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Birthday present

Me wearing my birthday present

Ahlem sent me a Birthday present which I’m wearing in this picture. I’m watching the FA cup final.
The text, which comes from an episode of the Simpsons is:

C:/DOS
C:/DOS/RUN
RUN/DOS/RUN

Renate took the photo!

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Multimedia Consumption Day

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Today, I’ve been mostly watching Google videos! Aside from the previously blogged video on the death of the desktop I’ve also watched Brion Vibber’s Google Tech Talk on Wikipedia and the MediaWiki software that drives it. Also from Google Video was this Documentary on Open Source available on Google Video:

“Revolution OS is a 2001 documentary which traces the history of GNU, Linux, and the open source and free software movements. It features several interviews with prominent hackers and entrepreneurs (and hackers-cum-entrepreneurs), including Richard Stallman, Michael Tiemann, Linus Torvalds, Larry Augustin, Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Perens, Frank Hecker and Brian Behlendorf.” Here’s the video: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=7707585592627775409&hl=en In my copious remaining free time, I have also added a links and a few new pages to the Swansea Learning Lab Resources Wiki, and listened to Part 1 of the JavaOne retrospective podcast, the first of two special podcasts from the Java Posse. Powered by ScribeFire.

New Blog

I have created a Google Code project for the continued development of one of my project student’s projects (A Module Catalogue for my School). This is the first of (I hope) many Google Hosted projects that will provide my students with valuable experience in the use of modern software project development tools.

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Dasher - writing with gestures

Just watched a fascinating video of a new gesture-based writing system called Dasher on Google Tech Talks. Dasher is a writing system which uses information theoric concepts to allow the user to steer through an emerging web of possible word completions. Developed at Cambridge University and demonstrated by Dave McKay, Dasher is seen as a tool with immediate applicability for mobile phone users as an alternative to predictive texting and for people with disabilities. However, it seems to me that with a claimed rate of 35 words per minute, it would be useful alternative to “hunt and peck” typing on a keyboard. It’s difficult to describe, but there’s a Java applet version that you can try on-line. Dasher has been ported to multiple platforms and is freely down-loadable. Worthy of further investigation!

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Ubuntu 7.04 running

I completed the installation of Ubuntu 7.04 started yesterday and it worked across the network just fine. I then installed Automatix2 as recommended by Geertjan and installed a bunch of development tools (Java 6, Eclipse, Netbeans). Interesting to note that the Automatix2 Eclipse bundle seems to have been tuned for Linux development and comes with PyDev, various Apache Commons libraries, Ant etc. Pity the Windows version doesn’t!

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Upgrading Ubuntu

Upgrading Ubuntu is apparently only possible using the alternative CD or over the network. Having tried and failed to leap over 6.10 to install directly from the 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” release onto my old laptop I reinstalled 6.06 LTS “Dapper Drake” with a separate home partition (an implicit recommendation that doesn’t seem to be the default) with the intention of upgrading. The recommendation would appear to be to do this release by release. But apparently, it can be done over the network using gksu “update-manager -c” or from the Alternative CD using gksu “sh /cdrom/cdromupgrade”. As I don’t have the alternative CD for either 6.10 “Edgy Eft” or 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” it’ll be the network then! See you on the other side!

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