Ruth gets chocolate from an international sweet shop in Birmingham. This Japanese pack seems to contain mock mushrooms with chocolate caps and biscuit stalks. I love the typography on the back of the package…
Some of the details appear to be telling a story (aimed at children?)
And the teacher figure appears in red on the back [...]
...that have solidified his believe that the PC industry needs to move away from just selling hardware and towards a service-based model that could be used to establish an educational infrastructure. “It’s all about long-term, sustaining relationships,” he told me, something that mobile phone companies have been practicing for years.
Alan Kay on the Apple Tablet [...]
Electricity costs less than 10p per kilowatt hour. You can charge quite a few laptop batteries for that, so I assume the notice was to do with health and safety, or encouraging people to move after their latte.
I see a lot of small odds and ends of space like this around the cities I visit. [...]
Works in the Mac OS terminal, and on Linux if you install curl.
#! /bin/sh
curl —basic—user “username:password”
Update of something I found from 2007, when twitter was using a different [...]
Click for a 1280 by 1024 desktop wallpaper image with a January 2010 calendar on it.
Can you guess where the postcard photo was taken from? I’ve been printing calendars. Back to work Monday, kicking off with the data handling module.
Jupiter is following the Moon at present, and this sight prompted me to dig up some of my old astronomical Web pages and spreadsheets. Below are some highlights. The Web site is available on this server in the kepler directory.
My Solstice spreadsheet based on Jean Meeus’ routines from his Astronomical Algorithms is predicting the instant [...]
“It is easy to turn the aquarium into fish soup, but it is more difficult to reverse the process”—Lech Walesa
Orvieto, Italy, November 6, 2009: In partnership with the OpenOffice.org community, WarMouse announced the release of the OpenOfficeMouse, the first multi-button application mouse designed for the world’s leading open-source office productivity suite. With a revolutionary and patented design featuring 18 buttons, an analog joystick, and support for as many as 52 key commands, the OpenOfficeMouse [...]
The Gallery on the Green is a postcard gallery in a telephone box in Settle. The Upper Settle green is a small patch of grass in an older and quiet part of Settle, away from the market place.
When we visited, there was a range of small images on view, and a comments book. I can [...]
It’s grim, it’s slow, everything’s badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I’m an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life. [...]
“I believe in adequate defence at the coastline and nothing else.”
War Is Just a Racket. Composed by Kyle Gann; performed by Sarah Cahill. The soldier speaks. Good luck chaps.
“As we entered Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral, a perfect fifth was already ringing on the organ. Little by little Charlemagne added notes, held down with little wooden splints, and pulled out additional organ stops to thicken the roar of sound. Finally he plunged onto the keyboard with both forearms, and, with overtones at maximum [...]
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“Researchers asked 3,000 11 to 14-year- olds in England to sit maths exams taken by pupils in 1976, and compared their scores with the earlier results. Analysis suggested there was little difference between the two generations.” BBC News article (no attribution)
What I noticed about this research is the way ‘maths’ is assumed to have some [...]
“The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as [...]
You can blog about (almost) anything. Forgotten Bookmarks is a blog that shows photographs of book covers with the bookmarks found inside them. My favourite so far is the Lab Work bookmark. Neat starting point for a story…
There are some photos of an old school arithmetic exercise book dated 1904, with some nice percentage problems!
Via [...]
Diving into the large trifle that is enrolment soon, and catching up after holidays. Lots of Maths coming, but for now
BBC page on PowerPointA ‘eulogy’ for the online presence of someone who is alive, well and probably having funWhy you should set a WiFi password on your router
“I couldn’t get enough Dragnet, or Dimension X. In my head, as I pictured whatever action was happening in the show, I also imagined the studio where it was recorded, the actors with their microphones, the audiences at the comedy shows, and the sound effects man simultaneously adding door slams and footsteps in real time. [...]
