Recent Posts

This is a screen-grab from my new MacBook Pro and it’s running Windows 7 in a OS/X window. It’s not magic, it’s the free open-source VirtualBox virtualizer from Sun Microsystems. At less than half the price of Parallels!

It works. It took no time to set up. And it means that I can continue to run some of the essential windows-only software (such as Camtasia Studio), Windows Live Writer, etc, during my transition from PC pragmatist to Mac Zealot.

If the upgrade of my 2-year-old Dell office desktop to Windows 7 from Vista is anywhere near as smooth, I’ll be very surprised! For more on running Windows 7 on VirtualBox on the Mac, these “Fat Bloke’s Shorts” videos from VirtualBox TV are a great introduction.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve started getting comment spam attacks on this blog via my comments stream. There’ll be comment like “I visited your blog and I’ve saved to read later” from a (presumably) bogus user. But the comment will include a number of links to dubious services. I use Disqus for my comment handling and I’ve had to gradually turn up the moderation settings so that now all comments have to be moderated. I’m sorry about this, but perhaps the bad guys will eventually go away!

I’ve noticed a few sites that I visit have also been link-spammed in a similar way, and Captcha technology doesn’t stop them. Presumably there are unscrupulous people who pay human beings to go to blogging sites and add link spam messages: sort of like the gold farming that is done in China for World of War Craft players who can’t actually be bothered to play the game!

I’ve just spent the afternoon with the wonderful celebration piece A people’s history of the internet: from Arpanet in 1969 to today that was published last Friday on the Guardian Technology website. What’s amazing to me is how recent it all really is! I started at Swansea University in 1985 and electronic communications was a difficult issue then. I remember the protocol wars of 1986 when JANET wanted to use X25 when the US was about to standardise on TCP/IP (I recall the our LIS wanted to toe the party line, but that Computer Science wanted to go the Internet route); I remember trawling Gopher for software to download using FTP and putting together tar files from shell archives of multiple USENET messages. I vaguely remember the public announcement of the World-Wide Web (1991), the emergence of the Mosaic browser on X-windows and the Mac, the arrival of the World-Wide Information Service at Swansea (created by our Own David Gill) and the first web site that I created for the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University (sadly not now to be found on the Way back machine). I also remember the University subcommittee that tried to standardize the University’s web sites and my complex, template driven system for creating my Department’s web pages (circa 1999) according to University Guidelines before there was a Content Management System.

But what’s really amazing, when you look at the time-line, is that the stuff that’s really important now, YouTube, twitter, Facebook, podcasting, RSS feeds, are all less than 10 years old. Even Blogger (1997) and Wikipedia (2001) are recent events. It makes me wonder what’s to come, and how will I continue to keep pace with it all!

It reminds me of the punchline to the Monty Python four Yorkshiremen sketch “And you try and tell the young people of today that ….. they won’t believe you.”

Aye, tha’s reet aboot that lad!

The BBC encourages the sharing of this video from Dame Shirley Bassey’s recent appearance on the electric Proms. So here it is, with the “Girl from Tiger Bay” (which Shirley is of course) composed by James Dean Bradfield, who’s playing guitar. It’s a good song! Enjoy!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/emp/external/player.swf

Clive on Learning: E-Learning Debate 2009 as mentioned by Jane Hart, a recent debate at the Oxford Union “This house believes that the e-learning of today is essential for the important skills of tomorrow.” has been summarized by Clive Shepherd. The debate (including video clips of the speakers is here: www.epic.co.uk/elearningdebate and there’s a tweet feed here. Which side would you be on?

http://youtube.com/v/vmaUW86RqbY

Giving lectures on code is pretty tedious for both students and staff and it occured to me that more interactivity is required. So I wondered if I could liven up my JavaScript lectures by using Firebug’s JavaScript console. As you can see from this quick “proof of concept” video that I made with Screenr, it might just work (and will require little extra effort on my part). I’ll blog again about how it went!

Today I attended a pleasant hour at e-learning and cakes. Saw a demo of QR codes and Paper Show two technologies that have real potential (although I will have to think more about how to use the former than the latter). If nothing else, QR-codes may convince me to actually try the mobile internet!

(A nice side affect of using the mobile internet is that I might be able to use TwitPic to get my photos off my phone!)

I have just uploaded an updated version of my Health and Safety and Project Planning presentation to SlideShare. The soundtrack is a bit School-of-Engineering-at-Swansea specific, but if you can make use of the slides, please be my guest.

H&S And Project Planninghttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=hs-and-project-planning-1223491503611174-8&stripped_title=hs-and-project-planning-presentation

View more presentations from Chris Jobling.

While working at home I wondered why I couldn’t connect to the new Plagiarism Awareness site recently announced by RSC Wales. Later I decided I’d do some work on Blackboard and found that I couldn’t connect. Odd, I thought!

So I did a ping/traceroute and discovered that the Swansea.ac.uk domain is cut-off from the Internet (see Twitpic image below).

My only choice is to walk in to work!

A couple of minutes later
The blockage spontaneously removed itself and comparing traceroute traces, it looks like one of Virgin Media’s local routers failed rather than anything on campus.

Still, I should go to work anyway!

Appropriately enough added to my own posterous.com blog posting about Sidewiki.

Unexpected, but perhaps not suprising, was the discovery that as a Google “customer”, you can post your comments to your Blogger blog(s)! Twitter, Facebook and other social sharing possibilities surely must be close behind.

in reference to: > “In the latest update of the Google Toolbar (IE and FireFox …” > - Google Sidewiki – Half baked but crispy (view on Google Sidewiki)