luck to the new people...

In between that all I have been doing all the 'duty engineer' roles as Peter is away. An example: Email comes in from partner tech support to say that they have seen on one of the sites having an 'invalid security certificate'. I gently write back to say something along the lines of 'we warned you about this and told you to notify your users'. Response from tech support guy: 'Yes I told my users but forgot about it myself'. [My paraphrase] If I was a lawyer I would bill them for an hour or my time!

Paula, our new 'administrator' [part of the job is to work out a job description, ie work out what we need administrating and how to do it], has been in a few days and we have been going through things together. She starts regularly some time in September.

27 years, 18 months and 3 days

2007-07-21T23:09:00.000+03:00

Spot the pattern in 27 years, 18 months and 3 days? I've been thinking about patterns this week. It was our 27th wedding anniversary, one of only 3 wedding anniversaries that match the pattern 1, 4, 27... people never get to the next in the sequence... 256! So what links 27 years, 18 months and 3 days? They are all related to activities this week. The first is obvious it's our wedding anniversary and we went away to a hotel in the mountains to get out of the heat, only to find that even up in the mountains it was 36 C. However, the break was excellent and we had a great time together.

18 months and 3 days each relate to what we call 'Cyprus time' meaning late. 18 months is the length of time we have been trying to open a bank account for the organization here on the island. You wouldn't believe how complex it has been. Getting documents from the UK, getting an apostile attached by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to show they are legal documents, getting a letter from our bank in the UK, then the Cyprus bank losing all the documents that had taken time and money to acquire. But at the end of last week I was in the bank withdrawing money and the manageress said that she had found all the documents and we could proceed. So I went in on Wednesday morning to meet her. No luck, she said come back next Monday. I really hope on Monday we shall solve all the problems and get the bank accounts opened properly.

The money was being withdrawn to pay the deposit for the Mac Pro computer for the edit suite mentioned in the last post. It would take 4 days they assured me for it to be delivered. 4 days 'Cyprus time' meant in reality 8 days. But that is pretty good considering it came from Holland. It arrived today. So I spent this afternoon with my youngest son getting everything working on it and now we have a really very good working video editing system. The whole thing is now digital: the camera records digitally on mini DV tapes, is pushed from the digital video recorder to the computer using Firewire, the computer monitor uses DVI and the video monitor HDMI and then we make DVDs from what we filmed. I was not sure if the DVI and HDMI bits were going to work [I only trust things I have done, not things that 'should work']. But it all works well. And... we completed the broadcast DVD for the Farsi dub we have been working on for months and months.

Oh, and by the way, this is what the Mac Pro looks like [image curtesy Wikipedia]. Apple always seem to make their computers look different. The handles/wings on the top and bottom for instance... I ought to run a competition for the best guess as to what it might be if it wasn't a computer. The fans seen behind the grill [which run almost silently] make it look more like a device for testing a jet engines [obviously you have to imagine the scale of the thing much bigger than it really is]. We used to say 'answers on a postcard to...' but in this digital world I guess it should be 'answers by SMS to...' Anyway leave a comment if you have any great ideas as to what alternatively it might be.

Actually the real competition is to find the key to the sequence in the first paragraph: 1, 4, 27, 256. I set this as a challenge to the two programmers in the office [one who loves maths]. He eventually got it. But can you?

Video Editing

2007-07-15T11:20:00.000+03:00

You'll have to click on the photo to see the annotations, but below is a picture of the new video edit suite that our friend wired all the jack plugs for. I ordered the new Macpro this week and it should come next week... Cyprus time... we'll see! When it does come the final few wires on the desk can be hidden and it will become even neater to work on.

A few weeks back I helped film a musical for a friend of mine and Tim (my son) is busy doing the audio editing and I am spending evenings and spare time video editing. We recorded the musical with three cameras on one night and one camera on two other nights so there are five cameras to choose from... but I have to ensure that they are all synchronized with the audio, which is easy for the cameras recorded on the same night but tricky for the other nights. Tim recorded the audio on a ProTools system in 16 tracks and this week he brought the drummer up and re-recorded all the drums as the live recording of the drums was not good enough.

The video edit suite is working 24/7 right now as during the working day its busy making... and hopefully finishing a Farsi dub of an Arabic film. There are two versions needed, one for satellite TV companies to broadcast and a second for distributing as a DVD in Iran and around the world. The DVD for distribution I hope will be bi-lingual Arabic/Farsi, which will be interesting to make as not only does the audio need to change with the language but also all the opening and closing captions.

The new big website is progressing very well. We got it to the stage where we could demonstrate the system to all our partners and show how it will work. There is a saying in programming that the first 90% takes 10% of the time and the final 10% takes 90% of the time. This will certainly be true in this project. We demonstrated the system, but it is only 10% or less working... there is still 90% to do!

The website is going to be very very different to anything else about in Arabic. Its a web 2.0 site - the first we have been involved with making and so there is a lot of learning. 'What's web 2.0?' I hear you ask. There is probably somewhere a good definition of Web 2.0 is significantly more interactive and media oriented. People are community related in Web 2.0 and rather than a one way flow of published information, there is an interaction of provider and audience into what is a seamless community.

The video project is moving slowly too with a totally new story idea being developed. Its something that slightly stresses me... this is one of the more interersting parts of my work, yet I have little time to develop it.

Juggling people and projects

2007-07-07T23:48:00.000+03:00

Its been a crazy week... good week, even great week, but crazy. Its been a week of juggling activities... I looked up juggle in online dictionary. Interesting definitions. #3 is the definition I mean, but I was juggling many jobs at the same time!

juggle
     n 1: the act of rearranging things to give a misleading
          impression 
     2: throwing and catching several objects simultaneously 
     v 1: influence by slyness 
     2: juggle an account, for example, so as to hide a deficit
     3: deal with simultaneously: "She had to juggle her job and her
        children"
     4: throw, catch, and keep in the air several things
        simultaneously

I have had two friends out from the UK [both staying at our guest flat], one is doing an audit of our financial records, which took a lot of questions to be answered by me. Part of the audit was to complete out 'asset register' which meant that we had to go round and check every computer/server/IP switch/monitor etc etc etc was correctly in the list of items we own.

Alongside this the other friend has has been wiring loads of jack plugs onto cables to complete the wiring of our video edit suite.. which involved me showing her how to do it and supervising all the wiring. And then she started redecorating Peter's office while he is away so that he comes back to a nice fresh office.

Alongside that I have had a colleague over from Egypt [and is staying at the office] and we are working on a new and very large website, which has totally new and unique features. Its a complex 6-9 month project. When finished it will [we hope] be very good but its a lot of work and there were loads of questions from him to me.

Alongside that I have been supervising our trainee programmer/designer on two projects, he is helping with this big project and writing a system to enable us to schedule duty periods of our monitoring system.

Alongside that I have been talking with another colleague [also staying at the office] about a video project we hope to shoot late this autumn... and he had a friend from a course he had just been on over to visit... [and is also staying at the office.]

Alongside that I have been responding to requests from Peter for more promotional materials to be copied and sent over to the UK.

Alongside that, with Peter away, I am duty engineer for his turns of duty...

Reviewing media, the UK and server[e] attacks

2007-06-23T17:48:00.000+03:00

Nearly a month has gone by since I wrote anything... My son is much more reliable. I don't know how he finds the time since he is almost as busy as I am.

Anyhow four things significant have happened in the last month, one could think of them as a week each but the first one took a month, the second two weeks and the last two a week each

review of all media
preparing for Peter to visit UK
visit from someone from UK
server attacks

We have been reviewing all the media projects we are involved with and those of our partners to see where we can be most strategically involved in the future. Sounds simple... but wasn't at all... you see we had to develop the methods to do the reviewing before doing teh reviewing! We have been talking about this for a couple of years or more, that is, developing a system for evaluating media for our audience. An American colleague did some work on it about a year ago but really we got nowhere till a guy from the Middle East joined us for a month.

Alongside me, he developed scales for evaluating the media and then spend days watching videos, satellite TV channels, listening to Internet radio stations and reading through web sites. The result is an extremely useful evaluation of all the projects we are involved with and others we might be involved with through partners. This evaluation took a lot of my time and Peter suggested that I should write a book to help others in their thinking. I wrote the draft outline for three chapters and have had good feedback from people who have read it. I have realised that though the book is very necessary, it will be a big job. I shall probably write more today.

Alongside this we were preparing publicity stuff for Peter to take back to the UK. I wish that things like this could be focussed on, not just rushed and fitted in between other things. The new colour laser printer has proved to be extremely valuable in doing all the publicity.

Then we had a guest from one of our supporting churches in the UK. Actually it was the vicar/pastor. He spent a week with us catching up with all that we are doing. It was really great to have him come out.

Then the inevitable... we have had with one of the servers over the past 3-4 days. We reset that server many times per day, and then it works for a while. We will be resetting again and again over the weekend and then starting again to sort on Monday morning.

We had thought it was all caused by Denial of Service Attacks from Egypt [we were definitely getting these and the server crashed after each attempt]. Then on Friday morning we had a crash at a time we were NOT being attacked so we spoke to the hardware support people in Germany thinking this was a hardware problem. The moved one Hard Disk to a different location in the server as it was apparently quite hot. The server crashed again. They replaced the Power Supply. The server crashed again. They changed the hard disks over between the two servers... this to prove if it was related to the Hard Disks or the motherboard. It crashed again. Each 'crash again' was after a few hours so we were waiting each time to see... So we have now diagnosed the problem to be related to the Hard Disks. When I had spoken to the head of Tech Support in Germany we talked about moving all the data to a new server and rebuilding on totally new hardware. We will start this on Monday morning.

If we had not had the DoS attack we would have traced the hardware problem sooner, but we were fighting that [which was a pain, as soon as we blocked an IP they changed IP!] and thought that was the cause of the problem. Now we know its hardware we will change as soon as possible. Rebuilding the server will be a pain!

We hope a colleague from Egypt will come over soon and the project for him is to get mySQL based DNS working so we can swap sites around servers quickly to not have this problem in the future. The alternative is to use virtual IP based switching, but because of security problems the Data Centre locks IPs to MAC addresses to stop spoof attacks so we cannot use virtual IP switching :-( Now I expect I have really confused you... MAC addresses? Every network adaptor in the world has a unique hardware address called its MAC address. In order that people don't pretent to be you, ie spoof your server, the system matches MAC to the IP address.

Well, that's about it. By last night I was extremely tired and fed up. I hate all these technical problems - I would much rather be working on the media and letting other people do the techie stuff, but we don't have people to do the techie stuff so we have to do it, and with Peter in the UK for six weeks I am left 'holding the baby' so to speak!

MacWho?

2007-05-28T19:53:00.000+03:00

This week has been a time of supervising a number of projects. We are just about to go live on a site that will help Arab speakers who want to know more about Jesus to study what the Bible says about Him... so I have been checking everything is ready for the launch and then we are trying to set up a Skype conference call to check that everyone involved is happy before it is made live. Trying to co-ordinate 4 people in 3 time zones and 3 continents to approve this has proved somewhat trying and we still haven't had the meeting.

Alongside this I have been supervising our new trainee on a project that will help us monitor all the servers better... and... trying to get someone else working on a mac-mini that is supposed to be sent to Bagdad. But... the mac-mini that was absolutely promised delivery this last Tuesday didn't turn up. Cyprus is part western, part middle eastern so in some ways its not surprising. However, what is surprising is how I solved the problem. I bought one in Egypt, having transferred money to a friend. He bought it and gave it to another friend who was over there and he brought it back, so I went to the airport at 10:30pm yesterday to pick it up from him and hopefully now the project can progress.

I think I should run a competition to see if any of you can guess how many visits to shops, telephone calls, SMS messages, Skype calls and messages I did in order to just buy this one mac-mini.

New Boat & Regatta

2007-05-28T18:16:00.001+03:00

A couple of weeks ago a Tornado hit the sailing club destroying my first boat. Because this was the beginning of the season I set about immediately looking for a replacement. Eventually I bought a Wayfarer dinghy. It's old but seaworthy and although it needs some maintenance work I sailed her the day after I bought her last weekend. This is a picture of my first minutes sailing her with Neil, a friend who is a good sailer and there to give guidance if needed. The Wayfarer is one and half times the size of the Mirror and develops much more power. After about 30 minutes we swapped crews to have his 11 year old son as my crew [which has become our normal crewing arrangement].

Oh and yes, the sails are filthy because the boat had not been sailed for a few years!

Last Saturday I took my youngest son and a couple of friends out sailing in her. We had a great time. Later in the day I did a minimal amount of the maintenance needed [changing the main sheet to original centre Wayfarer layout from a somewhat difficult to control end of boom main sheet arrangement for the sailors amongst you] ready for today...

This week in Larnaka is the celebration of Kataklismos, which is a rememberance of the flood when Noah, his sons and animals were saved. So logically I suppose, on the Monday of Kataklismos the sailing club has a regatta where we all sail round to the main Finikoudes sea front of Larnaka. Here's the club group picture I took. There are only two English families in the club, all the rest are Cypriot. The club is sponsored by McDonalds for this, so you can guess where we had lunch! You can probably see the McDonalds t-shirts on some of the members.

Among the flotilla we had three knock downs and a couple of capsizes on the mini-cruise, fortunately we were not one of them. I was sailing very conservatively, I had hurt my back slightly a day or so before and decided that I did not want to practice capsize drill today!

Sailing conservatively meant that there were only two other boats arriving after me on the outward leg and we were the last dinghy back on the return leg. Admittedly the club boats are 470s and Lasers so even if I was sailing hard I could not have caught them up. Anyway it was great fun.

This is the Google Earth map to show our route. The zig-zag at the top is sailing back and forth waiting for the rest of the flotilla. Somehow the GPS lost some of the track so there are gaps. Oh well... interesting anyhow. We sailed 11 nautical miles today.

Panic Stations

2007-05-23T23:17:00.000+03:00

The last few weeks have simply flown by. About three weeks ago I had a dream, not the normal dreams that we have but one of those significant dreams that you sense is God speaking to you. The dream seemed to indicate that we would be having more help in the office. At the time there was nothing on the horizon so I put it away wondering if the dream was just a way of God encouraging me.

It was about a week later that I received a phone call offering a short term worker to help with reviewing all the different projects that we are involved with and to help us develop a method for evaluating what we do in the future. This is something that we have wanted to do for some time and made a start on but go nowhere. So come Monday this person started working with us and staying in the guest flat.

About a week later someone at out Friday evening group asked if we could do with some help from a student programmer. So we met with this young man and he started with us the following money. He is being supported from people in the UK and will be with us we hope for 12-18 months.

About a week later a friend said they now had more time available and might it be appropriate for them to help as our administrator... and they will start tomorrow.

Another partner agency has brought over a short-term volunteer from South Africa and he is working with us for a couple of weeks in developing a component for a joint project. The hardware hasn't arrived in time for him to start that so he has been helping us with other work for us.

OK, so with all these extra people around the place why have I titled this 'Panic Stations'? The reason is that yesterday morning I came into the office to find one of our two main servers down, which meant all of our websites were down and all of our radio stations. I rebooted the server remotely and started looking with Peter to see if we could find out why it crashed. While I was doing this the server crashed again.

I contacted the service company for the hardware and the computer restarted... and crashed again. By the end of the day I was very frustrated and sent out an SMS message to about 40 friends around the world saying 'please pray'. Eventually the server came up around midnight... and crashed again at about 6am this morning! We rebooted it and it stayed up for a couple of hours and crashed again... we rebooted and it crashed again... eventually it came up long enough for Peter to look at it and find that it crashed as a result of what was effectively a Denial of Service attack through a fault in one of the websites we host. So we took that site down till the programmers can re-write and fix the problem.

Tornado

2007-05-12T21:08:00.000+03:00

Those of you who read this blog regularly will that I have a weakness to work too hard [some have even remarked on this]. However, I have a hobby which helps me relax and recharge and get closer to God. The hobby is sailing. A couple of years back I bought a second hand Mirror dinghy very cheaply and have been learning to sail. And loving every minute of it!

Only last weekend I had a really great time with sailing around the bay here with the 10 year old son of a friend of ours as my crew. The weekend before I had this lad and my 10 year old nephew as crew. We had a really great time and I was looking forward to sailing again this weekend as the week has been very tiring... we have a couple of new staff members [one short term] and have been supervising them and remotely supervising development in Egypt and... yes it goes on at the normal pace of my life.