“A dollar for a newspaper or a few bucks for a glossy magazine feels like a fair price for a copy. Trees have been cut, presses have been rolled, trucks have been driven to get that copy into your hands.” John Gruber Daringfireball Pay Walls
replying to
“Content matters. And you must find a way, in the [...]
A colleague draws a short line at the edge of the whiteboard recording the image of the window frame when the Sun shines in the classroom window and then carries on. As he is an enthusiastic and engaging teacher, the students’ attention is drawn away from the mark. The students are always amazed at how [...]
Attempts to upgrade to WordPress 2.8.1 led to me not being able to log into the admin pages. The database tables updated OK, but my passwords were not recognised and attempts to reset the admin password using the MySQL database manager application failed. I’m not alone, although some people appear to be authenticating OK but [...]
Nice photos from NASA in the Boston Globe with captions.
Moondust by Andrew Smith is worth reading, despite the review, because its the only account of the thoughts and reflections of those who walked on the Moon that is easily available. The author felt a need to put Project Apollo into the context of his life [...]
Image detail taken from a scan of a notebook opening on Kyle Gann’s Post Classic blog.
I’m just beginning to replan my teaching of fractions… I’ll have to get some simple music examples in there somewhere.
Computers should be like toasters, they should just work for years and then when they stop working, you should be able to pop out and buy a new one. Toasters don’t need backups, and a major cause of problems with computers is loosing data (which may include family pictures and purchased music as well as [...]
“Despite my passion for software I’ve been very interested in being outdoors and blending better my physical presence with the real world. If I could I’d prefer to just spend all my time outdoors; doing work such as annotating the real world with appropriate meta-data.”Anselm Hook’s use this interview
Anselm Hook’s personal site has colour coded [...]
I hate to admit it, but the future is probably with small portable devices rather than Web Books.
Just a few sentences on each. A draft of some staff training material.
FunnelBrain looked fun when I saw it on Jane’s E-learning Pick of the Day.
Alas, the site only works with MSIE 7+ and Firefox 3+. That cuts out Apple users, which is getting on for 20% of the 19-25 market in the US, and about one in 10 here. It also means we can’t use the [...]
I’ve changed over to the Bodmas minimal theme, based on ‘Zero’ while I test out an HTC TyTN phone on loan from the College. I’m trying to push the idea of a mobile phone as an e-learning material acquisition platform. More soon.
“He and his unit had saved their sweet rations and were holding a Christmas party for local Berlin children. As he lifted a young boy on to a chair, he saw the child had only one arm. With a sickening flash he realised that only three years earlier the Allies had bombed the very people [...]
Mark Bernstein is working on ‘a prototype of a new system’. That conjurers up images of sketchbooks, cafe tables with pots of coffee, and afternoon storm light.
I’ll need to stay with Mac OS just to see what it is. I was hoping to go totally open source this year. Tinderbox is one of the [...]
“Apart from Bowman, I can think of only two Google employees I could stand to be around for longer than an elevator ride. ” Joe Clark
Superb rant from Joe Clark, via daringfireball. I want to read that Susan Pinker book. I think I may have ‘male brain’ tendencies, but I know two people who box [...]
I can reassure the BlackCover blog people that an Alwych notebook will last. The notebooks above cover around 7 years of random notes, including one that got drenched in a North Sea storm and another that got dropped in a river. The paper is thick enough not to ‘show through’ with the heaviest of gel [...]
The answer is 42.
@blazingfruit on twitter will reach me now. I’ll be using this page to let people know where I am and when as I’m teaching across three campusses (campii?) this year. Twitter won’t send updates to my phone in the UK - you need to have a Vodaphone account to receive updates – but I can [...]
“As an editor I knew that almost anything can be cut to 300 words; the material is somewhere in the marble, waiting to be quarried out.”
William Zinsser – I’ve just ordered the book. Next year’s study skills module for HND will have some short writing tasks that will give students time and the incentive to [...]
Viva Mediva by Mediva
Just testing Magnatune’s new embed this album function. Mediva play early music with a modern twist. Just what you need when spending your Sunday hacking through the marking (again).
