After a recommendation in this week’s Technology Guardian I discovered LibraryThing another beta/web2.0/link/social/tagging web site. This time for books. I’ve started putting my book collection into it. Apart from the benefits of having a complete library catalogue on-line, the social networking aspects could be interesting. It can also be used in marking books for a class reading list. See EG-146 Reading List as an example.
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It’s the end of another term. Four weeks without students but lots of boring admin to do.
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I’ve just returned to my office after attending a Lunch and Learn session on Blogging and the uses of Blogging in education. Nichola van den Berg from LIS was the presenter and she gave a very nice introduction to blogging to an audience of academics who were new to the subject. A couple of things that I took away from the session were (1) I could do more to get my students blogging and (2) I could do more with this blog.
The idea of my EG-153 blogging exercise is to get students to recognise the benefits of blogging as a research tool. It sort of works, but I don’t think they become bloggers as a result. It occurs to me that blogging would also be a great way opf supporting their LEAP activities. Another couple of ideas that come immediately to mind are Blogs would make a reasonable alternative to log books; group blogs would be useful for GDEs; and research blogs would help in planning and gatherinhg materials for the dissertation project.
It could also be versy useful for reflectingon my own teaching and professional development, which is why I need to use it more. Question is do I reflect here or in a separate blog?
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p>Some of these were illustrated in Nichola’s talk so I know that they work elsewhere. Expect more on this topic!
I have just registered for the domain cpjobling.org via the free version of Google Apps. I’ve got a new web site up and running but it’s a bit sparse. However at only $10 for nominet site registration and free web, application, email and collaboration hosting (within limits) it’s a snip!
Three items of note from Charles Nutter’s ‘blog: 1. JRuby 0.9.8 has been released with 98% support for Ruby on Rails. The road to a 1.0 release seems well signposted.
3. Netbeans support for Ruby and JRuby is “even better than expected” (see the demos on Roman Strobl’s blog)
5. Ruby on Grails – Charles has analyzed the contents of the grails project and concludes that it could easily be fronted by JRuby rather than Groovy. Grails developer Graeme Rocher agrees. I would comment that that’s the beauty of dynamic languages: it leverages your investment in libraries and APIs!
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Glen Smith has launched a new blog aggregation site called GroovyBlogs.org. Created in just 20 hours in Grails, the site attempts to gather all the news that’s hot in the Groovy world and present it in one place. The source code is also available.
The learning lab at my University launched its first podcast today. I feel obliged to blog about it as Chris Hall interviewed me about the *Blackboard Quest* that I developed as a Blackboard training exercise for first year engineers. The podcast is here. The interview itself is quite quiet compared to the rest of the podcast, but then people have always said that I mumble!
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I have published another literate program on literateprograms.org. This one shows how the Rot13 encoding system can be implemented in Java. However, that is trivial! The real point is to document the basic use of JUnit testing and Apache Ant which are standard tools in the professional Java developer’s toolbox (in fact they make Java just about usable 
Within 24 hours of the first mention of my program, another literate programmer had documented the altogether more elegant implementation as a sed script. My guess is that a Groovy implementation would, if not quite as elegant, be much simpler than the Java version.
I am grateful to Dion Almaer for pointing me to a new add on for Windows called Enso Launcher which allows you to launch applications right from the keyboard. For example you just hold the Caps Lock key and type Op[tab]Ex release caps lock to open explorer. Not quite as quick as [windows]+E but not far off!. It also does stuff like spell checking any text anywhere. It also has the function I use a lot: changing upper case text to lower case text in any program or text field in programs other than Word! Cost is $20 dollars and I can see myself paying that when the 30 day trial is over.
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I have installed an instance of DokuWiki which I am intending to use as a home page. Its current location is eehope.swan.ac.uk/~eechris/dokuwiki/index.php but eventually I hope to move it to eehope.swan.ac.uk/~eechris.
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