Friday morning I woke to see the curtain dragged out of the window and the windows rattling and storm around. It was louder and more violent than any storm I have experienced before. The rain was nothing like rain in the UK, it was kind of like opening a fire hydrant from the sky and letting it rip.

We have had heavy rain before and I was concerned about what was happening at the office as last time some water had come in through the office roof and though I had asked a builder to look at it, he had not yet had time to come. In God's provision one of the two staff members was staying in a guest room at the office and so he got up and moved some of the computers and boxes and boxes of software out of the water pouring down through the ceiling. Roads were flooded... this is what it looked like on one of the roads between the office and our home.

When I got to the office, the french windows from the balcony to my office had blown in and water had also come across the floor of my office. Attached to the balcony is a satellite dish which downloads material off satellite which we then re-encode to upload to the Internet. The dish was no longer pointing at the satellite but at a neighbouring tree. It took a while to re-point the satellite dish correctly and get the radio station re-broadcasting on the Internet.

While I was doing this I had a phone call from a friend of mine saying that a tornado had crashed through the sailing club and although their boat was fortunately undamaged, mine was not so lucky. They had put it back on the trailer, but I was not going to sail her this weekend. So after lunch I drove down to the sailing club with my wife. On the way we saw this caravan that had been about 50 metres away on the beach last weekend now wrecked alongside the road.

My dinghy had also been lifted and blown from one end of the sailing club to the other. My friends had put all the parts together and put it on the trailer, but closer inspection showed it was not going to sail again without extensive work.

The hull had been punctured in many places and almost all the panels would need replacing to sail her again. The number of holes was too extensive to look at just a patch here or there.

Because it had been bashed about so much the fibreglass stitching that holds the panels together had all come adrift and it would be almost impossible to get new fibreglass to take to the old wood even if it were repaired. The Bible has something to say about trying to patch old wine-skins with new. Fireglass to old marine ply is pretty similar!

I had spent the winter stripping down and re-varnishing the boom, gaff, mast, rudder and centreboard. Now the gaff [part of the mast] had been damaged and would need a new gaff. All the buoyancy tanks had been damaged, ripping pins and panels apart.

Some of the structural pieces were also damaged. The boat isn't matchwood, but I don't think it's ever going to sail again as it would be much quicker to build a new one [quicker, mind you, not quick] than trying to repair this one.

So... I am feeling low. Sailing has been my sanity preserver and we are at the start of the sailing season not the end.

When 4th best is good enough?

2007-04-26T21:11:00.001+03:00

I can't believe its so long since I wrote on this blog, I have posted a couple of items on my other blogs, but basically not had time to blog for a couple of weeks or more. Pete and I are reviewing what we are doing. We are running about 220 component projects for various people and having problems maintaining it all. Running Internet servers grows more complex by the day.

Last week one of our partners from Spain flew over and we had a couple of days with him and one day with another partner too thinking through what we do. One phrase struck me that he said, 'Many times I am doing my fourth best option...' More and more we are faced with the least bad option rather than the best. Obviously choosing between a good and a bad option is a no-brainer. Choosing between two equally good options is easy, but we find choosing between two equally bad options very difficult. There is a phrase I remember from when I grew up 'Heads you win, tails I lose'. When its like that it just feels... well... strange.

Because we are so short of staff we are faced with making cuts in some of those 220 component projects. Which ones? Any cut will affect somebody seriously. Some people may not hear the message if we do cut. Another thing this guy from Spain said was that on the questionnaires he has to complete for any project he does within his organization there is a significant question that he has to answer for his bosses: 'What will happen if this project is not done?' I puzzled and puzzled over this.

Something about the question concerned me. Was it because we were faced with a similar one 'What will happen if this project is cut?' or something deeper than that. The more I puzzled the more I could not see it till the Friday evening. On Friday evening a bunch of folk who all follow Jesus come round to our house. We have a meal together, pray for each other and then look at the Bible together.

Anyhow, on that Friday evening we were looking at the book of Acts and about Peter and a Roman Centurian. The question came up "What if Peter had said 'No I'm not going to visit the Centurian'?" The answer we came to is that God would have found another way to communicate His love to the Centurian. Ahh... here's why I was so perturbed. The re is one answer to the question 'What will happen if this project is not done?' and its the same in every case. The answer is 'God will find another way to communicate His love to those He wants to'.

But that doesn't actually make the decision about what to cut any easier. It could mean 'Does anything I do matter if God will find another way to communicate?' Pete and I came back to what we feel God is calling us to. This guy from Spain again... he said we need to come back to our mission statement. We knew and could easily state what our 'unique selling points' [don't you just love marketeer speak?] are, but a mission statement?

Every company and organization has their mission statement today. McDonalds mission statements starts off 'McDonald's vision is to be the world's best quick service restaurant experience. Being the best means providing outstanding quality, service, cleanliness and value, so that we make every customer in every restaurant smile...' or how about 'Establish Starbucks as the premier purveyor of the finest coffee in the world while maintaining our uncompromising principles while we grow...' Trouble is that reading too many mission statements makes me want to vomit.

Anyhow, we did eventually get a mission statement and core values. We have also created a questionnaire that will help us evaluate all the projects we are involved with. Now all we have to do is persuade our partners to fill in the questionnaire... maybe we should offer a prize. Any suggestions on what the prize should be? Leave a comment...

Email working and spam being killed

2007-04-05T21:04:00.000+03:00

At last, we sigh with relief the main parts of the email upgrade are working and spam seems to have been reduced dramatically. A very boring week of testing, checking, compiling programs and configuring.

I was getting about 40-50% spam and now in the last two days [since we switched on the extra spam checking] I have had only one spam email. It seems so strange to me, why people are bothering sending spam, it really is a constant battle and more and more people are killing more and more spam emails... and so they have to send more and more and more and more...

Today I spent most of the day writing a couple of small [but complex] scripts to create all the SPF and Domain Key records for our DNS system. Time was when DNS was simple. Now it grows in complexity and reading the files gets more complicated. And looking at things I can see it getting more complicated by the month. Oh well...

Just looking at part of DNS that we are not using yet: Service calls. Instead of typing http://www.blogger.com your system would ask blogger.com what http services it supports and sent you to the right machine. Complex but useful for the way the internet will be growing in the future.

Our Egyptian programmer is approximately half way through his time here and the messaging system is working functionally, but with some glitches. Hopefully we will go into testing mode next week. This is the core of a new website which will be about community interaction.

What makes the messaging system different is that it works like a threaded discussion forum, but with the primary key being the person you are interacting with. This is because the focus is on relationship building.

This weekend is Easter and I will take a couple of days off and hopefully go sailing.

Email gets more complicated by the minute

2007-04-03T01:29:00.000+03:00

OK, so we have the email upgrade working but... we do a lot of email forwarding and the new SPF and Domain Keys don't handle forwarding well. It appears that I have to violate one RFC [RFC's are the Internet 'rules for how things work'] in order to get other RFCs to work.

Oh well, lets watch it over the next few days and see what happens. It's now past midnight and I kept working to try and get everything sorted so email wasn't breaking.

Blogging from my phone

2007-04-02T04:23:00.000+03:00

OK, so its possible to blog from a mobile phone, but does it work for me? If this post is on my blog then it does!

Critical but very boring techie stuff

2007-03-31T21:28:00.000+03:00

This week has been filled with very boring but critical technical stuff: working with Peter on the roll-out for the new email upgrade and getting a version control system working. Plus of course all the normal stuff of going through accounts with David. Plus of course working with a programmer from Egypt who is over here for a month working on a project. Plus of course all the normal maintenance of the system. Plus communicating with our partners about what is going on.

We never get closer than about three months away from the top of our to-do list and mostly we are way further behind than that. One of our partners today suggested that we should stop doing anything else and just focus on our to-do list till its cleared.

This is a great idea in theory, but in practise would be a disaster. The reason is this: Although Peter and I can do all this boring techie stuff it doesn't fulfil us and we see it as boring techie stuff too. So, if we just focussed on that and never did anything interesting we would get so bored we would give up. So we have to try to balance boring with some interesting to keep us motivated. Which means the boring keeps piling up. And since we lost John last Autumn the to-d0 list is increasing rather than diminishing.

So what is this boring techie stuff: Email is still an essential tool for our people and for communicating with people who want to know more about Jesus. But... and here's the but... spam is killing it off. As I mentioned in a previous post up to 96% of all email is now spam. So, because we handle about 50,000 real emails a month we have to also deal with up to one-and-a-quarter million spam emails per month. Yes, you did read correctly that is about 1,250,000 junk emails to deal with! Per month. Actually is not quite that number because the 'real email' count includes a few junk emails that slip through the net.

The aim is to get rid of most of them before the end user sees them. I get approximately 1,300 emails per month, so if we didn't have a spam filter running on the spam percentages above I could get more than 16,000 emails per month. Say it took me 5 seconds per email to open it and check if it was spam and then delete it because it was spam, that would take me about 80,000 seconds or 22 hours of clicking, reading and deleting. I would get almost nothing done at all! As the filtering works fairly well I can spend less than 30 minutes per week clicking, reading and deleting spam. [As an aside our top user of the email system received over 6,700 emails this month - most users receive low hundreds of emails per month.]

Any improvement we can make gives me and the 300 other people more time to do something useful. The effective cost is horrendous. 300 people all wasting time. Amongst us we are probably losing the equivalent of about 50 man hours per week in clicking, reading and deleting spam. If someone were paid the minimum wage in the UK of £5.50 this would be costing over £14,000 per year. Alongside this is the cost of Peter, Alex and I implementing tools to try to reduce this to as low a level as possible. Spam is costing the world economy millions of millions of pounds per year. It's a total waste.

Anyhow... the upgrade we have implemented is called 'greylisting'. It's a clever idea based on the fact that almost every spammer is running a special program to deliver all their junk around the world as fast as possible and is not running a proper MTA. MTA stands for 'Mail Transfer Agent' and it's the program that runs on a server to handle email between users. MTAs are designed so that if they cannot deliver on first attempt they keep trying for a few days... but spammer programs don't do this.

So what greylisting does is this: When someone new tries to deliver to us our MTA responds with 'We have a temporary problem please try back in a few minutes' and we log the message as attempted delivery. A spammer program goes away and doesn't come back because its only aim is to deliver as many as possible as fast as possible... a few failures doesn't matter. An MTA on the other hand does try back in a few minutes and when it does so, we match it with the previous attempt and this time our MTA says 'OK, we'll take it this time' and we also log the MTA as valid so that next time it tries with another email from [hopefully] a valid user then we will accept it immediately. [There is also a special website all about greylisting if you are interested].

The greylisting system isn't perfect, but it does kill most spam and the only impact is to slightly delay email from valid users the very first time they try to send it. Alongside this there were two other upgrades called SPF and Domain Keys. Read the links if you want to know more. They make greylisting look positively simple to understand.

The second techie thing I was involved with is setting up a version control system. Version control systems allow us to have a repository for all the programs we or others write and all the configuration files we use. Every time we make a change to a file or program we update the version control system. It stores the changes and because it knows of the changes we make each time we can rewind what we have done and other members of staff can see what the changes were that were made between different versions. All sounds clever and is something we should have implemented a year or two ago, but have been too over-run with work to do so.

The one we will be using is called Subversion or SVN for short. Subversion is a pun on a tree of versions... The internet is full of horrid puns, which I suppose is the techie way of staying sane. For instance there is a robot program to use with Subversion called CIA. Why CIA? Because CIA monitors and informs on subversion .

That same partner [from paragraph 2] and I wondered about spam... we've never seen anything remotely helpful in any spam message so cannot understand the mentality of people who send them. But then my wife was explaining the other night about the forums for support for Google AdSense, where people were saying they had bought a site and put Google AdSense on it and couldn't understand why they were not making any money [hmmm... maybe because you have no content on the site?] . Now we know why people send spam, it's these same people who are clicking on the spam and expecting miraculous growth in certain parts of their anatomy. Pity its not growth in their brain cells.

One problem is that although there have been laws in existence for the last 5 years to protect us from spam [EC Directive 2002/58/EC], almost nobody manages to sue the spammer. This month only the second company in the UK was successfully sued for damages resulting from sending spam. And the amounts in both cases were piteously small: the first award was £300 and the second £1350. What we need is a significant number of spammers behind bars for many years to deter people from trying it on.

Ok, so light relief time: Found this wonderful spam cartoon on http://www.ChristianLinksExchange.com

Week of mixtures

2007-03-24T14:46:00.000+02:00

Been a mixed week. We had meetings at the beginning of the week with one of our partners. They have appointed a new Internet manager and he spent two days with us going over things. It clarified in my mind how what we are doing is important, but we have maybe 20% of the manpower and resources needed to do the stuff. And its running us dry [Peter and I] trying to do it. One question came up "If you stop doing this, who would you recommend we go to?" The answer is that there is nobody who can take over what we are doing in some areas at all.

Alongside this we had one of the programmers we work with over from Egypt at the start of a one month visit. He is developing a second website with us and starting on a third. If these are as effective as the first one this will be tremendous. I wish I could describe what these sites will be about, but... hmmm.... sorry, cannot!

And alongside this Peter was working on the new upgrade to the email system and I have been helping with some of the database functions for that. We hope to make the upgrade live next week.

Other think I did was build an autocue unit. This is fully described with pictures in my equipment notes blog so I won't repeat it here.

Work and play...

2007-03-18T16:49:00.000+02:00

The last week seems to have flown by. I completed the preview copy of the dub from Arabic to Farsi and the film is now being reviewed by one of the satellite TV stations to be put out over the air. Another friend working in Iran is very keen to have a copy as soon as possible.

In between completing the dub there has been a plethera of little things to do, discussing with Peter about the new upgrade to the email system, the SMS phone system and the failover system... [which was failing over when it shouldn't have been!] Actually the one that was most painful to sort out was the failover system.

So what is the 'failover system' I hear you ask. Basically because our systems have to work 24 hours a day 365 days a year we have two servers for most of the tasks that we need only one for and we have some clever software that says 'Use this server if you can, but it you cannot use this other one'. Sounds great
in practise but configuring this system is a tricky business and for some oddball reason it was switching over to the backup when it shouldn't. I looked through all the configurations and checked everything and it was just being 'ornery' as the Americans put it, which means it was not behaving as we wished.

The configurations were difficult to wade through as I needed to relate the configuration files on four separate servers. Eventually I decided to re-write all the configuration files and [in my view] make them more logical and easy to read. And... yes, so far it worked the failover system is now working 'as advertised'.

The SMS phone system has also been causing us grief. Ever since Christmas it has been getting increasingly unreliable. By that I mean we have had to restart one or more phones every 12 hours at least. We consulted with the manufacturers who said [like they all do] 'We don't have these sorts of problems normally...' and then in passing mentioned there was new firmware for the phones that 'might fix it'. We installed the new firmware and it does appear [so far] to have fixed it.

The email system upgrade is a major undertaking. There are two parts to it: firstly making our system more compatible with other systems and secondly reducing the spam coming in to the system. Peter has been working on it for nearly a month now. He has completed the first part and working on the second part which is far from trivial.

I spent most of Friday talking through with him and looking at the configuration for a system called 'greylisting'. Blacklisting is where you say 'never ever send me email from this person'. Whitelisting is where you say 'always let me have email from this person'. Greylisting is where you say 'I'm not sure about this person, check out that its a real person and not a spam robot sending it'. Greylisting works because real email servers will try again and again to deliver but spam robots try once and give up, so basically for greylisting to work you log the email and then say to the incoming server 'please try again later'. If they do its a real email ad we accept it, if they don't then we're sure its spam!

They say 'all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy' and in between all this work I have been over the last two to three weeks stripping the varnish off the boom, mast, gaff, rudder and centreboard of my little mirror dinghy and then revarnishing them and repairing parts of the mast where a friend had a little accident with the dinghy last year. Now I'm longing to sail her and hopefully next weekend if the weather is good I will be able to have a day sailing.

This afternoon I went for a wander to my favourite place in Larnaca... the marina, where I can drool over the larger boats and dream of the one I would love to buy. The marina is somewhat empty at the moment as many of the boats are 'on the hard' [ie dry land] being repaired by their owners. There is one thing that is certain about all types of boat... you are constantly repairing them.