The only change I needed to make to the ‘embed’ code on the Magnatune page was to remove the new lines after each [...]
Dr Sylvia Earle trying to convince people to not destroy the Oceans
Clarinet Quintet in A Major, K. 581: I. Allegro – Sorokin, Oistrakh, Bondarenko, Terian, Knushevitsky
Just to see what happens… iMeem allows you to embed a music stream in your blog or Web site. The service appears to be paid for by some advertising that is embedded in the player above. Currently playing is the Allegro [...]
The students have realised why I’m YouTubing certain parts of the Maths course… I’ll do some more over the weekend.
“When I’m working on a story or novel, I set a modest daily goal — usually a page or two — and then I meet it every day, doing nothing else while I’m working on it. It’s not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, [...]
“A journalist must be where the action is, not sitting in front of a computor re-writing what someone else (whose competence might be questionable) has allegedly witnessed in far away places, or rehashing some blatant propoganda or innumerable puff pars”
Absolutely, Mr Hadwin, but how do I (and other readers) pay for the journalist? By buying [...]
Donald Westlake died on New Year’s Eve
Having problems with the side bar in MS Internet Exporer (6.0.2900) on most of the themes I use on this site. I think its because of the YouTube or the ScreenToaster embedded objects. So I’m using a really basic theme.
“The first effect that I noticed, towards the end of the first week, was an extraordinary intensification of physical sensation. My sense of body temperature became more acute – if I was wet, or cold, or warm, I experienced this very directly and totally. I have never been so physically tired, so aware of weather, [...]
Bob Staake screen cam…
Using older software because it is familiar and does what you need.
A touring exhibition by Stan’s Cafe is a gift to Maths teachers. Statistics suggested by viewers, people represented by rice grains.
proper museums have things in glass cases with typewritten descriptions on card. Accept nothing less.
Guess which USB device was not working properly?
Answer is in the ALT/TITLE tag of the image, so hold your mouse over the yellow balloon to see!
Francois Jakob quote from his autobiography called The Statue Inside about science found on the side of a building on the University of Birmingham campus
Typewriters are disappearing, but some people still use them and you can still buy a basic portable.
Scanning a famous Moon map
Birmingham’s landmark building is focus of an exhibition
Moon on your mobile
David Carson’s new book
How to keep it simple
And, for heaven’s sake,
Cormac McCarthy?
Central atrium with services drives interaction.
We are still eliminating Macs…
Time we upgraded – it works.
Not really
Brass corners on your tables to make them last longer
Quotes from construction workers
Contestability games
Free CD from Tasmin Little makes it possible for younger students to hear some of it!
Asymmetrical design
This has to apply to teaching somehow…
Keep them simple!
Food labelling – traffic lights or the full data?
Small Linux based Eee
Time passes
Where do you cut the map?
Not for long though…
The audio recorded legacy
Don Norman has it wrong for adult students
Microsoft foobar
“I find it very liberating to have a format that allows you to store a few years worth of work in a single shoebox.”
– Hugh MacLeodI used to be able to carry a couple of years work around on two sides of A4. These days, I need shelves full of lever arch files and [...]
Enrolment is when we advise thousands of people about courses…
Getting organised
Two diverse examples
Just some history
I was amazed to find how many of these I have used
Unusual stability in English weather
Are there patterns to learning in Maths? Are these different in different subjects?
Dialog box in video titling application warns against over used typeface
“After all, most users don’t know or care whether their computer has a 65nm dual-core CPU or a tiny midget wizard squatting in their cases. All they care about is how it works and how quickly it does the tasks we most often ask it to do.”
From Apple Mac Plus vs AMD Dual Core by [...]
The flickr photos were meant to provide a resource for use in blogs, on Web pages, and as PowerPoint backgrounds, they are not meant for paper reproduction especially.
I’ve just been asked via the comments (now back on moderation thanks to those nice people in Romania) about printing onto paper.
