Recent Posts

Recently I’ve been catching up with the the excellent new blog/podcast The Changelog which covers

what’s fresh and new in open source

Listening to episode 0.0.8 (you have to be a geek to appreciate the episode numbering!), I became aware of an interesting new application development platform called Appcellerator Titanium.

Inspired by products like Adobe Air and Microsoft Silverlight, Titanium leverages the open source WebKit web-browser engine (used in Safari, Chrome, iPhone and Android) to create a software development kit (SDK) that allows the development of native desktop and mobile networked applications (or apps). The unique selling point? The heart of the platform is a web browser, you can develop applications using standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript that will run, with native look and feel, on Windows, Unix, Mac OS/X, iPhone and Android. It’s one of those brilliant, obvious with hindsight, “why didn’t I think of that?” kind of ideas … and as a teacher of web applications technology ***very interesting*** indeed!

Now, can anyone think of suitable undergraduate projects to try this out on? Answers in the comments!

**The Small-print**

Like most modern web-based services, Titanium is available via a “Freemium” subscription model. You can sign up, create a project and get the generated starter code and development tools for free. Support plans are also available on monthly/yearly per developer contracts. There are also a collection of free and paid-for training videos available. Video 101: Welcome to Titanium, hosted on Vimeo, is worth a look.

**More good stuff**

For more breaking news on interesting open source projects see also Explore GitHub and Tail the Changelog. I’ll endeavor to highlight other interesting projects and podcasts here.

A couple of TED 2010 highlights that I stumbled on today. First Tim Berners-Lee reports on year one of his “More Data Now” campaign. Next I finally got around to watching Gary Flake on the data visualization features of Microsoft Livelabs Pivot (which I first saw reported on Swansea Yammer network a few weeks ago).

Try to find 30 minutes to watch all three videos then reflect like I did on what might be possible when Pivot and linked data colide!

It could be revolutionary – both for the citizen and for education!

Links:

- Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web (TED2009) - Tim Berners-Lee: The year open data went worldwide (TED2010) - Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration? (TED2010) - Making Data Public (Video), Time Berners-Lee and Prof. Nigel Shadbolt at the launch of data.gov.uk. (The Guardian) - data.gov.uk – UK government data online - Linked Data – linkeddata.org

This last week or so I’ve been watching a lot of Yahoo! YUI Theatre videos on JavaScript, starting with Douglas Crockford’s excellent five-part series Crockford on JavaScript and ending yesterday with Christian Heillman’s inspiring talk on YQL and YUI. This has inspired me to explore how I can use YUI (a JavaScript library) in the next version of my Proman dissertation project management application which will be needed for 2010-2011 allocation round in May. If it works out, there’ll also be some new teaching material for next year’s Web Applications module (EG-259).

I’ll post more in the under the tag YUI on the Proman, Man blog as I get to grips with this stuff.

Just a quick post to tell you about a new (to me) social network notification service called ping.fm. Just by connecting to your favourite services you can update them all from a single web site. I’m using it in the HEFCW Peer Support project to post messages to Ning, Facebook and Twitter. Many other services are available including LinkedIn, Yammer, Flickr, Posterous, Blogger, Tumblr, FriendFeed, Delicious, etc. Other features:

- You can also distinguish between micro-blogging, status updates and blogging, - ping.fm automatically shortens URLs, but at the moment it doesn’t seem to shorten tweets and link to the full text. - You can post to all your social networks, select particular networks or create groups of networks that you want to update together.

There’s also a mobile version at m.ping.fm and an iPhone version at i.ping.fm.

Finally, It’s interesting to note that ping.fm is a service brought to you from the people that brought you pbWiki.

Today I got a reminder from Google that the annual domain registration for my semi-defunct Google Apps account was due. Having also seen a service email from Blogger.com telling me that FTP support was being withdrawn and suggesting that I consider using a custom domain, I thought I’d take the opportunity to renew my domain and use it to host this blog. Sort of like a vanity plate for the Internet age! So from now on you can access my words of wisdom at blog.cpjobling.org. Please update your links: you can still reach me via crispyj2.blogspot.com which will redirect you.

Sometimes you stumble upon things on the web that are quite breathtaking in their simple cleverness and sheer elegance. I discovered one such resource today while reading the current draft of what may well become a seminal text on the emerging HTML5 standard. Chapter 2 of Mark Pilgrim’s Dive into HTML5 is all about supporting the transition as browsers start to support the new HTML5 elements canvas, video, local storage, web workers, offline web pages, geolocation, input types, placeholder text, form auto focus and microdata. This can be done by using JavaScript to interrogate new properties and functions that these new features will add to the DOM if they are supported by the browser, and this is the subject of this chapter. The beauty of it though is that, because this is a web page, written in HTML5, these very same tests can be and are be performed on any user’s browser that visits this page as shown in the illustration.

I spotted this feature while browsing the site with my iPhone, and then I thought I’d check it out with my other browsers. It works, and it is so elegant! I’ve summarized my findings in a table here, and the real beauty of this is that as each new generation of browser is released, I can simply go back to Chapter 2 and see at a glance what’s changed!

This and other HTML5 goodness recently discovered on the web can be found in my delicious bookmarks collection.

A new BBC/Open University documentary series on the World Wide Web started last Friday on BBC 2. It is called “The Virtual Revolution” and is hosted by Guardian Technology journalist Dr Aleks Krotoski.

It is interesting not so much for its technical depth (which quite frankly is quite shallow) but for its introduction to the social/political/commercial issues surrounding the Internet and the World Wide Web. Plus it has interviews with many of the pioneers and entrepreneurs who were involved in its development.

The series is available to watch again on the BBC iPlayer and there is a supporting web site (http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/) that has lots of further information.

I am urging all my ICCT students to watch it!

Welcome to the blogging exercise ICCT class of 2010. Please leave the link to your new blog in the comments.

I found this fascinating quote today. Regarding TurnitIn:

Recycling and repurposing of text online is becoming so ubquituous that the noise is casuing a problem in the interpretation of originality reports. They used to save us time in investigating cases of plagiarism, now I’m not so sure.Nick Sharratt, DrBadgr, Nov 2009

As we are about to use TurnitIn for dissertation theses, this arrives as a timely warning!

Yesterday I installed Windows 7 on a virtual machine on a MacBook Pro with no problems (see previous post). Today I’m attempting to do the same thing on my office desktop. Yesterday I ran the compatibility checker and no real problems were found. Today, at around 10.00 am, I stated the upgrade from Vista Business to Windows 7 Professional and it’s still not finished. First I had to remove Zone Alarm. Then the installer insisted that I remove the control panel for my Graphics card and iTunes (the latter caused the CD to disappear!) I also had to take my machine through both Vista SP1 and SP2 (and a couple of intermediate system updates in between) before the installer would even start the long-g-g-g-g process of “gathering system information” which happens even before the installation proper starts. At that point (Around 4.00 pm) I left it to it and have come over to indulge in a large latte in the Library.

I know it’s my own fault. Everyone says “do a clean install”. But who can afford the effort of backing up data, installing the O/S and then reinstalling all those applications and restoring the system settings!