One boat that I have been watching for the last 9 years is called Windsong registered in Littlehampton in the UK. Its a 44 foot long wood hull ketch and has been very sadly deteriorating steadily over the last decade, although the owner has done a small amount of repair work during that period. It looks a boat in desparate need of TLC. Her masts are at the state where you don't need to rub off the varnish, the sun and wind has done that already. The deck and cabin too have been at the sharp end of the elements.

So what makes Windsong so special? She is the only surviving David Hillyard sailing yacht to take part in 'Operation Dynamo' - and one of the very few pure sailboats. Operation Dynamo was the name given to the flotilla of 'little boats' that evacuated the British troops from Dunkirk. Which, of course, gives her the right to fly both red and white ensigns... and there is not another little boat up this end of the Mediterranean who has that right!

Built in 1931 it is interesting the sailing technology of the day. We don't see an autopilot at the stern to control the rudder but a wind vane. This keeps the boat at a constant direction relative to the wind rather than a constant direction. Of course the modern autopilots can do both and even tack the boat for you, but it's facinating to see how the old mechanical systems used to work. The mast has steps up it to make climbing easier rather than using a bosuns chair and a halyard. I would love to see inside and see how the cabin is laid out and the navigation was done.

I just hope this dear old boat is not allowed to deteriorate further and is restored to her former glory and actually enjoyed as a sailing boat again.

Pictures and sound

2007-03-11T19:36:00.000+02:00

The ongoing saga of video editing... I am now trying to complete a dub of a film from Arabic to Farsi. We were getting on well and then the transfer from Windows to mac took place. Should be easy mac can read Windows files. Hmmm... never expect anything to be easy. In the process I found out that the Windows machine had been making corrupt files. Although this explains a lot [like why we were getting problems on the Windows machine] it means that I have had to start from the beginning with the picture edit for the dub.

'Picture edit? I thought this was a sound dub...' I hear you mutter. Yes it is, but the opening and closing captions have to be replaced with Farsi rather than Arabic, and the original Arabic pictures don't match the new audio. So I have to re-edit that.

Peter has been involved with upgrading the email system, which is taking a lot longer than he hoped. Its pretty complex keeping up with all the changes to email to try to defeat spam.

Alex has been relaying a big prayer conference this week. We had over 4,400 listeners connecting over 38,000 times over the 4 days to listen to it live and nearly 3,000 viewers connecting over 18,000 times to watch it [either live or pre-recorded].

Flew last week, flu this week!

2007-03-05T22:24:00.000+02:00

It seems like yesterday I was back from traveling, but its actually been over a week!

Much of the time has been taken up developing a newsletter to send out to people so that they can read about what we do. I know there's this blog and one of the things I did [well actually a very dear friend, called my wife, did it for me] was to cut down a couple of extracts of the blog as a way of encouraging people to read it!

I went to the launch of a new streaming studio too... they also moved all the control for one of the 24/7 radio stations we had been handling to their own facilities. We will still be handling the streaming to listeners on the internet, on their behalf.In many ways the new studio is actually our success as we planted, watered, nurtured and are now seeing a plant in full bloom so to speak.

When I first suggested the idea of internet radio to them just over three years ago they were not interested. Within a few months they changed that to a cautious first step into internet radio with us developing all the systems needed and running the station 24 hours a day from our own centre here in Cyprus... and it developed and developed till last year when the person in charge admitted that he had been seeing the traditional radio audience decreasing , while the internet audience was rapidly increasing.

Last Autumn they decided to start a regular weekly live broadcast from our studio. The number of people wanting to chat with staff using MSN or Skype was so great, the computer handling them slowed to almost a complete stop.

There's a limit to how much we can achieve alone. Currently we are working beyond that limit. That's why it was so exciting this week to see one of our partners open their own studio for live Internet radio instead of us doing it all.

In between all this we are rebuilding the edit suite... or I should say John is rebuilding it. He has taken out all the old woodwork for the old tube based screens which were build in and created a working surface and panel for the audio meters etc needed. Its nearly complete now. Pete and I were remarking on how with people around helping it really makes a difference to what we can do and we are really really grateful for what John has done.

From Friday I had a terrible cold or a light dose of flu, or something in between. Anyhow I didn't feel great at all. I think I caught it while travelling, or maybe I had been working so hard my body was giving up. Anyhow I wasn't well over the weekend.

Today I was still not 100% so I kind of did a couple of things and put the equipment into the new edit suite. All the audio wiring still has to be done. We need to but a new computer for this [a macpro which will costs between £2500 and £3500 depending on the options we get]. Currently we're using a macmini but this isn't really powerful enough for the purpose, however its vastly more reliable than the old Windows machine was. Two more smaller parts are needed: a Behringer BCF2000 control surface and a Contour ShuttlePro. The last edit suite has lasted 5 or 6 years [with some modifications on the way] so this is the biggest rebuild and hopefully when we have everything will last us another 5-6 years.

A week in the life...

2007-02-23T23:27:00.000+02:00

Monday morning, starts week normally: Catch up with things like email and prepare for trip to another country. Late afternoon: fly to other country, arrive late evening. Dinner with colleagues, starting around 10pm. After dinner one colleague shares with me his problems till approx 2.30am.

Tuesday morning... ahhhh... start work at 8.00am. Which is very bad news for me, being up at 2.30am the previous night was relatively easy, but starting to try to think about complex issues to do with web site design at 8.00am is positively tortuous. But I cannot start later as we have meetings planned for most of the day. So the first web site meeting ends at 2.00pm and I have lunch meeting with another partner till approx 5.00pm. Then go to another partner organization and start measuring up office space to see if a new department can use the office space: There are 5 offices to measure and try layouts for. Discuss the needs of this department and go to another meeting at 7.00pm. This is meeting over dinner, and ends at 11pm. Final meeting of the day from 11pm till 12.30am. Oh no it isn't... a colleague wants to talk so we do so till 2.00am again.

Wednesday morning... even more difficult to start at 8.00am but somehow I do. Today is an even more complex website design planning meeting and goes on till 1.30pm when I go to another lunch meeting with another partner organization. Meeting ends at 5.oopm and you probably guessed already its time for another meeting. But you'd be wrong... I get a short break and hmmm... meet informally other colleagues who want to discuss things... followed by a dinner discussion with a colleague and the next meeting starts at 8.00pm and goes on till midnight, when I collect some covers and cases I had made and go to where I am staying and again I have a colleague sharing with me till the small hours.

Thursday morning... joy of joys we start at 9.00am... well 10.00am would be better but never mind. Continuing on the complex website design meeting we started yesterday. This goes on right through lunch [and actually we all forget to eat] till I go to the airport at 3.00pm to catch a plane at 5.00pm. Now I am not sure if I should be pleased or not, but the airports have WiFi internet connections so I continue to chat [this time online] finishing off a discussion about another project till I board at 5.00pm

Friday morning... back in my own office so I start work at 10.30am and work through till 6pm. I think I worked out I had about 46 hours of meetings from Monday night through till Thursday night. I think I probably did a a more than 70 hour week this week so I am more than 'vaguely tired', but cannot sleep... so up writing the blog.

RATS!

2007-02-21T01:03:00.000+02:00

Saturday: Phone call, “There’s water coming in through the roof of the office...” Rush in. Thin layer of water over the mini DV video recorder. More water over one of the monitors. Fortuneately no water over the brand new mac-mini, new flat screen and new portable hard disks.

So I clean up, move all the equipment out of the way, leaving some to dry out. And then go to look round the rest of the office to see if there are any other leaks. In the main server room I hear a noise... ahhhh... no we don’t have mice, we have rats. Big rats. About 20cm long with 10cm tail.

Monday: The pest control company come in at Peter’s request. “Sorry we can’t do anything today, its raining!” And leave.

Tuesday: Arrive in to find loads of tubes about the place with labels saying these are rat and mice poison [the pest control people say we have both].

Wednesday late afternoon: Peter leaves for home. I am alone in office. Scamper, scamper, scamper across the false room of my office. I don’t lift any of the ceiling tiles to look, yes I know I am much bigger than a rat, but I still don’t want to come face to face with one when standing on a chair trying to dislodge the ceiling tiles.

Thursday-Friday: No scampering.

Monday [following week]: John comes in to start changing the video edit suite furniture to take account of the start of building a new video editing suite. As he moved the old furniture we find two things: One an old bar of soap with teeth marks around [wondered why the soap suddenly disappeared] and blue rat droppings... blue means they have eaten the poison.

So what have I been doing all this time? Well, having lost John when he retired [not the John who is changing the edit suite but the other John] at the end of last year and Alex now only available part time, Peter and I realised we are supporting more than we can cope with for Internet resources for different agencies and individuals. So I have written a paper that we are circulating to our partners explaining the situation and suggesting we need to talk to see ways of supporting this work better for the long term.

As a result of this paper, we have had telephone conferences and meetings with various different groups to discuss alternatives. As I write this I am in the airport to fly to another Middle Eastern country to discuss with partners there.

Peter and I are really project people who are good at developing ideas and methods to use the Internet in creative ways to reach our audience. We’re pretty bad at long term day to day maintainance. And that is stressing us. We’re also lacking an office administrator as the discription above probably suggests: No, we haven’t fixed the roof leak, the toilet is still very slowly leaking water and the kitchen floor needs sorting along with 101 other things...

Currently we are providing various services to 15 partner organizations, over 300 secure email accounts, 30 websites, 7 24 hour a day radio stations, 7 audience relations systems with 9 SMS phone gateways with 10 servers we are directly re-sponsible for, plus consultancy and advice to those partners on other IT issues.

One of our key websites last year received 50,000 visitors per month and we had to reduce the number of visitors to 10,000 per month to enable the people relating to the visitors to cope. About 5% of our email users are 'high maintenance', often needing help with their own computers two, three or more times per year and taking upwards of six man weeks to support them. Last year we had John dedicated to taking and managing support requests [by that we mean where a user or partner organization says something is not working as expected].

The struggles have changed too: We are now facing approx 400,000 attacks against our servers per year. Within the last year, one website was compromised and turned into a spam sender, another website was hacked a couple of times and a third website hacked a number of times each time being taken over with pornographic images. These were all due to poor website pro-gramming and we are taking steps at a higher level to try to protect these poorly written sites.

Within the last month two partners have sustained hacks within their office networks which have resulted in one case potential denial of service and in the other actual denial of service to those office networks. Both of these were potentially caused by Word 'documents' within the office network: Even some types of 'document' are now dangerous to share between colleagues. We acted as consultant to one of these two partners, sorting out the blocking and advising on ways to reduce the possibility of a repeat problem.

Spam has become a major problem: On current growth we will be dealing with more than 20,000,000 spam emails this year. There are multiple divergent methods for tackling some of these problems with different proprietary manufacturers competing standards, so, even if you for instance, buy an off-the shelf Microsoft server for your office email it is guaranteed that some of your emails will be delivered incorrectly. Thus we are 'shooting at a moving target'.

Of mice and men...

2007-02-01T21:06:00.000+02:00

Last week Peter and I had a quiet stroll around Europe... well not exactly, we checked in at 01:30 on Monday morning, flew overnight to London Heathrow, got a bus to London Gatwick and spent the day planning the meetings for the rest of the week. We then got a plane to Malta arriving there around 10:00pm and went into a meeting till approx 3:00am.

The following morning we were up and travelling to another part of the island by 9:00am to get to a meeting which went on all day. That evening we travelled back across the island [OK, it is small I'll give you that] to another meeting which fortuneately finished by about 11:00pm.

Next day... informal meetings all day and in evening with yet another agency. We went into this meeting hoping we could 'give away' some of the work we did to them. Unfortuneately they went into the meeting with the hope they could give away some of their work to us! Oh well, at least we know we are both overloaded.

Following morning, up and catch a flight back to London Gatwick, then pick up a rental car and drive to Birmingham. Rental car was amazing, it had one mile on the clock, really really nice. On the way up the M40, Peter was driving and I was logging on via GPRS [that's internet over your mobile phone] to sort out problems in our centre here in Cyprus. Thursday evening: Meeting with board of trustees.

Friday morning, up again and drive to the south coast to meet two groups of people from another organization. Lunch with one group and afternoon with another. Great meetings and 'can I sleep sometime please?' Phone call from Cyprus studio, they are having problems, so pull into service station and GPRS in again and fix it. [My comment: "Red light on means studio on air, red light off means off air, would have saved time if you told me the red light was off!"]

Then over to my mother's house for a couple of days, [where I did sleep!] pick up some software I had delivered to her and go to Brighton to buy some other that hadn't been delivered and catch a flight back to Cyprus.

So, into the office, first day back and I go to the control centre, hit the keyboard to bring it to life and... nothing! Follow wires through and find that the wire to the keyboard are broken. Think terrible thoughts about the people who were in on Friday and wonder how they managed to pull the cable so hard to break it. Hmmm... just a moment... that looks like teeth marks, very small teeth marks... and on that cable too, and that one... hmmm... MICE!

Some you win, some you lose...

2007-01-18T19:09:00.000+02:00

Peter and I arrived in yesterday morning to a message informing us that one of our partners had been sending out large quantities of spam yesterday evening. The message ended: "You put this spammer out of business today or get your entire domain blacklisted tomorrow!" This could have affected all of the partners we host email for. In order to protect the hundreds of other email users who rely on us we took the unilateral step of blocking email to/from that partner till they found and fixed the problem.

We then contacted the partner concerned and they have started investigating and found that one of their computers in their office had a number of viruses, but they actually believe that the spam came from a guest from Western Europe who used their office broadband connection to do their email yesterday evening. They are still investigating. Although it was probably not the computer they found the viruses on that sent out all the spam this shows that partners MUST be more diligent with their virus protection of their own computers.

This is exactly the type of problem we were concerned about and why we blocked .DOC files in December. This is the type of thing that can happen when a computer is 'hijacked' using the zero day exploit in Word documents. We all need to consider the implications of letting guests plug in or attach via wireless to our broadband connection. Today we discussed how all of us will almost have to get to having airport style security checks for people who wish to use our connections.

Spam is getting out of hand, so we understand why the spam blocking agency took the action they did to only give us 24 hours to solve the problem: Approx 6 months ago we had about 60,000 spam messages per month to deal with. We will be dealing with over 200,000 spam messages this month. If this rate goes on as it appears to we could be dealing with over 1 million spam emails by the summer and 5 million by this time next year, by which time the real email would constitute less than 0.01% of the email we were coping with. At some stage it could become unmanageable to try to deal with!

On a lighter note, in order to disengage my brain when struggling with these issues I play a quick game of Solitaire on my phone/PDA. Today for the first time I got 2005, the first time over the 2000 level... there is only one score higher I could have got so its the second top score.

Of course getting this is totally random and has no skill at all. There are times when I feel that the fight we have with various computer problems is totally random. Strange considering they should be logical devices. What's even stranger is that often the cards seem far from random.

TWO MONTHS!

2007-01-13T21:58:00.000+02:00

I haven't written anything since I have returned from Singapore, and suddenly I realise two months have gone by since my last entry.

Since returning from Singpore [which was almost a whole month away] I have been involved with two major projects and various discussions with our partners: The two major projects were the finishing of an interactive training DVD. This is a project that has taken over a year to complete, primarily because the project has gone through two major re-writes and was started from scratch three times in the process and partly because we were fighting faulty equipment and buggy software.

The equipment/software problem is because we don't have the funds to have the best, we are always trying to do the impossible... make media with almost no money! However, I did finish the training DVD just before Christmas, so at least I could relax knowing it was finished.

Secondly, I was trying to complete the dub of a major drama video from Arabic to Farsi [spoken in Iran]. They had done the dub in Tehran, but very badly. So we had to record the songs for the video here [we have a Farsi singer here in our town] and I went through the film sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase with another Farsi speaker synchronizing what was recorded in Tehran with the lip movements of the actors on screen. I finished the synchronizing just before Christmas but will do the mixing of the sound and adding of Farsi titles.

Then fighting the equipment began again. Because we don't have enough hard disk space in the audio dubbing suite we had to do the dub in sections and found that there was a slip in the synchronizations for each section. Then the video editing system [Premiere running on Windows] proved its old unreliable self crashing time and time again [6 times in 2 hours] which meant rebooting the system each time so nothing was action done.