As Flickr is a resourced published to [...]
Leave a comment if you read this blog
The bridget theme will return when I have solved an annoying compatibility problem. Until then, I am falling back on the simple and clean White as Milk theme by Azeem Azeez.
Note added Monday 28th Actually, I’m trying out a modified version of John Pozadzides’ Rapid Access theme, which turns out to be broken on MS [...]
David Weinberger’s 49 minutes on his new book, with some questions.
We develop ideas about things through ‘prototypes’ that we refine; a sparrow is perhaps a better example of a bird than a penguin is, but both fit the prototype ‘bird’
Digital objects can be in more than one category, a certain thing could have [...]
Testing the ScribeFire blog tool, a plugin for Firefox. You can post to blog directly from Firefox, and you can upload pictures using the WordPress image upload script.
The HTML produced by the rich text editor is familiar to Firefox and Mozilla users, full of line break tags. At present, there appears to be no [...]
Some free books and a film of Douglas Engelbart using a five button mouse.
Why ‘understanding’ isn’t a good word to use in learning outcomes or criteria, and the problem with Bloom’s taxonomy.
Chill zone
It is after 12 noon in my time zone so it is safe to venture out.
Stephen King’s most important lesson – cut!
We can organise our own peer network, surely?
Fear of colours in modernism?
Some drawings available online
A planetary event that is actually visible in England!
Being a little subtle can pay off, and not just with IT support
Abolishionist documentary not available for download!
Michael Wesch and students producing remarkable stuff
Vasyl Y. Choliy’s replacement for the AA.
List inbound and outbound links by link type
The packaging has longer protection than the sound.
this is not a blog
Sky Map now available for Linux. There is even a .deb package!
There is life in the medium yet…
Download a spreadsheet that will calculate the date and time of the solstices.
Les the cleaner won’t appear unless you watch the trailer
The full title is “How to Write Articles and Essays Quickly and Expertly“. Stephen Downes explains his system for planning a piece of writing as you write it.
The first batch of 1000 minimal laptops has apparently been delivered. The machine runs on less than 2 watts of power, and the display is visible in sunlight.
UK Journalists no longer have a trade paper. Teachers have the TES, which seems to carry on driven by job adverts.
Josie Fraser has posted about BECTa’s advice to schools and the way that advice may be failing to give open source products a fair chance. John Pugh MP is tabling an early day motion in support of some acceptance of open source software and we were asked to write to our MPs. I have used the ‘write to them’ service to post the following letter to my MP…
Auctioning the fold for charity. These people will write your name on toast, then photograph it and then put the toast and a link to a site you nominate on their page. The rounds of toast are listed in descending order of contribution. All proceeds go to charity. They are auctioning the space above the fold – well neat.
Intellectual property rights may damage innovation and split markets. Lessig explains using the Google Book Search as an example, through the medium of a presentation with sound track.
Cambridge University and the Darwin family have presented all of Darwin’s writings on a Web site. Text is searchable. Superb resource, and perhaps the way forward for history?
Press Gang is a 300,000 word history of national newspapers in the UK from 1945, with a bias towards the London newspapers. Roy Greenslade has written a brick of a book coming in around 300,000 words. The Birmingham Rep is producing Pravda by Howard Brenton and David Hare and we have tickets for this Friday.
Seth has hit it on the nail again: for new students the college has just started… This is going to get printed in 24pt and put on the notice board. It means we can’t make assumptions about what adult students know about the educational process. It also means that I have to explain the learning process. Otherwise they fall back on the last model they had – and that didn’t work too well, otherwise adult students would not be taking level 2 qualifications.
In previous years, we have used a collective blog for journalism students with the tutor acting as editor. Perhaps it is now time to encourage NCTJ students to set up their own blogs on blogger or similar and self-publish (with safeguards for the College).
Download a 34 page handout that describes the various ways in which a teacher in an FE College in the UK might support students using various ICT/ILT/e-learning facilities. This is a draft, and I’m starting with the text and then adding photos, screen grabs and Web addresses later. Some of my colleagues will actually scan a handout like this and read parts that attract their attention.
Orange / Wandadoo / Freedom to Surf worries again
A camera that takes pictures, a laptop that does e-mail and browsing and some Office tasks…
Crowds of people once a year
The cognition and affect project at Birmingham University is researching aspects of AI
...four addresses and at least two online courses for general sale
Learning through play
Creativity and Maths – a hostile witness
Reliable connection to the Internet is all I ask for
Jinpow exhibition with a nice Flash site
How to stop customers paying you more
Hypertext and set theory
Hog Bay software provide a small app that turns your iBook or MacBook into an Alphasmart with built in hand heater
Harry Kroto speaks at Oxford about the Internet and takes part in a radio program about carbon
Mythical Man Month mauls Microsoft
A tale of two wordprocessors
Imagine living in a flat that was 100 square feet in size. Communal toilets and showers I suppose, but what about the cooking? They seem to have flasks but no stoves so perhaps there is a communal kitchen. No sign of ‘a room of one’s own’ here.
Michael Wolf is showing us part of the living [...]
Black rust form mould grows in concentric circles
Current reading: Biography of Glenn Gould by Kevin Bazzana places the performer in a social and historical context.
Is it possible to upload a flash movie through WordPress?
To remove blank lines from a text file in Textwrangler, you have to run search and replace, tick the ‘use Grep’ option and then search on the pattern ^r. Replace with nowt and the effect is magic. A boon to the ‘everything in one big text file’ advocates.
The pattern < /?[^>]> can be used to [...]
Use a special theme to export posts!
According to the BBC News quoting research by doctors in London and Shrewsbury, there may be a link between migraine with aura and a hole in the heart. Their figures (quoted from the BBC article) are as follows…
“The latest study screened 432 migraine with aura patients, and found 24% had a moderate [or] large PFO [...]
Metropolitan Police officers have apparently received ‘guidance’ about blogging that includes the following phrase; “consider the impact of expressing views and opinions that…bring the organisation into disrepute”.
What is, exactly, a blog? Perhaps an online notebook where you list links, tips, ideas, common experience (like the blog you are now reading) or sometimes a place where [...]
I once heard the Beaufort Scale rendered as epic poetry. The reader started in a quiet conversational tone, speaking fairly quickly. As he ascended the scale, the voice grew louder and the pace slowed. The word ‘HURRICANE’ was bellowed at considerable volume.
The table below was copied from a notebook entry made one foul day in [...]
Just storing a draft in a convenient location
A recent post to the Real Climate blog details recent work on satellite images of Greenland showing the volume of ice flow into the sea from the glaciers that surround the coast.
The numbers are large – 220 cubic km of ice per year is currently flowing from the glaciers into the sea. That apparently corresponds [...]
On an overgrown path is an example of a personal blog that a classical music fan updates daily. The blog is produced using Blogger and uses one of the built-in blogger templates – anyone can use these simple tools to publish a blog. The articles provoke thought and the comments are very illuminating and mostly [...]
I have re-arranged the way bodmas.org works, and this wordpress blog is back in the bodmas.org/blog subdirectory. I decided I wanted a static page upfront to allow for a wider range of non-blog content arriving over the summer.
All I have to do now is work out how to customise the 404 error messages incase my [...]
New link to useful resource
Links to ‘rules’ and checklists for writing and revising the writing
“Sometimes I wish there were no such thing as binary code, and that programs were written and sold in source form in the same way magazine articles, short stories, nonfiction books, and novels are sold: by being offered to publishers. Human readability would be as important as machine parsability. Code would be copyrighted, but never [...]
A description of a state
Up to 2.01 and then down to 1.51 in one day…
A Monk and Two Peas
Freeware stats package for Mac OS X, Linux, Windows
Psyllium husk is a source of fibre – personally I’ll stick to the porridge – but the packaging looks sound.
Vincent Cable and George Galloway
All about pencils
Read all about it coursework: a useful list
Expecting nice pictures from freeware astronomy package
Current mapping and arithmetic lead to predictions of colder climate
Multitasking doesn’t work very well
Some projects in Southern Africa aim to reduce the impact of the digital divide
David Edgar re-translates and prunes the German theatre classic: Music and a stark stage, more space for the theologians
Minimal instant on keyboard usable on trains and allows capture of text in meetings and in odd corners of time.
Tinderbox – soon for Windows – is worth the money, deep software
Use a spreadsheet to write each idea in a cell with a heading….
MS PowerPoint can help you plan writing – forces focus on structure
Good old fashioned museum in Oxford has a range of objects
Amateur page on monochrome photography with small 35mm cameras
Teletubbies alive and well and living in Korea
Nicolas Negroponte’s $100 laptop takes a step nearer
Moodle runs OK under Mac OS X apache with MySQL 4.0.2x- just needs graphics library
Gossamer-Threads forum is free to non-profit organisations and has good user management but without bulk upload. Discus Pro costs about £70 but has user creation by spreadsheet.
Mambo works locally under Mac OS X with mySQL 4.o.27
How to remove things from the System Preferences panel in Panther and how to get a LAMP platform working on Mac OS X Panther
Simple iterated map generates a strange attractor that can provide a model for the rings of Saturn
Tanniemola B. Liverpool’s home page with quotes – the book features diaries of 10 scientists
“One key point is that a half of all people under the age of 24 have no friends over 70, and vice versa” – survey on ageism
General information on Saturn’s ring system
BBC News article on the spokes – gravitational effect of a moon
The Cassini probe has allowed astronomers to infer something about the dynamics and structure of the particles that make up Saturn’s rings, and solve a puzzle about the ‘spokes’ seen moving around the rings on a previous flyby.
The ring [...]
Most people born abroad live in the South of England – especially London. New statistical analysis decouples immigration from ethnicity.
This goes for chemical reactions in the brain of a baby being born with a shortage of oxygen. A ‘cooling cap’ slows the build up of damaging chemicals and allows time for remedial action.
The RSPB devised an innovative technique for estimating insect populations – count the splats on the numberplate as you drive in the country. How did the methodology stack up?
Temperature records kept from 1659 to present day allow trends to be identified
Broadband connectivity is shared amongst users – Fair Use policies need to cap bandwidth hogs
Seabird sightings low as breeding and migration patterns change
Amazon deforestation rate has ‘halved’ – so that’s OK then?
Chemical is found to be present in all dead animals… and plants…. linked with cancer…
Tinderbox allows a quick and dirty HTML export template and the construction of a course web site in a very short time
Industrial archaeology in the cyber age? We need to preserve the appearance of the older user interfaces and this site does it well.
Some links on learning theory
Silly picture for the bank holiday with link to Chicago based design company doing magazine layouts on Web pages
Nice clipart GIF of TGIF spelt out in child’s blocks
It was Brian Eno that composed ‘that chime’ – he did 84 separate pieces
Testing the links in the module guide
Strange geometrical pattern found in 1840s building
Left Hand, Right Hand, Chris McManus, Phoenix, 2003, ISBN 0-75381-355-6
Whale watching and statistics
Stafford and Worcester trips
Limit the number of items on a to do list to three. Knock out some quality work. Then go home.
Richard Long is an artist who walks and makes small changes to places as he passes through
Not around for a bit
Becky – the 15 year old school refuser – came out with a tirade against surveillance and CCTV, eyes everywhere. She may have had a point.
A spreadsheet uses simplified low precision formulas to calculate the altitude of the Sun and the Moon for each hour of a given day. Change the latitude to see the effect of moving into the arctic circle. Change the date to see the effect of slipping towards Winter.
Where did Arial come from? The history of a computer font as told by a typographer.
