Posted by universalis on 13 June 2008
This is a technical posting of no interest to most users of Universalis, but I’ve put it here because it addresses a problem that has been repeatedly raised in Internet forums. Users of the downloadable Universalis for Windows Mobile have asked about it a couple of times, as well.
The question is: if you have a program that puts an item in the Today screen of your Windows Mobile device, can you install it on a storage card, to save space in the device’s main memory?
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Pocket PC, storage card, Today screen, Windows Mobile | Comments Off on Windows Mobile: storage cards and the Today screen
Posted by universalis on 8 June 2008
This is a rather less exalted posting than the last one about Mykonos.
Mykonos must be the original of Through the Looking-Glass. Whatever direction you set out in, you end up somewhere else. What is particularly impressive is that in one place, after walking uphill for 10 minutes from the harbour, you end up at the water’s edge. Surreal.
This time I got a map, and asked, and made a dry run; but nevertheless at the last minute I rushed back to my excellent hotel to get a bundle of old drachma notes to put in the collection (if the Church can’t turn those into money, I thought, no-one can) and I took a wrong turning and I was a good ten minutes late for the 7.30pm Mass. Not to worry: the Mass itself was also late and hadn’t yet started.
At the beginning of June the tourist season in Mykonos hasn’t really got under way – the roads are empty and the beaches are half deserted – so the tiny church was full but not overflowing.
We were given a novel kind of missal as we went in. It was in eight languages, and done in parallel, so that each double-page spread had eight boxes of text, one for each language. The bishops who have responsibility for the Greek islands realise that in summer their churches become little towers of Babel, and have imaginatively designed this book to help everyone cope. It works very well.
The people’s parts of the Mass were done in Latin, because that was likeliest to be the language we all had in common. The variable prayers were done in Greek. The non-Gospel readings were done twice over, once in Greek and once in English. The Gospel was in Greek only, but we had all been given sheets with the readings in our own language (English, Spanish, etc) so that we could all follow.
The homily was in Italian, and the priest paused every few sentences so that one of the congregation – a person from Philadephia whom I loathed on sight for reasons I shan’t go into here – could translate into English. The same sort of thing happened whenever the priest wanted to give us instructions or exhortation during the Mass.
Deepening my devotions, or distracting from them (it’s hard to tell which) was the eighth language in the missal. Latin, Greek, English, Spanish, Polish – all those were straightforward, but what was this thing called “Shqip”? I spent a long time reading the Creed and the Eucharistic Prayer in it, looking for the words for “Lord”, “Father”, and so on, but coming to no conclusion at all.
At the end of Mass various things became clear. There is no resident priest on the island (at this time of year, anyway), so the priest’s next journey was to the ferry terminal. Shqip is the Albanian name for the Albanian language, which shows that there are enough Albanian migrants, and enough of them are Catholics, for the Greek bishops to pay attention to them and care for their needs.
And the priest who was equally fluent in Latin, Greek and Italian was, of course, a Pole.
Posted in Mass Tourism | 7 Comments »
Posted by universalis on 15 April 2008
The downloadable Universalis program is now available for the Macintosh.
It requires MacOS Tiger (10.4) or Leopard (10.5) and it’s a Universal binary, which means it’ll work on both PowerPC and Intel PCs.
Thanks to everyone who tested it. Your comments were a great help.
Posted in Downloadable Universalis | 3 Comments »
Posted by universalis on 31 January 2008
When Easter is early, the feasts of St Joseph and the Annunciation may fall in Holy Week or Easter Week. The rules say that in that case they should be celebrated on the next free day, which is the Monday after Easter week; or on the Monday and the Tuesday if both feasts have to be moved, as they do this year.
This “traffic jam” of feasts has been felt to be inconvenient and so the rules have been changed from 2008 onwards, so that St Joseph is moved backwards to the Saturday before Holy Week.
The calendar on the Universalis site now implements the new rules and the downloadable programs will do so soon.
There is a further complication in Ireland and other places where St Patrick is celebrated as a solemnity. In these places, when there is an earlier Easter, St Patrick is moved earlier to avoid Holy Week, and St Joseph is moved one day earlier still, to the Friday before Holy Week. If you have the appropriate local calendar selected, Universalis will do this also.
Posted in Calendars, The Universalis site | 4 Comments »
Posted by universalis on 9 October 2007
Universalis is responsible for distributing criminal content on an international scale. Apart from places such as China and Pakistan, Universalis also helps anti-social elements in Malaysia to subvert the law, as this testimonial shows.
Posted in The Universalis site | 21 Comments »
Posted by universalis on 3 July 2007
People using AvantGo to read Universalis on the Pocket PC have been complaining that AvantGo makes the Universalis page slightly too wide for the screen, so that you have to keep on scrolling left and right as you read each line.
Posted in The Universalis site | 5 Comments »
Posted by universalis on 18 May 2007
Readers of Universalis who know the work of Ronald Knox – and those who don’t – may enjoy this review of his “Essays in Satire”.
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Posted by universalis on 13 March 2007
From time to time someone notices that a reading on Universalis is different from a reading in a book or on some other site. I thought I’d gather together the commonest reasons for this happening.
It’s possible that I have made a mistake or have typed something in wrongly. This becomes less likely as the years go on, because the readings are generated automatically from a permanent database: so if someone discovered an error back in 1999 and pointed it out, it will have been corrected in 1999 and will never occur again. But I am sure that there are still quite a few mistakes there that no-one has yet noticed or reported! If you think you have found a mistake then please let me know.
Other people can make mistakes too. For instance, this year one reader pointed out a difference between the Office of Readings psalms for the Friday after Ash Wednesday in Universalis (psalm 77(78)) and the printed “St Joseph’s Guide” (psalm 54(55)). In fact psalm 77(78) is used in Advent, Christmastide, Lent and Eastertide, and psalm 54(55) at all other times. The compiler of this year’s St Joseph’s Guide must have thought that Lent started only on the First Sunday of Lent: but both the Latin and the English breviaries agree that Lent starts on Ash Wednesday.
On most saints’ days it is allowable either to use the readings of the saint or the readings of the day. The exceptions are (a) during high seasons such as Advent, when the readings of the day must be used, and (b) when the saint’s day has a high rank (feast or solemnity).
In most cases when there is a choice, Universalis uses the saint’s readings. Quite often parish priests take the opposite approach. This is one of the cases where you may find that Universalis and your priest disagree but both are right.
On the third Sunday in Lent, the Gospel reading is of the Samaritan woman (the “living water” passage from John).
Because of the rule that all Sunday readings should change on a three-year cycle, this reading occurs only in Year A. Because it is such an important reading and should not be omitted even in Years B and C, the Missal contains “alternative readings” for the third week of Lent, which contain exactly this Gospel. It strongly recommends that the alternative readings should be used on one day in the third week in Years B and C, so that the “living water” passage is not forgotten.
Universalis follows this recommendation by using the alternative readings for Monday of the third week of Lent. Other authorities may do it on a different day in that week, or may not do it at all (since it is, after all, only a recommendation).
Exactly the same thing happens in the fourth week of Lent, when the Gospel for Year A is the story of the man born blind (the “I am the light of the world” passage from John), and in the fifth week, when it is the story of the woman caught in adultery.
This is another case where Universalis can disagree with other sources but both can still be right.
Posted in The Universalis site | 43 Comments »
Posted by universalis on 20 February 2007
A user in Japan reported that random Japanese characters were appearing in the Gospel display when she was using the stand-alone Universalis on her Japanese-language iPaq.
This was because of a difference in the way that Microsoft’s operating system (Windows Mobile 5.0) works on international and Japanese-language palmtops. The stand-alone (downloadable) version of Universalis has been altered to work round this problem, and the version now available for download from the Universalis site will work identically on Windows Mobile computers anywhere in the world.
Posted in Downloadable Universalis, Programming | 1 Comment »
Posted by universalis on 1 February 2007
There are two unbreakable rules that guide the layout of the liturgy in Advent:
What happens when 17 December falls on a Sunday? This posting is about what happens when the two unbreakable rules collide, as they did in 2006.
Posted in Liturgy, The Universalis site, Translating | 5 Comments »
Electric Prayer 