The third issue that consumed time were discussions with other agencies we work in partnership with. Almost everything we do in partnership with other agencies. It's said 'no man is an island', we have no choice, we all have to work together. But this can cause major stresses if the agencies concerned don't do things the same way... there are always minor differences, but sometimes these can escalate and take time to resolve.

When we, as a family, went on vacation to see my son in Singapore I left a task for two of our Egyptian colleagues to do. The task was to configure a database system and train a team in Egypt how to use it. The programmer who was supposed to do the configuration went AWOL [absent without leave] so to speak and didn't do it. When I came back I had a very unhappy partner agency who didn't have a working database system or training.

The situation got worse as the programmer totally disappeared and we were worried he might be ill, had an accident or something. Eventually, after trying all routes to find him I got an email saying 'sorry I didn't do it and I won't be able to'. Short and sweet. So I had to work out the system and do it myself together with the other Egyptian in an online conference. We did that all Christmas Eve, finishing at 4am on Christmas Day [25th December]. Christmas Day in the Middle East is 6th January so it meant that my Egyptian colleague could train the other Egyptians before their Christmas!

As we look back over the past year and towards the new year, here are out concerns:

What to do about the programmer in Egypt, he has been very involved in what we do over the last year and is one of the best in the region, so replacing him would be difficult.

We lost a valuable member of the team here in November. He was our first line technical support person -- he fielded the questions before we dealt with them determining if it was a real technical problem that we should get involved with or was a problem with [for instance] the partner's computer and not our problem at all.

Generally more people, Peter and I are both project and R&D people, we really need a team of good support people to do some of the work we are doing. We would like to train Middle Easterners to do this, but are not sure how to fund such.

We have requests to help with maybe 3 or 4 times as much as we can actually do. If we cut down to what we can reasonably do it would leave Peter and I doing only maintaining systems which would drive us nuts as we are not maintainer type people.

We are spending time trying to plan the next 12, 24 and 36 months to try and get out of the sort of 'Catch 22' situation we are in.

Singapore

2006-11-06T15:28:00.000+02:00

We arrived in Singapore today. We are here for 3 weeks to spend time with Daniel. No, not work... total vacation, so no blog entries after this one for 21 days!

SPAM :-(

2006-11-01T21:00:00.000+02:00

"We appear to be using an unusually high bandwidth on one of our two links..." that was the greeting this morning from John who is first line tech support. Hmmm... why?

20 minutes later I want to go to the balcony and SCREAM "AHHHHHHHHHHHH". Yes, I've found the culprit. Untold quantities of email are passing through one of our gateways. Thousands, tens of thousands of messages. "OK, STOP ALL EMAIL IMMEDIATELY".

We discovered a problem - one of our partners was sending out bulk email. Theoretically this was to about 1000 people who had [I hope] signed up to receive it, so it was not [I hope] spam. There was a problem in the computer program that was sending it [not written by us, but by a programmer working for them] which meant that thousands and thousands of emails were sent. Not only did this totally clog our system reducing performance to everyone, but because of the fault some people got more than 800 copies of the email [with Word document attachment]. This action could get both the partner and us listed as a spammer which has legal and ministry implications.

In response to this we have disconnected the offending partner from email entirely while we are doing whatever we can to reduce the impact of this activity upon them, us and other partners. Instantly disconnecting while we sort the problem may be irritating to them, but is essential to maintain the service to everyone. It takes time to sort out problems like this and may be a few days before we can restore service to them.

We have to very careful about sending mass or bulk emails to people. It is essential that whenever they send a mass or bulk email that you have clear evidence that the person receiving it has specifically and deliberately asked them to send it. If they do otherwise they will be classed as a spammer and their domain will become locked to send emails. What is more serious for us is that our servers will also become classed as spam servers and will then be blocked for all users to send emails.

Failing to comply is not just immoral it is also illegal under DIRECTIVE 2002/58/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 12 July 2002 concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector (Directive on privacy and electronic communications). Member states have different punishments for violation of their respective implementation of the directive, but I am sure I don't want to find out what the inside of a jail looks like without being merely a visitor!

What does the law mean in practice: If someone writes to a website or radio or TV station, then our our partners can write back and forth as much as they like. However, unless the person has specifically signed up to receive bulk emails then they may not send them an email that is sent to many people; they may not send them extra unsolicited information about the station; they may not send them a survey; they may not send anything which is more than responding to their specific email questions or comments. The response should be personal not bulk.

It is questionable and has not yet been tested in law if they may even send them an email asking them if they would like to sign up for extra information. Current opinion [among the professional ISP community] is that they may write to users who started communicating with the station before 2002 and ask them if they would like bulk emails, but they may only do this once and a non-reply must be considered to be a 'no'. In fact unless they have a specific 'yes' then everything must be considered 'no'.

As an example of the specific sign up, if they have a web page for people to send messages etc if they want them to be able to also receive bulk emails [eg newsletters or information about the radio station or website] they must have a separate check box for them to confirm they want these bulk emails. The check box must be unchecked and the user must check it - the law requires 'opt-in' not 'opt-out'. If they announce on the TV or radio an email address they must make it clear if this is for communicating with the station or to receive bulk emails. Unless they have specifically told the listener or viewer it is for bulk emails [eg "If you would like to receive ongoing information about our stations please send an email to this address"] or unless the listener or viewer has specifically asked for bulk emails [eg "Please send me information about your station whenever it is available" or "Please keep me up to date with all the programmes on your station"] then they must consider the email not to have opted in and never send them a bulk email.

Sounds severe... and it is. Currently on our main email server we reject twice as much spam email as we accept as real email and for some people the 'real' contains a high percentage of spam. Spam is a real problem, it wiill get to the point where email is totally unusable as a communication medium unless something is done about it quickly.

So that was the early morning distraction... now down to 'real work' -- mixing the audio for a drama DVD in Farsi. "Please God, give me a smooth ride on this one". This should actually be fun. I enjoy sound mixing and doing the final mix on a dub should be enjoyable.

Problem One: The Betacam tape that I am copying from appears to have problems, or is it a headclog or... phone call to engineer... no answer... try again later.

Problem Two: More major, the so called 'M and E' tape is different from the picture tape. 'M and E' stands for Music and Effects. When you are dubbing a programme into another language you prepare first an audio tape with just the Music and sound Effects. Over this you add the new dialogue and finally mix them all together to make a combined audio track. Alongside this you take the pictures from the picture master tape. The picture master tape should be identical to the M and E tape. It wasn't. Why?

Phone call to production team in Egypt. They knew there had been problems during the editing [some years ago] but didn't realise the two tapes were not identical. Now I have to find out where they are non-identical and make artistic decisions as to how to correct it. Simple... not.

Sonic Solutions or Sonic Problems?

2006-10-30T22:32:00.000+02:00

Sonic Solutions: The leader in Digital Media... or so their website tells us. Maybe you've guessed... I'm back to problems with the infamous DVD we are making. Today I burned what should have been the penultimate DVD having corrected all the problems. There are 100 video titles, countless menus and playlists in this DVD so checking is a task in itself.

First when I came to make the DVD my dear friendly DVDit Pro came up with an error saying 'Cannot recode MPEG audio' or something very close to that message. With 100 audio titles all having MPEG audio and nearly 50% of the menus also having MPEG audio you are left screaming a question... "Which MPEG audio?"

Of course, being a computer it just sits there looking blankly at you not answering at all. Obviously the programmers at Sonic Solutions thought a guessing game was more productive to the spirit at this stage in the proceedings than actually telling us... so guess and guess again and I found the offending files.

Hallelujah... with the offending files corrected it made a DVD image. Took it home to burn. Remember the new office burner has failed and I haven't had time to pull the system apart and take it back to the shop where they would test it for 3 days, send it back to the supplier who would test it for who knows how long and eventually pronounce they will... maybe... supply a replacement.

Yes, it burned correctly. Yes, it plays correctly. No, its not perfect. Some of the corrections I did appear not to have happened. Second award for duff computer program goes to Adobe for their flagship program Premiere for video editing which when you click 'Use audio from the left channel only' sometimes indicates its doing this, plays it back through the speakers from the left channel audio but then creates a file with the left channel audio missing!

Now just in case you are wondering, please ask any Apple MAC users you know if they have the same problems with Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. When I said to a colleague from another organization that I felt like chucking the Windows based system out of a very high window she offered to help me with it! She had changed from Windows to MAC and knows my frustration. It was why she changed. While you are looking for Apple Mac users [not difficult to find they are increasing every day] go to the Apple website and watch their extremely funny adverts contrasting Windows and Mac computers.

But is everything Apple Mac perfect? No, far from it. We have a system for allowing people to send SMS messages securely to our servers. We want to have a small neat system we can ship to remote locations to enable the SMS messages to come in from all over the place. A Mac mini should be perfect. The old G4 that was available till this summer worked great. Now they introduced Intel processors and... won't work with the SMS system. Intel processors? Aren't they the processors that Windows computers use? I'm not saying a word! Silence speaks louder than words.

Well... I have 4 more days before our vacation and two things to do:

complete this DVD
complete a sound mix for the audio for a film dubbed into Farsi

Too successful?

2006-10-27T21:45:00.000+03:00

As I write we are broadcasting a live radio show from our studio over the Internet. We are having problems... problems of success... we have so many people calling in and chatting that the equipment is not really coping.

A few of weeks ago the computer that handles all the chatting was going so slowly that we could barely move the mouse at times. So that week we went out and bought 3 times the RAM and the following week we had about 30 chat windows open at the same time... and the computer was still having problems.

I think the only answer really is to buy a cluster of 3 or 4 MAC mini computers and let each one handle a third of the task. The MAC minis handle the audio better than the Windows computer we are currently using. We'll need some flat screens to go with them and a KVM switch so the person answering all the messages can switch between them. If you are feeling stressed at work with answering the phone at the same time as chatting on line... imagine what its like having up to 30 chats going at the same time and the phone [via Skype, MSN or Yahoo] still rings!

Just a few minutes ago the presenter was talking about praying for people to be healed by God, someone called in over Skype and shared on air about how the Lord had healed them... another listener has just sent a file through about how they went for an operation last week and how they were healed just before they got to the operating theatre much to the confusion of the doctors.

We are really excited about how well things are going but we have to somehow upgrade equipment to cope with the needs. Please pray that we receive the funds we need to do this.

Oh, and in case you are wondering... in between writing this and checking that everyone knows what they are doing for the radio as I will be on vacation in a weeks time... I am running back and forth to the video edit suite rendering video files as mentioned in the previous entry!

A day in the life...

2006-10-17T22:48:00.000+03:00

There is almost no such thing as a 'typical day' as every one seems slightly, somewhat or very different. But in the last few days I have felt I really ought to try to paint a picture of what the nearest thing to a typical day is. This is put together from a number of days to show some of the diversity of what happens... but only becasue I cannot remember the detail of an individual day. Everything actually happened this week and is pretty close to the sort of diversity I deal with daily.

I wake around 8.30am when Sue brings me a mug of hot coffee. Sophia, one of our cats enters the bedroom loudly saying 'Out, Out'. Sue opens the door onto our balcony to let her out. Sunlight and fresh air streams in through the balcony door. I look over and see an oil painting of a tall ship beating against the wind...

Slowly, very slowly conciousness creeps over me. I drink the coffee and grab my Treo. My Treo is one of the tools to help run my life... apart from being a mobile phone, it's also a multi-version Bible with concordance, task list organizer, diary, remote access to our servers and... a very silly solitaire card game that allows my brain to go into neutral when things are too frantic.

As I turn over in bed I review the day ahead with God. What is it that I have to do, what could I do, what is urgent, what is merely important. My 'to do' list[s] have over 100 items on them, ranging from writing project proposals, through editing DVD projects to buying a water filter for the house. Prioritizing is essential, so as I sip my coffee I 'chat it over with God' and see His take on what are the priorities of the day.

No breakfast. I almost never eat breakfast. I find that my body is slow getting started and food at the beginning of my day usually ends in pain later in the morning. I drive to the office. It's only about a mile away, but frequently I need the car at the office to go out and buy something later in the day, so I take it rather than walking.

When I arrive at the office around 10am, I greet John, and find out if there are any urgent problems with any of our computer systems. John is first line defense on any problems, diagnosing whether the problem is with our systems or a problem with the end user of the system [as is more frequently the case]. Today there are no problems, praise God. John is reviewing graphs of how our systems are performing, in between copying tapes onto the hard drive of the studio computer.

I go through to the second office and greet Michael, a programmer out here for a couple of months doing an update on the SMS mobile phone system we operate. It turns out to be more than just greeting, Michael started work earlier and has some questions about the system that will allow us to place remote mobile phones in places like Bagdad. We monitor the mobile phone systems by comparing the time now with the logged time that we last connected with the phone. If its more than 60 minutes then we have a problem, an alarm goes off and somebody does something about it. 'But', asked Michael, 'did we really want that if the phone was in Bagdad?' There then followed a 30 minute design discussion about how we should monitor the remote phones and all the interconnected links that connect us with them.

I turn on the video editing computer, check where I have got to in the DVD project I am editing and start a 'render' of a 2-3 minute sequence. A render is where the computer makes a single video file out of graphics, captions, video and other animations. I check and correct the audio levels on this sequence as I am working from review notes sent back from the partner with this project. It takes about 15 minutes for each sequence to render and there are 99 sequences in this DVD.

During the time that this sequence renders I go to my office and phone one of our partner organizations. It seems that another of the other partners has managed to get somewhat muddled over the copyright implications of a website that we are having some programming written for. Somehow, the programmer has managed to get paid for the project and retain rights to what he has written... this is an ongoing problem that has been on the back-burner for some months and the day before our partners had a meeting with the programmer to try to resolve the issue. There were also some other things I needed to discuss with this partner, but he had a meeting to go to and I had to go and do the next video edit and render.

I return to the video editing, check the review notes, make changes as needed and set off the computer for another render. Peter, my co-team leader arrives so I greet him, and discuss with him the order we need for some equipment to be brought out from the UK with the next person coming. I return again to the video editing, check the review notes, make changes as needed and set off the computer for another render.

Time for coffee. The door bell rings. It's Jim back from the USA. He had warned us he was coming in. We all come together in the lounge for coffee. It's a time of sharing and then we pray together about whatever are the issues of the day. Today we wanted to hear about what Jim had been doing in the last 6 months while he had been back in the USA and then pray for him. This took up the rest of the morning as we also discussed where the training projects he is involved with overlap with what we are doing.

My Treo makes a loud alarm noise to say 'time for lunch' so I hurredly return to the video editing, check the review notes, make changes as needed and set off the computer for another render over lunch. This sequence has a bigger problem with it than I hoped and just as I am setting it off to render the phone part of the Treo rings. It's Sue reminding me gently it's lunchtime. 'I won't be long...' I reply, and drive home.

At 1.30pm my Treo alarms again. This time it's an SMS message telling me that I am 'on call' this afternoon for any system problems that might occur. John does the mornings 5 days a week and then there are three of us that do the afternoons and weekends... and actually fix the problems. So one of us is always 'on call' rather like a doctor.

I drive back to the office, return to the video editing, check the review notes, make changes as needed and set off the computer for another render. I answer another question or two from Michael and find a message on my desk to say that the partner I was talking on the phone with earlier on the day phoned back while I was at lunch. I phone him back only to find he's in another meeting.

I go through to the sound studio and check that everything is working as we will be doing a live radio programme from the studio that evening.

My Treo alarms again. This time, it's an SMS to tell me that one of the radio playout systems has failed and that one of the stations we handle is thus 'off the air'. So I go to my computer and log into the playout system, sort the problem and put it back on air. Just a few moments work and part of what being 'on call' is all about.

Trouble is... having turned on my computer to log into the system to fix it, colleagues in Egypt see that I am online and immediately set up a chat link to ask me some questions. Then someone from Malta also notices I am online and has some questions. So I have three chat windows open and in between answering them I open my email and check that. Multi-tasking my brain... as Michael arrives in my office with another design question. Email, chats with remote colleagues and local ones takes up the best part of an hour and a half. All necessary to keep them moving forward with what they are doing.

