At the YWAM Centre I last worked at it was always an interesting conversation when it came to filtering the Internet. On one hand we are blocking the Internet, stopping people from free access and controlling them. On the other hand we are protecting them from all sorts of junk that is out there, and can possibly cause our brothers and sisters to stumble.

This is my fourth attempt writing this post, my computer has crashed all three other times …

I’ll be honest, when we lost all of the old YWAM IT site last year due to hosting / billing problems I became extremely discouraged and lost my motivation. This has resulted in the site you see today, one that is pretty dead and needing a lot of help. The last site started out being driven by myself, but very quickly a community developed, which is what brought life to the old site.

That community is what I would like to build here again.

In the last article we have seen that we can't buy-and-forget a computer, we have to maintain it; and that anomalies, which causes a such maintenance, are (maybe) easier to detect at a car than at a computer. Installing updates is one important part of this maintenance, running a anti-virus and a firewall yet another one. However, if you're responsible for the whole network of your base, it is even more critical.

Install updates. Install updates of ALL installed programs. Please.

I cannot stress enough the importance of installing updates. But how does it come that this concept is so counter-intuitive? Because it's not related to the material world.

I recently had a sad event happen where the power supply burned up for my 12" Powerbook. So, what could I do? Well, what I'm about to document here is my little journey into getting back on my feet. The reason why I did this & not simply try to buy a new power supply is that a) my wife & I are about to make an international move, so time is short where we are, b) I didn't have time to wait for a power supply, since I had some pending projects that needed to get finished & I needed to get the hard drive out, so that I could get to those projects & c) I didn't have access to another Mac to connect my Powerbook hard drive to.

So, here we go!

This is a fantastic article that will help us all to keep things in perspective. Burnout is probably the number 1 cause for people not being able to stay the course. Let's be more aware of this issue, not only for others, but for ourselves, as well!

As the password database (both in my head & in an encrypted file) grows, I increasingly worry about the responsibility which is behind. Not only that someone else could get access to these passwords, maybe suddenly the Internet stops working (at least at home), my computer stops working, the hard drive refuses to read the database file; maybe I'm in holidays, sick or otherwise occupied, and in this very month a significant security update should have been made for [replace this with concerning server or website]; or worst, my heart stops beating and someone else is trying to take over my heritage because he desperately needs access to [server/website].

Originally Posted on 26/06/2007 by Kevin Colyer

I was reading the Crit 07 report and was interested by the part about proposing an IT Symposium "a gathering of IT specialists that can come together and work on a common project – an IT project/infrastructure that will serve the mission as a whole".

Originally Posted on 18/06/2007 by Alex Costa

Hey! I've been testing some OpenSource and Free software for using with Videoconferencing equipment and I was wondering if someone here have tested, tried or successfully used any of the following software.

Xmeeting - for Mac computers

Ekiga - Formerly known as Gnome Meeting ( for Linux and has a beta for Windows)

Originally posted on 06/06/2007 by Sindre Vaernes

I think I vaguely remember when the service first started, but I did not pay much attention. Now I just read an article where Deutsche Telekom has made an investment in this company, so maybe there is something to it after all. I signed up but haven't really been able to test anything yet.

They are supposed to offer some competition with Skype, etc. Following is an excerpt from the news article I read: