Posts from 2008

Today was first day back “at work” and I’ve spent much of it catching up on OSCON 2008, O’Reilly’s annual open source conference, which was this year held in Portland Oregon between July 21-25. Greg Pollack of the RailsEnvy Podcast has made a nice video introduction to the conference (OSCON in 37 minutes) in which he gets various luminaries and speakers to introduce their talks and so provide a nice lead-in to the presentations, most of which are on-line, and the keynotes which were video-recorded and made available for syndication via blip.tv.

This video, from the YouTube series “Simon’s Cat” was featured on last week’s Culture Show on BBC 2 [in the UK]. There are two others, equally great and hopefully more to come. All cat lovers will get a shiver of recognition when watching this!

http://widgets.vodpod.com/w/video_embed/Groupvideo.1409152

more about “Simon’s Cat ‘TV Dinner’“, posted with vodpod

In an new post from the Swansea Learning Lab we are pointed to some videos from Blackboard which showcase new features in the planned 2009-2010 release of Blackboard. I watched the videos, and in a comment on the videos, I noted a trend within Blackboard that reminds me of the famous 1994 memo “Windows: The Next Killer Application on the Internet” sent by J Allard to Microsoft executives. This memo was a call to embrace, extend, and innovate [the Internet] in order to make Windows the platform of choice in the newly visible “wired up” world. It was later alleged by the U.S. Department of Justice, that within Microsoft, this mantra became embrace, extend, and destroy.

Blackboard seems to have a similar strategy in the e-learning space. Innovations from Web 2.0 are embraced, extended and, if not destroyed, at least assimilated. Even the title of of the new Blackboard product Blackboard NG [NG = next generation] brings to mind those other great assimilators, the Borg. Resistance is futile?

Pictured L-R: Matt Smith BSc, Mark Davies BSc, Mark Ireland BSc, Russell Morris BSc.

Today was graduation day for the students in the Information, Computing and Communcations Technology discipline at the School of Engineering at Swansea University. Congratulations to the new Bachelors of Science Matt, Mark, Mark and Russell. Russell was also presented with the W.G. Isaacs Prize for best project. Congratulations and good look to you all! More pictures from the day will be posted on Facebook and Flickr.

As reported yesterday, I’ve been catching up with a number of presentations from the Google I/O 2008 conference. However, I just had to draw particular attention to one of the highlights which is this recording of a very entertaining presentation from Chris di Bona who is Open Source Programs Manager at Google. In an engaging, anecdotal style, Chris covers the history and philosophy of Open Source (which includes a name check for Swansea’s very own Alan Cox) and how Google relies on it, promotes it and develops some of its own. The video is on and the original link to the talk includes the slides (which I assume are re-usable).

Technorati Tags: self, video, google, io2008, open source software, google

Today, I discovered Blog Networks after reading Sarah Parez’s posting “Blog Networks like MyBlogLog for Facebook” on ReadWriteWeb. Blog Networks is a new Facebook application that allows you to embed your favourite blogs (including your own) into your Facebook profile so that your friends can read and rate your thoughts and the thoughts of others that you value. An interesting feature is that the easiest way to claim ownership of your own blog is to get your friends to verify that you own it which is both a social and viral way of getting the word out.

The picture illustrates my set up with ReadWriteWeb, O’Reilly Radar, Technology in Teaching, Lifehacker and of course Fresh and Crispy. Blog Feeds comes with a set of popular widely read blogs to choose from and you can easily add your own or other people’s. Presumably, friends see and can comment on the latest articles in your minifeed. If nothing else, it’s be a useful way to share RSS feeds without mentioning RSS!

Last month Google hosted the first of its Google I/O conferences in San Francisco. I’d like to report that I was there, but I wasn’t (although I did watch the keynote the day after it was given). The video recordings of the speakers (hosted on YouTube) and their slides (mostly shared on Google Docs) that have been on-line for a few weeks now. With term finally over, I can become a virtual conference delegate and today was my first chance to catch up with some of the more interesting talks. If you’ve been following me on Twitter you’ll note that I watched/will be watching:

• Steve Yegge’s presentation on Server-Side Scripting with Rhino [more philosophy than technology]
• Guido van Rossum’s demonstration of the Google App Engine
• Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman (Google) telling the world about Google’s open source project hosting platform
• Aaron Boodman’s and Chris Prince’s talks about [Google] Gears and its potential for implementing parts of HTML 5 and extending the web browser
• John Skidgel and Lindsey Simon on engaging web app users [with Google App Engine, but I’m sure that the lessons are universal] and
• Josh Bloch on the new Effective Java book.

There are lots more talks to view and lessons to be learnt, and it’d be great if more big companies and conference organizers did this sort of thing.

More travels with my bike … this time a swift 15 minute ride to Verdi’s at Mumbles for an espresso after dinner. Sunny day (not many of those this June) and lovely views over the Bay towards the University, Swansea and Port Talbot.

Following on from Chris Hall’s discovery of Wordle, here’s the Wordle-art tag cloud for my del.icio.us bookmarks. Interestingly this indicates that I’m a typical geek (look at the size of the programming and development tags). Interestingly my courses EG-259 and EG-146 (both on Web Development) feature largely. I’m also apparently keen on the Web and self-improving tutorials! Of course these are only my public tags!

Took a trip up National Cycle Route 43 from Swansea to Pontardawe and back. It was a very windy day and the last 3 miles along Swansea bay was into the wind and a bit of a killer. In other news, my wife Renate got a puncture and had to push her bike home from the Liberty Stadium while I went on ahead to cook the dinner. Puncture repair kit will be next on my shopping list (some would probably say it should have been first).

Pictured (left) is one of the 1000 way-posts that The Royal Bank of Scotland have sponsored on the national cycle network. This one is about 100 m from the Pontardawe Inn which is also pictured.