Peter arrives back from picking up some equipment and we close the door and spend a few minutes discussing some sensitive personnel issues plus some longer term plans. We pray together about those. We are interupted by a security question from Michael relating to the project he's working on.

My Treo alarms with an SMS to ask me to go online and do a Skype chat with a colleague in Egypt about a technical problem. After doing so I phone back the partner I started the conversation with earlier in the morning and we sort out what will happen over the copyright issues and the equipment and discuss an upcoming project we are working on together. At least that conversation gets completed today even if I haven't managed to get back to the video editing much in the afternoon!

The door bell rings again. I let in the presenter and production team from one of our partners for the live Internet radio broadcast that night. I check with them that everything is working correctly and then my Treo alarms again to say its time to go home as we are going out for a meal with some friends celebrating his 65th birthday. I get home, change and find I have totally forgotten where we are supposed to be going for this meal. Absolute blank. I remember the conversation about where it was, but totally forget the content of that conversation, so I phone the friend to get the directions again. It's in a wonderful little taverna just outside our town.

Half way through the meal and ten minutes after the time the Internet radio broadcast is supposed to start my Treo rings in it's mobile phone mode . Hmmm... it's a colleague from the other organization in the studio. Which means bad news. They say 'We're not on air, what is the problem?'. The Treo comes in handy again. I log into the servers at the office remotely and find that the reason they are not on air is the person who created the schedule to put them on air had not taken account of the fact the servers all run on GMT [ie time in London]. So when they programmed it for 20:00 [8pm] it was 20:00 GMT not 20:00 Cyprus. So I manually put them on air, phone them back and explain.

I enjoy the rest of the meal, meeting with other friends from various churches in our town. Of course, because I had put them on air manually, I will have to take them off air manually, especially as they are supposed to go off air at 23:00 which is the equivalent of 20:00 GMT. If I don't fix this, then as soon as they go off air, then the scheduler will put the studio back on air and we will have nothing going out at all! So I take Sue home and return to the office, fix the scheduler and manually take them off air.

Just as I am closing the door to the server room I smell burning. Worst thing you can smell in a server room. I find that one of the power supplies has burnt out, so I replace it with another one from our store. It immediately burns out. Ooops, this is serious. Then I find the problem. Earlier in the week I had put in a 12 volt relay to turn on the red 'On Air' light. I thought this was connected to a 12 volt indicator supply. It wasn't - in fact it was connected to a 24 volt indicator supply, so the relay had been gently cooking throughout the broadcast and was now nicely browned all over. I remove the relay, change the power supply [again] and go home to bed. Midnight.

3am. I am still awake, very tired but not sleepy. I get up, go downstairs and type up the minutes to a meeting a week previously for 3 organizations that are coming together to start a new interactive youth Internet radio station. 4am. I am now sleepy so I return to bed.

People needed...

2006-09-21T23:28:00.000+03:00

By the end of November we shall lose a very valuable member of our team. Officially he has been our primary support person, the person that people talk to first about any problems they are having with any of our facilities. However, he has been much more valuable that that... he has also been Mr Fixit, sorting out many things that needed doing around the office, from plumbing to building shelves. And even more than that he has kept a smiling face and been an encourager to the rest of us. He is away on vacation at the moment so we are missing him already.

So if there were people available to fill all the people we need what roles would we need filling?

Office Administrator & Book-keeper
Primary Support Person
Server Administrator
Software Developer
Video Editor/Sound Mixer
Training Co-ordinator
Fund-raiser

When I thought about this I initially thought I will try to put them in order, but I am less convinced there is an order. We really do need an Office Administrator and Book-keeper. It's a sort of half time but critical role. From simple things like ensuring we have an office cleaner [not doing the cleaning but arranging it to happen] though sorting the multiple mishaps [like arranging a plumber or air conditioing engineer when needed -- can require up to a dozen phone calls chasing up], office supplies and remembering silly things we forget like coffee, but alongside this the vital role of Book-keeper. We currently have someone who gives one day per week on this, but sometimes its quite a bit more than that and keeping it done on a day to day basis is a real need.

When we lose John at the end of November we shall need another Primary Support Person, again this could be a half time job, involving answering problems [when a user says 'my email isn't working' he finds out what they mean, then check that it is working from our end and then tells them what to do to fix it if he can... frequently with the facilities we provide its not a problem with our facilities but with the end users use of them] We also need documentation writing for some of the facilities and John has been steadily uploading programmes off audio tape onto the main audio server as a sort of background task. This of course alongside the building shelves etc that I mentioned earlier.

We really need a full time Server Administrator, someone who knows Linux/UNIX and is comfortable administrating email, web servers and database systems, backing them up and doing all the housekeeping needed to keep 9 production servers directly under our control running and a helping partners with a few other servers that they turn to us for advice on. There are currently three of us doing this support part time and we would still be available for 'holiday relief' and some of the administration but we are more project oriented people who are better developing new ideas and systems.

We need a Software Developer, someone who is confident in Perl, PHP and SQL. We have had someone out here for three months developing a system for connecting desktop mobile phones to the database servers. He will be coming back for six weeks next week. Looking at the projects we could be doing if we had a developer shows us we really need one.

We could do with a Video Editor and Sound Mixer combined. I can do both those jobs and actually enjoy doing them, but don't have time and projects are always getting behind because I don't have 'focus time' for some of the projects. When I mean 'focus time' I mean significant chunks of time [weeks not days or hours] to devote to projects, this is in part because I am 'on call' for support for 3-4 shifts per week, have co-ordination meetings, administration and a host of other calls upon my time.

Over the last couple of years we have had an Egyptian person as an intern, he has been here between a quarter and one third of his time. It has been very profitable both ways. He is now a very competent system administrator and becoming a valuable media consultant in the region. We would like to multiply that and have 3 or 4 interns - so there would always be one intern here in Cyprus. To run an effective internship programme we need someone to do it. Someone who can travel so that between times here at our office they can be visited and encouraged - that's the role of the Training Co-ordinator.

When I said we needed a Fund Raiser, that is true, but that would only be part of the job, also needed would be communicating with supporters about what we are doing and how things are going. We need funds for projects and for keeping the office going, but we also need equipment that is not allocated to specific projects but helps us do what we do. An example of this would be an interactive whiteboard with video projector. We have a couple of small rather old whiteboards, but as we are often developing systems, being able to integrate whiteboard and video projector would very significantly enhance our effectiveness. Replacing all the aging screens with LCD screens would be another need... plus some decent computers for development [we are currently using old cast-off computers for this].

So if we had all these what would I do? I would go sailing of course... no seriously, I spend a lot of my time in meetings and co-ordinating and being the stop gap for when something needs doing. I would so some projects but not be overloaded like I feel I am right now.

Meetings, meetings everywhere...

2006-09-20T01:25:00.000+03:00

So far this month I have had meetings in Cyprus [as might have been expected], in Egypt [twice] and Tunisia [once]. OK, the Egypt twice was en route to and from Tunisia, but there have been a lot of meetings. Most of those meetings were about one of the major web sites that we host. The actual name of the site we don't publish here but the site has another information site that you can see what its about and how effective it is called eBridge. Click on 'Results' to see graphs of visitors, new people signing up etc.

Basically the site aims to 'sit down and drink coffee' [metaphorically] -- to build bridges with Muslims and share Jesus in a natural way. Obviously they can accept or reject Him, but frequently Christians say things in a superior 'we're right you're wrong' sort of way which is unhelpful to building relationships and thus inviting them into a relationship with someone we love dearly called Jesus.

We have been hosting the site for two years or so now and a year ago we took over responsibility for rebuilding it -- both design and site development, with others doing the regular updates on the content. Our partners also started advertising on Google and the response was overwhelming. While we were advertising we were getting more than 30,000 new visitors per month. Since we have stopped advertising [due to finances] we have now [only?] about 25,000 visitors per month with about 4,500 who have joined as members and interact with the editorial team daily.

The meetings were to plan the way ahead for the next year. What is ironic is that there is something incarnational about relationships that virtual relationships miss. What do I mean by this? Here we are running a very successful website where thousands of people are interacting daily, but we have to have face-to-face meetings to plan the website.

Now I'm back there are a few things to finish off... the DVD project that I am loving to hate [went for review while I was travelling and now have all the hopefully final comments to integrate]... plus a dub of a video into Farsi [another group did the main voice dub and we are sorting out the mix and adding in recordings I made of the songs in Farsi]... plus a dub into Kurdish of a video...

Struggling with Sonic Software

2006-08-30T21:37:00.000+03:00

At last... I kind of hope... the DVD project will come to an end... maybe...

Having solved the jittery problem with Sonic DVDit Pro [no thanks to tech support who were hopeless!] The next thing that happened was I got some wierd problem when I get half way through the project re-rendering etc [ie a week for full time work later] is that it crashes with a 'error in source code WaveDump.cpp line 244, -1' code. Eventually be reverse engineering finding where they store temporary files and finding out which file was being accessed at the time it brings up this error I found that one of the video files had a corrupt audio file with it and that was crashing the system... why can't it say something useful like 'Problem with audio file cp2.mp2, cannot continue' - at least then I would know which file was faulty!

Then... find that there is a specification limit to how much of a DVD can be used for menus, and because there are so many animated menus we are over the limit. Of course... the program only tells you this too late. If you duplicate and edit a menu it allows you to go over the limit, then on one change it suddenly says ''Ooops you are way over the limit, no changes..." or rather the 'way over' part is missing so you have no idea how many changes you need to make to allow it to work.

I hate computers at times like this. I mean if this was a cheap domestic package we were using then what would you expect, but this is the second to top software for making DVDs on Windows machines... wish we had money to go MAC totally... next video machine will certainly be a MAC! Each time I need to make a test DVD it takes between 2-4 hours for the machine to make it.

I got the new dual layer DVD blanks on Monday - we need double layer ones for this project to fit it on and they are not so easily accessible and about about 6 times the cost [approx 3.50 GBP each out here]. Overnight Monday night I rendered a DVD image, was going to check it then add the final audio tracks today and make DVD overnight.

But... this yesterday morning when I came in I found the RAID controller showing an error [the RAID controller makes two hard disks into one very large and very very fast hard disk which you need for video editing]. Yuk... But the disks were bought on 3rd Sept so they are just within warranty... contacted the supplying company who said 'Yes, we will test them, then return to manufacturer, then when they return new disks to us, we will send them to you'. [Approx 4-5 weeks from past experience].

So we bought a couple of new hard disks... this project is proving expensive to us what with new software for the captions [which we then discarded] new DVD authoring software for the number of clips, loads of DVDs as tests for the new software, new DVD writer [because it failed] and two new disks for the RAID system. Please I want a MAC video computer for my birthday and forget about all this Windows rubbish ;-)

Anyhow... have managed to coax some life back out of the disks, put them on another computer [that is identical to the video one and we happen to be borrowing from another organization at the moment] and yesterday I copyied all the files that are not corrupted between the two computers.

Today I made a full project DVD... YIPEE!! Ready to send off to our partner. After it was finished I started going through checking the menu orders and... you'd guessed it I now get a 'menu out of order error -45633' come up on screen. I don't believe it :-(

I have had an email from Tech Support at Sonic, saying if there are further questions please reply on the website. So I went to the website [almost every day for a week] and cannot login because it doesn't recognise my password so I clicked in the 'email me my password link' and... nothing comes! So I look up the 'Contact us' page and it links to the login page that doesn't work and requires the 'email me my password' to work. So... no contact with Sonic. Thanks guys... not!

Mobile Phones

2006-08-17T23:15:00.000+03:00

Today we had a strange thing happen... two of the desktop mobile phones used for incoming and outgoing SMS messages were working and two were not. Finally traced to a very wierd problem... on one of the non-working desktop mobiles there was an incoming SMS message with the phone number showing a something like 3C487A068FD298 - nothing at all like a normal number which should be something like +441211234567. This strange and wrong number crashed the mobile phone, which crashed the program importing it, which locked up the USB connector to which all the mobiles were connected, stopping two of them working, but allowing the other two to continue. Very strange.

Lost blog

2006-08-17T00:15:00.000+03:00

Hmmm... last week I wrote an entry which has mysteriously disappeared into the ether. Rather like emails seem to sometimes. Strange. When I first started using the Internet and in the old days BBSs email was somewhat unreliable. Then about 5 years ago things seemed pretty reliable most emails seemed to deliver and responses were quick. Now we seem to have drifted back to the 'bad old days' of unreliable email.

Anyway... now I forget what I wrote last week about the previous week's activities. I do know I eventually solved the problem with making good DVDs, no thanks to the Technical Support Department of Sonic [we use DVDit 6 pro which is very powerful and good].

They suggested we had the wrong/old display drivers [we were using the latest, which were old but there were none newer and it was a problem with playback on a set top DVD player anyhow]. They then suggested that the problem was due to having old firmware on the DVD writer [we had almost the latest version - but later found another problem - and it had been working fine with DVDit 2]. Finally they suggested that the DVD stock we were using was bad [we had been using the same DVDs successfully prior to switching from DVDit 2 to DVDit 6].

Eventually I found the problem was that Premiere or the Matrox capture card was somehow changing the DV tapes interlace from bottom dominance to top dominance. Why DVDit version 2 didn't object but DVDit Pro version 6 did I fail to understand. Great... now working fine... almost... in checking everything the last few DVD burns got worse and worse and eventually the DVD burner [a Pioneer A03 which we paid 700 sterling for when it first came out] died. Hah... found the problem... the stock was new stock and unless you had upgraded to the latest firmware [which they hadn't notified us of] then new stock burnt out the laser! So new DVD writer needed.

Anyhow what has happened for the last week is that I have been re-editing and re-editing the material for a project we started 12 months ago [and had too many changes en route]. I am now 50% through the final re-edit and hope by next week I can tell you all I have completed it.

What I can say is that as soon as possible we shall change from using Microsoft Windows for our editing computer to a Mac using Final Cut Pro. We have had three or four Windows based editing systems and they have always been unreliable. The reason for staying Windows had been simple - cost, but now Apple Macs are cheaper and so no reason not to use them. I have a Mac notebook which I have had for 9 months now and it hasn't had any 'blue screen of death' or lockups or anything... and it's lighter than any Windows notebook I have seen!

I wonder how many weeks of my life I would have saved if we could have afforded a Mac based video editing system... could have been out sailing instead of fighting a silly computer!

Rewiring

2006-08-04T00:10:00.000+03:00

Having got the servers working more reliably today all three of us in technical support spent the day re-wiring the bay that the servers live in. In big organizations, which both Peter and I worked in, there are people who are 'wiremen' people who are very good at the detailed wiring of connectors. No such luck here, so we do it. It's nearly complete and tomorrow we should finish it. The target: Prepare the equipment for the next 3 years service.

Sprocket holes

2006-08-02T18:22:00.000+03:00

When I started at the BBC all the news was shot on film. The first sequences I directed were on film. Film is a nice medium - when you hold it up to the light you can see little pictures and with a magnifying glass you can see exactly what you have. Between each picture there is a nice little sprocket hole for the projector [or telecine machine in television] to align the each picture.

The ongoing saga of making DVDs makes me long for the 'good old days' of film. With all this 'top field' 'bottom field' stuff it is complicated and invisible. However, today I have cracked it [I hope]. Although DV tapes are recorded with bottom field first, somewhere in the import process this gets converted to top field first... but... Premiere seems to think it hasn't so says 'export this bottom field first'. I don't know how many places you can change the field order... too many for my liking, but at last I have found the right combination and I am busy making a final trial DVD.

Switch over

2006-08-02T00:22:00.000+03:00

So why did clustering not work? We [two of us] tried everything we could for a week to get clustering to work. Sadly we couldn't make it work with the resources we had. Reading what other people were doing online with clustering I found that most people had 30 Gig RAM or more in their servers [we have 1 Gig in ours and many home machines have half that].

To get that amount of RAM you need four 8 Gig RAM cards. Each 8 Gig RAM card costs approx 11,000 US dollars... yes, you do did read that right, so to have 32 Gig in two servers would cost just under 90,000 US dollars, that's just under 50,000 pounds sterling! So, assuming the price would drop within the lifetime of the servers we investigated... only to find our servers would only take 4 Gig RAM and to get more powerful motherboards would cost another silly amount of money... so forget that.

