invention

Preached at Jubilee last Sunday night on building with gold, silver and precious stones - how we build the church.

Included this great version of the three little pigs ("Wolf-Side story"?) and a picture of the Taj Mahal, contrasted with the Cardboard House mentioned last week on Slashdot.

What kind of church are we after? Something temporary or something permanent, something functional, or something of beauty? We need to build Love, Obedience, Passion for spreading God's glory (Jim Elliot quotes) as well as Persistent Prayer, Faithfulness and Commitment, Sacrifice and Suffering and Discipleship. We need to avoid building mere structure. Building on the precious foundation of Christ, building for eternity means we cannot settle for less. And God supplies the materials by his grace (v10) so we don't ever have to settle for less.

Felt like it was delivered OK, people encouraging afterwards. Presentation here and low-quality MP3 here.

Did some work at the Jubilee Linux lab (5 old slow computers each with their own version of Fedora - 4 at the moment because one of the power supplies has died...)

upgraded to xfce-4.1.90

This is the latest version of xfce (the lightweight desktop environment we use). It's supposed to be a beta, but for the use at the lab it should be perfectly stable (I've been using it at home to test). The main reason for this is the kiosk mode (next item) The other things the latest version does that was a major missing element in xfce 4.0 is you can have a start menu on the panel (similar to windows). I haven't enabled this at the moment as people are only using a few apps

set up kiosk mode

This version of xfce has what is called "kiosk" mode which enables the administrator to set up what settings users are allowed to change (panel icons, desktop settings, etc). I have set this up so the normal user can't change anything, and set up some default options so it should work exactly as wanted. Note that it does make it slightly difficult to actually change the settings if you want to override it.

set up the default panel

I have set up the panel to contain a link to terminal (which most people won't use), openoffice.org, mozilla, help, log out, and the time. I have also moved the workspace switcher from the panel (at the bottom) to the taskbar (at the top)

cleanup

We had very little free space on some of the machines (20MB!!!) so I did some clean up of packages we don't use. - removed Omni printing libraries (57MB) - removed OpenOffice.org i18n libs (250MB) (fedora installs all the languages avaailable by default!)

Looking nice now...

Last night at church we had the final of three training seessions on being a multi-cultural community in South Africa. Jabu spoke about his experiences in the struggle, going to prison, what God did in his life. It reminded me of The Heavenly Man. Then Charles from the Foundation for Church-led restitution spoke about giving his farm for restitution to those who have been wronged, and Alastair spoke about restitution too ... Steve wrapped it up with presenting the education fund Jubilee is starting as a part of restitution.

Afterwards spoke to Jabu, he said he'd heard about the translation work, and wants the Zulu programs ... couldn't believe its free software ... said "it'll help people learn computers..." so hopefully translate.org.za is also doing something to redress the injustices of the past. Gave me extra motivation to release the Zulu translation, and make sure we're rounding off any bugs.