So we then spent two more days rebuilding the system to be a 'replication pair' of servers. This is not as powerful as a cluster but works well with the resources we have available. And we have now switched over to the new system.

Alongside this, the video editing project needed a new DVD authoring program - that's the software that enables menus and other clever things to be added to DVDs. The new software refused to work properly, producing very jittery images. I tried all things to make it right and nothing seemed to work. So... reluctantly I phoned technical support in the USA. This is a charge service so I was trying to do every option before incurring extra costs.

Tech support was not very helpful. Having asked all the options about what I had tried they then suggested that the display adaptor software on the computer was out of date [we had the latest software] or maybe the DVD burner needed new firmware [we had the latest firmware] or maybe the DVDs themselves were bad [we have used them successfully for months] - everything but a problem with their software of course. Not helpful.

This morning I woke up thinking maybe there was a problem with the GOP structure of the files. Oh, yuk this is really technical! GOP stands for the highly technical phrase 'Group of Pictures' and what happens on a DVD is that every so often they have a complete picture but within the 'group of pictures' they only have the differences between the pictures. This saves a huge amount of disk space. Hmmm... but... the GOP structures were correct.

I then read somewhere online that somehad had a problem with the 'field dominance order' of some video capture cards... I wonder??? 'Field Dominance Order' really is too technical to explain simply. But basically normal TV has the top field first but DV tapes have the lower field first. OK, strangely... very strangely... very strangely indeed... it appears that if I invert the field dominance order in the program making the video files and then invert it again [ie put it back where it started] in the program making the DVD it works! But... the quality is not quite what is needed as I had to convert the file to Quicktime and back again. So... more investigation.

Third breakthrough... Peter had been struggling with some computers in our 'lab' which were refusing to work. They are regular desktop computers, but he found today that if he turned off the battery saving system [normally only of use on laptops] they work correctly. As the Americans say 'Go figure'.

So we move on... this is really boring but necessary stuff.

Up periscope...

2006-07-27T00:44:00.000+03:00

"Up periscope... scanning horizon... clear to surface..."

This last month seems like 2-3 months in one month. Mainly we moved house, which we had intended doing earlier in the year when it was cooler, but happened in July. The house move went well and can be read in detail in Sue's blog, but it did take me away from other work for quite a while.

Then there was editing to catch up on. This training DVD just won't go away...

Then we have a major rebuild of the servers. One of my colleagues from Egypt has come over for the month so that Peter, he and I can all work together so that we are all understanding the system together.

What we wanted to do was an upgrade to one of the database systems we host to stabilize it for 3 years - obviously minor upgrades during that time, but the major one now. Within that upgrade we wanted to have automatic backup of the data and automatic changeover between the servers. This is called clustering. Another change had been in process by the programmer of the system and that was to incorporate all the images into the database.

Everything worked well until the day we were due to switch over from the old system to the new... when we tried it we found that one of the databases was very large indeed and clustering required more resources that we have available, but that the newer version of the database software would probably handle the large database better. So now we are in investigation for how to proceed as the databases will grow significantly during the 3 years we want this system to work for.

Alongside this, there is the war in Lebanon. We hadn't anticipated getting our guest apartment ready yet, but had to do so in a hurry to accomodate a couple who had evacuated Lebanon.

2006-06-18T04:42:00.000+03:00

One of the services we provide is what is called a 'contact management system' for people who contact various radio and TV stations. 'Contact Management' is a way of ensuring that letters, emails, SMS messages and phone calls are all dealt with promptly and that the people doing this can know what contact has happened with an individual viewer or listener before. The radio and TV stations we help have tens of thousands of contacts per year, so this kind of thing is important. It is also important that the information is kept private and confidential.

When we started providing this service about just under two years ago the numbers on the system were pretty small, but have grown out of all proportion and now the two servers we had handling this system were really not coping very well. Every time one of the people doing listener support would click on a page of information it could take up to 30 seconds to display. They were getting very frustrated. As a clue the BBC home page takes about 7 seconds to display everything... this was a text only page and taking 4 times as long!

This upgrade has been long in the works, if you have followed th saga of the motherboards you will know it well. But at last this week we managed to upgrade the main server and at last all the parts have arrived to upgrade the backup server.

One of the things we also do is research new technologies to see how they can be used for communicating around the region. This week Peter showed me something that as they say 'blew my mind away'. We have been streaming audio for some time and doing trials with video streaming, including streaming video to some pretty large numbers of people from various conferences. But to my mind video on the Internet is pretty lame. If the material is not available elsewhere then I guess it's OK to watch but I'd much rather watch satellite TV.

However... Peter showed me the new Reuters website with embedded video. The quality was stunning and smooth [often Internet video is jerky] with good sound. The technology used for this is Flash video and uses Flash Media Server software.

Funny enough this has come along just at the time we need it for a project we have discussed for some time, and has grown closer to actually happening while I was in Egypt. There is a TV programme on one of the satellite TV channels about a couple of small groups of people who each meet together in their homes to worship Jesus. As you can imagine in some places in the region this is the most appropriate way for followers of Jesus to meet.

The desire is to create an Internet 'home' that people can come to who see the TV programme and who want to know more and want to link up with others who feel the same as they do. I use the term Internet 'home' because the aim is to be much more than a website, with lots of things on offer and eventually live linkups between people who cannot meet physically. We had already decided to use Flash technology, but the Media Server technology will make it much more open and friendly for those coming to the site. Of course dreaming the idea is only 1% of the work!

2006-06-07T00:10:00.000+03:00

Just back from Egypt where I was directing a Live Outside Broadcast... and there are a lot of pretty upset people back there in Cairo. Why? People from the event we were supposed to be broadcasting kept coming in to the video control room where we were working from and asking us to feed the programme onto the screens so everyone could see it but we could not because it wasn't there on the satellite channel it was supposed to be on... there were many phone calls asking why it could not be seen on the satellite channel... the people that sponsored the uplink kept asking why they could not see the programme they were paying for. Just as a clue, the cost to the sponsors for this one Live OB was the equivalent of half the price of buying a flat to live in. So you can understand why they were upset. Why wasn't it on the satellite channel? I have no idea. Someone somewhere decided it should go out all over sub-saharan Africa but not the Middle East.

However, for me personally, I also was upset about the communications between our OB site and the main Outside Broadcast which meant that for the second year running we had a disaster uplink. Before the event I kept repeating to the broadcast organizers that the communications needed to work well and I was concerned as soon as I heard what they were attempting to use [one ordinary phone line] - that they were totally inadequate.

In the morning of the Outside Broadcast we tested the communications, connected the phone line into our talkback and although the quality wwas poor it were adequate and I was encouraged. Maybe it would work and I would be proven wrong.

When it came to the live OB we had problem after problem connecting and when we did it appeared that the OB engineers in at the remote site had no clue how to handle the facilities. When we first connected the sound was adequate and we could hear the director, then it became distant like down a tunnel... it sounded like we were on a regular phone handset that had been placed on the desk, not connected into the talkback system, but I cannot believe anybody would even attempt a TV OB using a phone handset for communications, so I am not sure what was happening. Then after a while we would get tone dialing on the line and then the line would be hung up. We would then redial and redial and redial... for 30 minutes or longer only getting voicemail, eventually connecting only to repeat the performance. Taking that long to re-dial each time meant we missed the first two inserts we were supposed to do for the broadcast.

It is almost 30 years ago to the month when, as a very junior Outside Broadcast engineer, I was involved in sound mixing a major OB for the BBC. Over a period of 10 days we did numerous inserts into radio stations around the world including many in Africa. Some were simple but many were more complex than the OB last weekend.

I remember particularly doing a sequence with Kenneth Kaunda simultaneously into a number of radio stations including Zambia. It was notable to me because part of the interview included this African statesman sharing his faith in Jesus as being the only hope for the continent.

Why I am now upset is that as an 18 year old junior OB Engineer I set up and facilitated many links with complex communications over those 10 days, some difficult to achieve but all successful. Since then, over the years I have been involved in many Christian events, including directing significantly more complex ones than the OB last weekend. Now I weep because we had absolutely appalling communications again. And it was totally unnecessary to be that bad.

Of course I also had my own traumas in Egypt again, where they swapped the second unit director to someone who had never directed TV before and therefore got really bad pictures and blocked my requests for backup interview guests to cover if there were problems - eg when we hit a time of total silent prayer for the only time we did get on air... but that's another story...

It is the second year running there have been problems. The first year I just felt sorry for the organizers thinking it was a unique occurence. This year has been a repeat performance. So what do I do? At the moment I have said I will not spend my time on these Live OBs in the future. Should I spend more time teaching more people? Will they learn? Will I really learn to say NO!

Finances and volunteers

2006-05-24T23:14:00.000+03:00

Every Wednesday David comes in for the day as our book-keeper. He is retired and gives us one day per week doing our accounts. I am amazingly thankfull for all he does. The day he comes in I try to keep clear to work with him on all the financial matters. One day per week is really not enough time, so he is always behind and always trying to catch up. Today by 5pm I was whacked out and came home for a rest [the bacterial infection still seems to have left me weak] but David carried on working for another hour or so after me.

There are also dozens of other little jobs that need doing, which get sidelined till we get time or it becomes critical... the printer needs a new cartridge, the bath for guests has problems, we need more paper and so it goes on.

John is another volunteer - he helps us with technical support. Every morning he comes in and answers emails and holds the 24/7 support hotline phone for if there are problems. He is another person I am amazingly thankful for.

John leaves us to fully retire in November and David never catches up... we need more volunteers, people who can help. So if you fancy a retirement job in a pleasant location... let us know!

Testing... testing... testing...

2006-05-23T23:32:00.000+03:00

No, I haven't just forgotten to write... well, partly, but mainly because I have been unwell. I had a urine infection, so the doctor told me, and felt really really unwell for a few days and then afterwards have had very much less energy than I normally have. I am on the mend now, but it really did take a lot out of me.

It's only a few days before Michael leaves us and although he is not happy that enough testing has been done, we have done a lot and today we did 'stress testing' of the new SMS system. Over a period of about 10 minutes 8 people fired SMS messages at the system as fast as they could, repeating the same message to emulate the equivalent of about 10,000 to 15,000 messages per day. Which is vastly more than we expect at the moment, but the aim was to see what would happen if there was a huge number come in at one time.

The results were very encouraging. At one stage the Desktop Mobile did have a problem, but Michael's code went into it's error catching routine and corrected the problem.

Peter and I have been working [since I have been back] at trying to get all the systems up to our new dual-failover system. We are not there yet, but hope to complete before the end of June.

The 'Lab' - part of the computer food chain!

2006-05-08T19:15:00.000+03:00

A friend of mine who works for one of our partners sent me a URL to the Microsoft Macintosh Laboratory. It was very impressive... hundreds of Macs everywhere with a whole cluster of Mac minis. He added 'pity we cannot get anything even approaching this for our line of business'. So true. We would love some Mac minis for developing systems for use around our region. They would be great for monitoring stations and SMS gateway machines and audio workstations and... and... oh well, in our dreams.

Anyway the development of the SMS gateway is progressing and so you can compare our modest setup to Microsoft, here is a photo of our setup... just after we took delivery of another 3 Burnside desktop mobiles so we can test them clustered together. Well, actually it's half of it. The other half is a couple more lab computers on a big table the other side of the room. Most of the lab machines became lab machines because they were too old for anything else useful. So we use them for testing and development.

This week Michael will be trying to get his software to automatically configure itself for multiple Burnside phones on the same USB connection. In the old days [no not 'good old days' or 'bad old days' just the old days about 10 years ago] you plugged something like a modem into one of the serial ports. You knew because it was labelled 'COM1' that it was COM1. With USB it's not so easy... the com port changes when you plug extra ones in, hence why Michael's software has to go out and find the correct phone.

The machine at the front contains the motherboard we are testing for a new replacement we want to put in for all of our servers. Assuming it all goes to plan then it will be moved to our rackmount servers in about 2 weeks time. So far... [this is the third one we have tested] it looks fine. When we have approved that motherboard and completed testing and put it and others like it into service then the old slow motherboards will become lab machines replacing the even older and slower ones we currently have. Now you understand why we long for some of the resources that big brother Microsoft has at their disposal!

Little things please little minds...

2006-05-06T20:44:00.000+03:00

At least we had a couple of successes this week... for those following Sue's blog will know of the ongoing saga or maybe we should call it nightmare of selling our house in the UK... so some successes at the office help... a little...

We got a new motherboard [3rd one for those following this ongoing saga] for one of the servers and will be using it for testing the new SMS gateway for the next couple of weeks before putting it into service. The SMS gateway allows people to send and receive SMS messages from teams looking after the websites we host and radio and tv stations we partner with. Well... having had two failures with motherboards we at last have a success.

The new one is much better than either of the other two in features offered and works perfectly [so far]... no racing clock and full monitoring of voltages, temperatures and things and all connectors working. Actually there are loads more connectors than normal. For those technical I think there are about 8 USB connectors, 2 Firewire, goodness alone knows how many audio including an optical audio and 2 Ethernet. It is the 2 ethernet that are particuarly good. We normally have to fit an extra ethernet board to get our servers working, but this comes with 2 built in. Of course the bad news was the price. Which we won't talk about. Especially as we need five more of them.

Secondly got the first live test of the new SMS gateway working on the 'live' system. And it worked perfectly. Next week we shall change one of the live SMS systems over to the new software and see how it runs, monitoring it continually. Interesting to see the difference between the old version [which I wrote] and the new one written by Michael. Michael is with us for a further month and is a professional programmer. On the server when we run my software it shows up as the most 'hungry' program on the server for resources. It is almost continually top of the list of using up resources when we monitor. Michael's on the other hand is so low that it doesn't even show on the first page of programs! This is particuarly good news as we want to run many copies of his program at the same time for many different mobile phones.

Had a visit on Thursday from one of the folk that I did the live TV Outside Broadcast for last year. He was conveying thanks from the team for what I did and we spent about half a day talking about what might happen this year. I have made a number of suggestions and hope that they will be accepted so as to reduce the stress at both ends.

Catch up? When?

2006-05-04T01:02:00.000+03:00

Tuesday/Wednesday have been catchup days... catchup with colleagues returning from vacation [in particular Peter who co-leads the team with me] and catchup with accounting.

Wednesday is the day David our book-keeper comes in. We spend the most part of the day raising invoices to partners for their projects. The problem is with the book-keeping and administration is that it isn't a full time job, but it is more than 1 day per week. So with david coming in one day per week we are always behind. We try to keep up with paying the bills, but the invoicing partners is always way behind. In this case we found one that should have been sent out in October 2005 that hadn't been. I don't know what the answer is really, other than pray that God sends us someone who can do 1/2 time book-keeping and administration.

We are also fighting an old accounting system - Quick Books. It's not really up to what we want it to do and intend changing over to SQL-Ledger as soon as possible. SQL-Ledger will help a lot, but we wanted to change over as soon as we got all the new accounts. Since we are now in the EU we can do things easier... so they say... all we need is the charity/company papers from the UK verified by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the UK and hey presto... we can do things in Europe. But it has been months and months waiting for the FCO to verify our papers and we are still waiting.

Good meeting, bad hardware

2006-05-01T20:06:00.000+03:00

Had a good meeting this morning discussing how we will proceed with live interactive Internet radio. We hope to start the new youth radio station, with a high emphasis on music and interaction at the end of September. There's quite a lot to sort out before then, like the new youth team, music profile, themes etc. I came back from the meeting feeling that this was the sort of thing I enjoy -- co-ordinating a team of people towards a defined project.

Then this afternoon happened. I hate hardware. The mother board I had replaced... see this thread, proved to be faulty and had not allowed any SMS messages to come in or go out over the weekend. So I changed it back to the old, slow motherboard as slow is better than stop. So tomorrow I have to try to sort out what to do about it. Also one of the SMS 'desktop mobile phones' went faulty at the end of last week and we are having problems getting a replacement sent out. This means that the SMS project is effectively held up until we get it.

So, day start good, day end bad.

mother-bored?

2006-04-29T15:35:00.000+03:00

Changed the motherboard on one of the servers yesterday... the one with the groundhog day problem... and some things are running much better. It now runs on a clock that stays pretty much on time and we can correctly monitor the motherboard temperature, fan speed, power supply voltages etc. But... the second network card doesn't seem to work with this motherboard.

We have a system for monitoring all the servers, and all the services on each server which is supposed to send us an SMS message if something goes wrong. Peter has been off all week, so I have in between been trying to get the monitoring system working with all the new servers and services.

We have nearly 300 services to monitor and these are continually checked and and problems reported to us. About 10% of those services are proving an absolute pain to get monitoring properly. One such service is an alarm if the number of email messages waiting to be delivered gets greater than a preset limit. If this happens it normally means something else is wrong eslewhere, but its a useful indicator of a potential problem. Of 10 of the servers that have email going through them I configured 5 to monitor the number of email messages with no problem, but the other 5, with identical configurations are refusing to work. Why?

These technical problems are extremely boring. I would rather be working on media projects, but things like the monitoring service enable us to use the systems without spending all day every day just monitoring the technology. When I spend a week of in-between times trying to get the monitoring working and sorting out boring mother boards I wonder...

So... what we need is a good technical system administrator who likes keeping systems going!

Whacking hackers...

2006-04-26T18:02:00.000+03:00

Today at lunchtime there was a discussion about how to murder someone. No, don't worry this was all in the light of the board game Cluedo. I was saying that I could not imagine using a candle-stick to kill someone. I'm a gentle sort of person on the whole and clobbering someone to death is just not me. But hackers really get my goat, I kind of feel like picking up a large heavy object and banging it around their heads.

Today we were hacked again. Last time we were hacked we thought we had closed all gates, locked, bolted etc. In the past people got in through using legitimate usernames and passwords they had stolen through our users not having adaquate virus protection. This time, in one sense it was much less serious in that they couldn't get into the system as a whole, but they did find an exploit on one of the forum systems and changed the forum system to rabid anti-Muslim propaganda. Seems like we are hit from both the Muslims and the anti-Muslims.

Strangely enough they appeared to leave a valid calling card. In the past it has been invalid, but this points to a site in Spain - home of a celebrated hacker community. So what should we do about them? Call the police? Tell al-qaeda? Send them a paela?

Groundhog day on a computer?

2006-04-26T17:02:00.000+03:00

You know I have been complaining I don't have enough time to get everything done... well one of our servers has found the solution to the problem. It gains time, so that in a couple of days it's clock is two days ahead. We then reset the clock back to normal and it relives those two days again. Groundhog day all over again. Trouble is... its a pain! We have a system that should correct small time errors every few minutes. But this is drifting too far out for this to cope so that it cannot correct itself.

So, thought I, I will set it do to a big correction every 5 minutes. Sounds good eh? Well, yes, but the reason it runs every 5 minutes is because the clock says so. So guess what happens? It corrects the time, which means it pulls it back and then runs the correction again, which pulls it back and... need I go on? Of course this is not too much of a problem unless it sends you an email to say 'Done that, aren't you grateful than I'm such a nice little computer?' [liberal translation of technospeak message it actually sends] which gets a little boring if you get about 60 messages per hour like that.

Solutions on a postcard, sent yesterday to arrive last week to: Time Travel Bureau, 5 Vie La Temps, Tempus Fugit, Tomorrow.

No news for a month

2006-04-23T23:56:00.000+03:00

I started this blog thinking people might be interested in knowing what I was doing... since a number of people support me in this. However, I have had no emails from anyone or any comments from anyone so I have kindof lost interest and find doing this a bit of a chore. If nobody wants to read it, why bother?

So what has happened in the last month? Well, the live video and audio relay went pretty well. It was much smaller than last year, but there were still about 30-40,000 listeners and about 8,000 viewers over a period of a week. So although it was much smaller, it was obviously a worthwhile exercise. Bacause of where it was coming from there were numerous breaks in the feed. As someone who used to work in professional broadcasting this is pretty frustrating, especially as there is 'off the shelf' satellite technology that w0uld make it work very well indeed.

I also visited a country in North Africa to talk to the main editor of one of the websites we developed and host. We get about 60,000 visitors a month to this site and we have just finished rebuilding it totally. Most of our websites are media oriented, ie they have a lot of audio and video content, but this one is about 98% text. We have just turned on something called 'Google Analytics' which enables us to see where people come from, which is a total of 91 countries. It even breaks it down by city so I see nearly 700 visitors from Riyadh and even a handful from Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Some of those people are now responding to the message and we've been creating a new website for those who want to go on from an initial contact and know more about what we believe.

We've had a programmer [Michael] out here for a couple of months creating a stable system to integrate SMS messages into our work. Some of you will know that I created a system about a year or so ago to do this, but there were two problems with this: Firstly the programming I did was great 'proof of concept' but really needed a professional programmer to write a cleaned up reliable system for rolling out around the world. Secondly the hardware we had been using was not really up to it and so we had to use different hardware which meant it had to be re-written from the ground up anyhow. So that was what he was doing. It's close but not finished... and it should have been finished by the end of April.

One of the problems faced was the Arabic long messages. SMS messages was supposed to be a Short Message Service, but for many people in the region it has tended to replace email and has become pretty long. Some of this was documented, some of it was covered by sections in the specification that read 'reserved for future expansion' and then Michael had to dig around and try to find out if anything was written about the future expansion that was actually being used. Anyway, he has decided to stay on for another month which should complete the porject. There is probably enough work for him to do if he came back full time... so maybe that will happen.

In between all this Peter and I have been trying to get all the servers completely moved over to the new cluster in Frankfurt. We moved another one over last week and will make that live this week and hopefully complete everything before the London contacts run out at the start of June.

We hope to be start regular weekly live broadcasts in the beginning of May and this week a Scandanavian will be flying out to discuss this project. He has been involved in running an FM station in Sweden, so his input will be valuable.

As you have probably gathered from the beginning of this post, I am somewhat fed up. The stresses over the church have really got to me and I'm currently taking a break and then kind of looking around for another place to go to church. Although there are 8 english speaking churches in our town none of them seem a good match and I will probably end up at whatever I consider to be the least bad option... which is not very motivating to say the least. I feel closer to God out sailing than I do at church right now. At least when we look at nature we don't see men leading people astray!

Streaming video and moving sites

2006-03-21T23:29:00.000+02:00

This week we will be handling the video and audio streaming for the same conference we did last year. Last year we had 70,000 listeners and 20,000 viewers approx over 4-5 days. I don't know if this year will be bigger or smaller, we shall wait and see.

Last year I went to the country in which the conference is being held but this year I am not, so I have been setting up the links on the server ready for the feed and my son helped set up the 'shuttle' system to send to the conference. The 'shuttle' is a very small but powerful computer with a special card inside for converting video into the web stream. It's about the size of a large shoebox, but really a pretty powerful computer.

Anyway it took a while to configure, but not only is it working better than last year in the tests, but I learnt quite a bit more about video streaming in the process. It's a never ending cycle of learning and developing here. So the rest of the week I shall be [on and off] monitoring the feed and checking everything is working correctly.

I also moved one of the main sites we handle here from the second London server to our new server cluster in Frankfurt. There are still about 20 sites we have to move sometime soon.

Good news and tribulations...

2006-03-19T23:09:00.000+02:00

I cannot believe it is two weeks since I wrote an update. It seems to have both flown by and dragged out for ever. I have been very stressed these last couple of weeks, but more of that later.

I have had meetings with a couple of our partners, resulting from the experiment in live radio on the Internet. The result of these meetings is that this area of work will certainly expand in the future. We are looking at more experiments leading to a full time service by the end of the year.

I have been editing a DVD in between. Having got the sequences together, I spent 2-3 days 'authoring' the DVD. Authoring is the process of puting in all the menus and links and what goes to where etc. In a multi-media training DVD this is pretty complex. Anyhow... having spent 2-3 days getting it ready to burn a demo to sent to our partners in the UK I click on the 'Make a DVD' button. Hard disk wirs... dialogue boxes come up on screen saying 10%, 20%, 30% etc up to 99% when its says [paraphrase] 'Croak, you gotta be joking this ain't gonna turn into a DVD for love nor money'. Actual message was 'Unknown Error UkErr01 - cannot make DVD'.

Furious I went to the website to talk to tech support for this commercial software. 'This product ceased to be supported in September 2005, please buy an upgrade'. The upgrade is 250 sterling! I downloaded the demo version of the upgrade, expecting since its an upgrade it will read in all the work I have done: Nope - 'Sorry you cannot import this file the version that made it is too old'. So I had to learn a new package and reauthor the same thing again... GRRRR...

Michael has managed to get the communication with the database working and the start of communication working with the mobile phone. So things are progressing pretty well there. I am encouraged having him doing the programming. He is much more logical and structured than I am which is what is needed in a programmer... I am good on the ideas and concepts and I can programme, but not good on all the 'what if's to test is something goes wrong. I have been his liaison with the project so have been in and out on this over the couple of weeks.

Next week we are handling the streaming of a live event in video and audio from Egypt. Last year there were 70,000 listeners and 20,000 viewers over 4-5 days. I have no idea how many to expect this year. I was in Egypt for this last year, but this year I am not going. An Egyptian colleague will be handling that end and I am handling all the stuff from Frankfurt servers.

The following week I shall be making a visit to Morocco to see some partners there. This will be the first time in Morocco and I am looking forward to it.

So... the stress point... this is something I don't normally write about here as my wife normally puts this sort of thing in her blog, but it has so affected me so much I think I have to have it here. The church we have been attending has adopted 'The Purpose Driven Life' lock, stock and barrel. The problem with the Purpose Driven Life is not that it is 100% wrong, but that it is a confused mix of good and bad. It is a mix of normal Christian doctrine and Southern California mega-church universalism. We have a word for this phenonema its called 'syncretism'. If you want to know exactly what it means, here's a pretty good definition.

Anyhow [as I appear to so often say], some people I am friendly with in the church have seen this too, but the leadership are into it hook, line and sinker and some people are being totally misled and deceived into not seeing all the errors... even the basic tenet is wrong, we should be spirit led not purpose driven!

Not sure where will be going from here church wise. I'm pretty sick about the whole thing.

Trials, tribulations and good news...

2006-03-04T02:16:00.000+02:00

Another week gone by and it seems like only one day. This week has been marked by trials, tribulations and good news.

So first the good news. We have another volunteer for 2 months out here. He arrived late on Wednesday evening. He is a programmer and his job is to create a program that will take SMS messages and put them in a database and messages from the database and send them as SMS messages. This is part of our upgrading of the SMS system.

I had written a program to do this, but it suffered from two problems. Firstly the hardware we had been using for the purpose were normal domestic mobile phones connected to our servers. These proved to be too unreliable. Secondly in order to communicate with these Nokia mobile phones we had to use some software called gnokii. That was designed for talking to 1 mobile phone only. In order to get it to talk to more than one mobile phone I had to do some very complex programming, which proved to be unreliable and make the whole project unstable when using more than one phone.

We have now found some new better professional Desktop mobiles from a British company called Burnside Telecom. These appeare very much better and the task of the programmer is to write a new simpler [and therefore more reliable] program to talk to these units.

So, that't the good news... we had got a new computer ready for Michael [the programmer] to use. It was using a spare motherboard we had and we bought new components to go with it. On Thursday we turned it on for him and within 10 minutes it froze. We rebooted. Within 10 minutes it froze... again and again. We tried different configurations and new hard drive and... it froze. So that had to be taken to the computer shop for them to look at. In the meantime Michael is using an old computer we have as a 'lab' machine for testing. This is old and slow. So inappropriate for him to use for the project.

And... CYTA... [the main telephone company here on the island] decided to do an 'upgrade' to the DSL system in our town this week starting very early Wednesday morning. Upgrade? Hmmm... it took most of Wednesday to get one of our two links working again. The other, which was with a different ISP, took till Thursday evening to get working. The other ISP blamed CYTA for the disruption. And it took till late Thursday evening to get all our facilities back to normal. Yuk. I hate ISPs that cause us more work!

The experiment ended

2006-02-26T20:07:00.000+02:00

The experiment on live Internet radio is over. I am both pleased and sad. Pleased because supervising a live 4 hour broadcast every night is a strain on top of a normal workload... sad because it was such a success I would rather it is sad to stop it. We had been getting about 50 listeners per day to this station, but by the end of the experiment we had over 2000 listerners per day, most within the 4 hour period of the live broadcast!

We have a saying 'no peace for the wicked' and I guess I must be in that category since as soon as the live broadcast finished we had to change servers from a London supplier to a Frankfurt supplier. So Peter and I have been tied up all this last week doing that. On the whole we are pleased: The London supplier had 24/7 reboot, which meant if there was a problem and the server had locked up we could get it rebooted, but only 9-5 Monday to Friday support. So if there was a server failure at, say, 5.15 on a Friday we had to wait till Monday morning for it to be fixed. Since most of our audience use the servers in the evening fixing problems promptly became a significant problem. The new company has a true 24/7 support option.

Live Internet Radio

2006-02-12T12:24:00.000+02:00

Right from the beginning of when we started Internet radio my hope and desire had always been that it should be live so that the presenters could interact with the audience. This Tuesday we started a two week experiment of 4 hours live Internet radio each evening. It has taken up a lot of my time ensuring everything is working and that the presenters are trained in how to do live [contrasted with pre-recorded] radio.

The results as far as audience is concerned have been pretty amazing. We have seen a 350% increase in the audience since we started. But the audience increase is not the whole story - we have had many contacts with listeners through phone, MSN, Skype, email and messages posted on the website.

Of course its not the size of the audience that is just important, if we broadcast sports we could get a huge audience! The content is also important. We have changed the style of the programming, but we are not totally happy with that and this next week I shall be having meetings with others of the management team to discuss how we go forward. It's obvious from the numbers we need to do something regularly live, but the question is to how to get the content right for our specific audience. That is always the most difficult question.

Moving on...

2006-02-06T02:42:00.000+02:00

Almost 3 weeks since the last post. Doesn't seem like a 'dear diary' spot. I will try to get back to more regular updates. There seems to be a logical problem here: When I am busy there is loads to write about and almost no time to do it. When I have time it is because there is little to write about! Today is part of the 'busy' but I couldn't sleep so got up and decided to write.

From the ongoing trail of problems you will know that we have had countless problems with servers and with the hosting company we use in London. We hope we will soon have solved both of those problem areas.

We decided that we need to work more like a telephone company with our mission critical servers. Obviously you don't want to try to make a telephone call only to find your telephone doens't work. One of the ways telephone companies get over the problem of equipment breaking down is to have two of everything critical with a system that swaps over to the other one if the first one breaks. This is called 'hot standby'.

The system we had been operating was called 'cold standby'. Cold standby systems have other equipment that can replace the faulty equipment, but needs to be set up to take over. This is what happened over Christmas. We had the parts, but we had to configure them and get it working.

Over the next few weeks we shall be setting up a hot standby system with all the servers in the office and those that are currently in London. This will directly double our costs as we shall have to have two servers wherever we had one, but it should in the medium term reduce the stress on us as when one goes wrong the other will take over, and then the repairs can be done when we want to, not when everything is crashing around us.

To solve the London problem we will be moving the facilities we lease in London to Frankfurt. We have been negotiating with a German company to provide facilities similar to what we are leasing in London. Again we will be going for a 'hot standby' system, so this again will double our costs. We have been discussing with our partners and they are prepared to pay the extra costs so that we can all have a more reliable system.

Alongside all these decisions we have been working on two things: Preparing for two weeks of live Internet radio and preparing to re-launch one of the websites we host. For both of these we have had extra people from one of the Arab countries staying with us to prepare.

The two weeks of live Internet radio is an experiment and will come from our studios here in Cyprus. It is for a week before and a week after Valentines day. Valentines day is celebrated in the Middle East and gives us a suitable 'peg' to hang on many questions about love and about how God cares for us. More news as it unfolds.

The re-launch of one of the websites came as a request from the team that develop the content. We have helped totally redesign and restructure it. It's a 12 month project and we have hired full time a programmer to work on it.

Generally speaking the sites we host get between 2 and 8 thousand visitors a month. Which is good considering the target audience. This site was at the bottom end of the figures, but the countries visitors came from and their reaction to the material more than made up for this.

In December the team started using Google AdWords to advertise the site and the result was almost a 10 fold increase in visitors to 19,000. In January the figure was over 34,000. Apparently about 2% of those visitors then signed up for more information. And this is before the new re-launch.

The re-launch will happen within the next week or two. We are ready, we are just waiting for the content team to be ready. So for two reasons... watch this space.

Support problems

2006-01-14T19:29:00.000+02:00

The only thing that is reliable about computers is that they are unreliable! And trying to do everything we do within a very very limited budget only makes it more difficult. We have Internet radio stations that operate 24 hours a day, Internet TV programmes for viewing, websites, e-commerce sites, email systems etc etc etc

We have a system that monitors everything and sends a text message to the mobile phone of the person on duty, in theory, within 15 minutes of a problem developing. As you know from following this blog we have tended to have problem after problem after problem with systems. This week we had a minor problem with one server. Sadly the problem became greater because the person on duty ignored the alert thinking it meant something else.

What we realised as a result of this is that sometimes we get so many messages from 'clients' reporting faults that we cannot see the wood for the trees. I say messages from clients reporting faults... but what we found out is that only about 25% of the messages we recieve are reporting faults. The rest fall into the category of either administrative messages or personal support messages [where the 'client' has a problem, but the problem is not ours but theirs!] or where the client is asking for a new feature rather than reporting a problem.

So... how to manage things? Administration is not my strong point. And we have just come to the end of another year, which means I/we have to do an end of year report including the end of year finances. We always find the end of year reports a pain to do... and yet find when they are completed they are really helpful in seeing how much we have actually achieved. So... coming up is going through the finances and going through the logs to see what we have done.

Editing...

2006-01-06T21:54:00.000+02:00

Since Christmas, as before Christmas, the biggest thing I have been doing is editing a training programme. Training programmes are always difficult as they have to be 'interesting' but often the material is somewhat abstract and trying to make them interesting can be difficult.

In the early autumn we installed a new computer for editing - the old one was now four years old and very slow by today's standards. We thought we could do the upgrade cheaply by just buying a new motherboard and keeping everything else the same. No chance sadly, we ended up building a completely new system... and what was worse we were supplied with a faulty component [cheap 15 pound component]. Sadly that faulty component did significant damage to other parts... the supplier replaced the faulty component but not all the other parts it damaged.

Anyhow... my son is into hardware for computers and he came in to do the building of the system. Computers for video editing are complex beasts and he installed the system about 4 times before saying it was working. So I started editing with the computer. It was not 100% working. Every so often it would crash. I know some people say 'What do you expect, it's a computer?' and others might be demeaning of Microsoft, but I do expect computers to stay running longer than a couple of hours.

Having started the editing and having a deadline of early January, we could not stop and try sorting out the problem, which would have required a complete re-install again [maybe more than once] and we had no real idea how to stop it crashing. So I persevered. And persevered. And persevered. And got angry with it. And wished we could have a Mac editing system [which is what we would have gone for it we were starting fresh today]. And got even more angry with it.

This is time for an aside, because it's from this that some thinking came about... There is a strand of Christianity called the 'prosperity Gospel' - people from that strand teach that since God created the whole universe he can sure provide all we need in abundance all the time. And there is some truth in that teaching. Some truth. But not whole truth. Anyhow people who teach from that strand tend to drive Mercedes, live in big houses and have the latest and best of everything.

There are some groups within Christianity that value austerity as the way forward. That group tend to have bicycles, live in apartments and re-use tea bags. And there is some truth in that teaching. Some truth. But not the whole truth.

So in times when I am struggling and getting angy with these stupid computers I tend to feel attracted to the 'prosperity' and wish for the latest, greatest, no expense spared... after all aren't we trying to share Jesus in what we do and so what we do must be valuable?

Had a meeting yesterday with someone and he said one of his gifts was fundraising. Often, when I am getting angry with lack of resources I feel that maybe I should do less and fundraise more. But that in itself is strange. There are some times when we have received really quite significant gifts, and one of our ex-trustees said that I was pretty good at it. Well... that's what's strange. There have been times when we have received sizable gifts but generally it has been God arranging it. Someone might come to our office and say 'what do you need money for now?' or take me out for coffee, and I share what we are doing and they say 'how can I give you money to help this?' It's pretty infrequent I will grant you but it does happen.

Other times I have tried to 'fund-raise' for equally valuable projects and got absolutely nothing! So I tend to end up carrying on using junk equipment because I can achieve more even with problematical equipment than with fund-raising. Of course, one might take into account my stress level too...

So there we are. Struggling with equipment, wishing I really believed the prosperity Gospel, feeling guilty I am not fund-raising, knowing that I would not get anything anyhow unless God brings the donors, and if He brings them then so long as I am doing what He calls me to do I don't have to do anything other that be there available. And I am still struggling with the equipment.

Yesterday morning the video editing computer was behaving even worse than normal. I was wishing we are back in the 'good old days' of shooting film not videotape - at least you could hold the film up to the light to see it and edit it! At lunctime we discussed it and my son did some research in the afternoon and then from about 8pm through to 1am we re-installed the system again...

It's better... lots better... but still not 100%. It's not crashing every hour or so now, but it is misbehaving, refusing to play back video perfectly. Struggle on. Struggle on.

So where does that leave us? As a team we talked and prayed today. Yes, I think we all have secret longings for prosperity, and feel guilty about not fund-raising, and are not gifted in it and... and...

Christmas break... NOT!

2005-12-30T10:35:00.000+02:00

We planned carefully, worked hard before Christmas so we could all have a break of a week over Christmas. Over Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day a colleague in Egypt would be 'on call' as they celebrate Christmas in January not December. The rest of Christmas week we would be taking turns on being 'on call'. We have a system where is a fault develops it sends an SMS message to the person on call OR if someone needs support then again an SMS message is sent.

Tuesday was one of my other colleagues birthday so that day I was 'on call'. There were about 20 alerts from the monitoring system and 6 calls for help. So much for a break. The most serious was that on the server that handles enquiries from listeners to radio stations or visitors to web sites. Our servers have multiple hard disks in what is called a RAID system. The theory of this is that if one hard disk fails the other takes over... but... this only applies to data not to the 'system' which cannot be RAIDed without extra expensive hardware. Since it's the data that is critical to us we throught that this was the best way forward.

There are a number of servers in our office handling the various facilities we host. This is the 'engineers eye view' of the server rack. It looks somewhat complicated, but the rack contains servers and audio cabling and battery backup systems... everything we need to attempt to have 24/7 service!

Of course, this RAID system of multiple hard disks is the best way forward except during a Christmas break! The data was fine, but the system disk went unreliable. On Tuesday I 'patched it up' attempting to correct errors on the hard disk, with the aim of keeping it going till the following week when we were all back at work. Good theory. Didn't work in practice.

Wednesday... the hard disk failed totally. Peter is 'on call' so I can relax... hmmm... good theory? Other colleagues all round the world phoned me on my mobile, and didn't follow the correct procedure which would have put them in touch with him. Grrrrr... some un-Christian thoughts passed my mind! Messy day and Peter began the process of trying to sort out the mess.

Thursday... yep, my turn again 'on call'. Serious stuff... time for a rebuild of the server. Yes, that's me peering dangerously into the server with screwdriver in hand. We have a 'spare' server, so I ended up gutting that to get the main audience relations server running.

In the process I have re-built the system in a different way. Instead of dual hard drives in a RAID system which protected the data but left us with rebuilds whenever there were problems with the system disk I have used the spare server as a 'mirror' for the main one. The theory of this is that if on or other server fails the other can take over. We shall see!

A week is a long time...

2005-12-10T12:17:00.000+02:00

They say a week is a long time in politics... but it seems that two weeks is even longer in the work I do, since it's two weeks ago that I last wrote in this blog.

A couple of weeks ago the main email server in London had been attacked and just been rebuilt. Well... nearly rebuilt as we found out later. It was not that the attacker had left anything behind - we had been worried that he might have left a trojan or or two. Trojan programs are the computer equivalent of the Trojan horse in Greek history - they are programs hidden in the system that allow malicious attackers later access, without actually being obvious as being something nasty. There weren't any trojan programs left.

But... the server was totally unreliable for about 10 days. Servers like the ones we run have as part of their Operating System a method of self-protection. What that means if if they start running out of resources they automatically kill off normal programs so that the server keeps going. So, for instance, if it was running short of memory the server would kill off the email service and keep going. This stops us having what Windows users call the 'blue screen of death' but can be extremely irritating to find you have to restart the email service or whatever reguarly. But we couldn't work out why we were running out of memory. The server has inside it two computers [processors] and about four times the amount of memory a home computer has. It shouldn't run out of memory!

In this trauma we thought the memory was faulty so we got the leasing company to change the memory. Because we were having memory problems they tested the memory before installing and after they changed it we still had memory problems.

Eventually we traced the fault down to when the leasing company had re-installed the system they had installed the wrong 'kernel'. The kernel is the heart of the Operating System and the kernel they had installed was designed for very old processors that could not handle as much memory as we had installed in the server. We remotely installed a new kernel. This worried us as if the kernel didn't install correctly the server would crash and we would have to request another total install of the Operating System. However, it did install correctly and we now have the server behaving correctly, working faster and not running out of memory.

We took the opportunity of the rebuild of the server to implement some security enhancements that we had been planning to do around now anyhow. But we had been planning to do them on another server to test before installing them on the 'live' one. It also required writing a new user interface for part of the system... all to do done as fast as possible so that 'normal service will be resumed as soon as possible' as it used to say on the TV screens while I was a kid growing up.

In between all this I was co-ordinating a project for a new very large website we will launch in February. We have had a programmer here for a month [he leaves today actually] and there has been the need for a lot of thought about how the underlying structure will work so that it will be expandable in the future.

And... the mobile phone text message system is just about to go into phase two of development. We have proven it is both needed and doable, but we need a more reliable and expandable system, that would also be able to be easily installed in other locations around the world. We had a planning meeting about that leading onto research oabout equipment we can use in the future. Phase two starts as soon as possible...

Between all this I have been editing a video training series for the organization we grew out of. Eventually we hope it will be an interactive DVD. Training videos are always very difficult to do. The reason for this is that they have to be interesting. I know all films and videos have to be interesting, but training films are somehow more difficult to get to be interesting.

Server attacked... and repaired.

2005-11-29T22:10:00.000+02:00

Early last week our biggest server was attacked and an intruder go into it [not physically, but basically took over control of it] and then started using it to attack other computers and servers in London and around the world. The people we connect to in London received complaints about this and disconnected it from the Internet.

When someone has got in that deeply the only thing you can do really is to wipe the hard drive and re-install everything. Fortuneately we had a backup that was only 8 hours old [we do daily backups]... but re-installing is definitely non-trivial. What made it worse was the following morning one of my colleagues went to Dubai and another was teaching in another country, leaving me to sort everything out. Although before he did leave we talked through the re-build and decided to do the security upgrade we were planning to do soon.

That security upgrade was pretty complex. I won't bore you with the details, but basically it took me about 18-20 hours per day for about 5 days to get things back to where they were. However, I must admit that the pain was worth it and now with my colleague back we can see the fruits of that labour.

What did surprise us was just how many people were using our facilities. We have about 250 users and over 400 email accounts on the server. Of course, that means that was the number of people disturbed by that one hacker.

Administrator needed...

2005-11-19T20:46:00.000+02:00

Wednesday is the day when David, who does the book-keeping for us, comes in. He gives us one day per week, which we thought might be enough, but we are realising that it is not enough. As we are expanding so the administration is expanding.

By that I mean all the accounting for partners - everything we do is in partnership with another group and its important to get all the calculations right and to chase up when they pay us or when they don't. It may sound simple but we work in many different currencies, expenses can be in US dollars, British Sterling Pounds, Cyprus Pounds, Egyptian Pounds... and so on. Working out what percentage of our costs like electricity and communications charges should be attributed to each project is important too.

We are realising that a lot of that has not been done and a lot of the chasing up has not been done. We have focussed on getting the projects done rather than the administration to support them. I have many unanswered emails... before Peter came I was doing a lot of technical stuff, which was necessary even if somewhat boring. Now it looks like our need is for administration so I shall have to spend a lot of my time doing that.

We did have a good breakthrough at the end of the week technically though - the connection to collect files from Malta at last has got working. This has been troubling us for some months.

Two David's

2005-11-15T22:54:00.000+02:00

First two days of this week involved two meetings with two David's - one American, one New Zealander. We had been talking about the need for more people here -- recruitment. Since we don't salary people 'recruiting' means something different to commercial companies.

One suggestion that came up from one of these meetings was to have a training centre here, where people from the Middle East could come for a few months to a year to learn more about media. It might also be that we have some westerners also in their 'gap year' coming out to work alongside these young people from the Middle East so as to learn about and share in the rich culture of the region.

In between meetings I have spent a lot of time getting some problems solved with the scheduling system for the radio stations. Boring but necessary.

New project started

2005-11-11T00:47:00.000+02:00

We have started a new project which will last for a year in total. It's a total re-write of a website that is very interactive with our primary audience. Some Christians tend to take a confrontational approach to those outside the faith - basically telling them where they are wrong. Jesus tended more towards dialogue and attracting people to himself, the old people he had really bad words for were the Pharisees. Of course, even for people caught in the very act of sin, he didn't say 'OK, carry on it's quite alright' but 'Go, and don't do it again'.

So, this website publishes articles and allows interaction. Sadly its got in a bit of a muddle and so the first stage in untangling the site and then re-creating what the authors actually want. We have a programmer over from another country for a month to do the first stage of this, then he's back in the new year again... we hope to 'go live' with the new site early in February and then finish all the rest of what is needed over the next 12 months.

A week later

2005-11-09T22:13:00.000+02:00

A week since I wrote... not sure if that is a good sign or a bad one.

It's been a week of ups and downs. Sometimes I feel like its all overwhelming and I cannot continue and sometimes I feel like things are moving forward.

Overwhelmed? There are many more things to do than we can do and all of us at times this week have felt we are just cranking the wheel and getting nowhere. We had never intended doing lots of maintainance type stuff essential to keep things going, yet we find ourselves doing a lot of that. These are things like keeping email and websites and audio streams going.

When you visit a website it feels like the author just wrote the stuff and that's it. For him that is it, but we are maintaining the computers and systems that keep his material there. And that is a lot more like the maintainance needed to keep an aeroplane flying than the maintainance needed on a house. The engineer looks at the aeroplane after every flight, two or three times a day often, yet our houses need action infrequently.

Today we had a team meeting and we drew all the relationships and all the locations on the white board - we realised how many people we are serving and how many depend on us. We are doing a lot of things for a lot of people. We realised how international we are when one of our partners paid us this week and that one financial transaction involved 6 countries!

So in amonst the feeling of getting nowhere there is the odd nugget. We were talking about training and I get tired of training because it often seems people should be able to find some of the stuff out for themselves. So I have as a value teaching people how to learn rather than just how to do something. When the subject of training came up I groaned inwardly. However one of my colleagues from another country said that at some recent training he had done he had been using my approach of not just teaching people how to do the task but of how to learn for themselves... and he said it was working. This is a big change for the Middle East, where that whole approach is counter-cultural, but necessary for today's world. Maybe I am making a small change after all...

It's been a time of change this week too - we moved three of the rooms in the office round. We are having more people come to stay and work with us for a month at a time and they stay in the guest room at the office. We moved the guest room to one that we didn't need to go through on a regular basis and was more out of the way. It won't be long before we really need a guest apartment for visiting staff, but we don't have money to pay for that yet.

This also gave more space for workstations, which we will need with both the extra people coming and going and because we had an extra full time person start this week. This means that reguarly there will be between 5 and 7 people in the office for the next few months. We are having to learn to communicate better and work more as a team than just a couple of individuals.

Meetings foreground... voip background...

2005-11-01T21:45:00.000+02:00

This week looks like being full of meetings after last week being full of conference meetings. Helping advise another partner organization in Malta today. Tomorrow discussion about how to set up an online community of believers [or church by any other name].

In the background to all these meetings colleagues have been setting up a VOIP system. So what is VOIP you ask? VOIP stands for Voice Over IP, which in plain language means using the Internet to connect telephone calls. This would enable people responding to radio or tv programmes to connect to people who can help them with any questions they might have. Up to now if people want help its been through old fashioned letter, email and more recently SMS messages from mobile phones... but people in the Middle East are 'oral culture' which means they prefer to talk than to read or write, so if we can get this working it would be a big step forward.