“We live in a world where instant gratification is not fast enough, in a world of not only speed dating, but even of speed yoga, said Mr Honor?©.”
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the new Bodmas design is borrowed from Jakob Nielsen’s personal site at http://useit.com/
128 kb/s
£13 for 24 hours connection time
I could be using this for heavy downloading
iBook needed the wireless card replacing as well as the combo drive but it is behaving now
Kepler introduced the idea of elliptical orbits and increased the accuracy of prediction of planetary positions by a large factor. He based his calculations – essentially a curve fitting process – on the observations of Tycho Brahe, the first observational astronomer to produce continuous nightly observation records.
I’ve parked an old site of mine that contains [...]
A Quick (and Hopefully Painless) Ride Through Ruby (with Cartoon Foxes) actually starts at Chapter 3. It has cartoons and an unusual style (for a programming book).
A sample: “Most variables are rather temporary in nature. Some parts of your program are like little houses. You walk in and they have their own variables. In one [...]
An editor assembles a book called The Best Software Writing from Web based essays on software and interface design. The book is published (typeset in sabon). A blogger assembles a page pointing to the original essays .This can’t be a copyright issue can it? I mean the originals all existed available for free before the [...]
Neal Stephenson’s essay: In the Beginning was the Command Line
Eric Raymond’s essay: The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Did either of these geezers need to cope with fan control in Linux on a 3 year old laptop and a wobbly combo drive on a brand new iBook?
Why can’t computers be like toasters – sealed units that just [...]
Real climate is a ‘commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists.’
Nice to see scientists in a controversial area using the Web (and a blog to boot) to keep people informed. Plenty of backstory here.
I owe this interesting Web site to the current issue of Seb Schmoller’s [...]
“Computers feel more like appliances than they used to in the days when we hand soldered memory chips onto the motherboard or fiddled with DIP switches. A little, but not much – but they’re cheaper and more disposable, and so there’s less concern about what’s really in the box.”Andrew Orlowski, The Osborne Effect Spooks Apple [...]
“I dont really get all this open source malarkey. Do you know some where that spells it out S L O W L Y for us clueless folk!”
The homework was set by a student (who is not clueless at all by any means). Its my own fault for trying to interest people in using [...]
Mark Shuttleworth interview with Slashdot explains the dot com millionaire’s approach to making Open Source software work for Africa and pay.
Ubuntu update: The 5.04 Hoary install on this little laptop needs to have the modem drivers compiled.
wiki page for Lucent Winmodems
I used the Warty instructions after having tried the Hoary procedure first
I suspect this might [...]
David Kolb has produced a hypertext essay on the nature of modern spaces in cities called Sprawling Places
This hypertext has 100,000 words, 600 pages and 1,000 images
The work is multiply linked and threaded by a number of outlines or themes
It is possible for two (or more) people to ‘read’ the work in quite unconnected ways [...]
The Schoenberg Centre for Electronic Text and Image has online images of manuscripts – some of which have blank pages (texture layers in GIMP)
Danger: anorak zone
The list below is a first bash at a study skills handout for GCSE Maths students…
Some quick hints for studying Maths again…You are not alone – get to know other members of the class – you will realise that we are all up the same creek in the same kyak paddling in the same direction.Work [...]
Recipe for spicy lentils collected by Ismail Merchant from his sister Sherbanu
Performance arts event sets up a public blog to get audience feedback.
Use an older version of the GTK+ libraries to run the Gimp 2 on an ancient laptop under Windows ME
The Becta report based on an ‘oportunity’ sample of schools using Open Source software to varying extents compared to schools using commercial software (i.e. Windows servers, desktops and Office) has now been published (publication was delayed during the General Election).
The BECTa press release has a good summary
The full BECTa report Open Source Software in Schools [...]
Why A4 paper is the shape it is?
Survey! Question! Read! Recite! Review! is a reading framework that is suggested for University students.
As I find myself teaching a reading / writing based subject (Forensic ICT) to a group of sixth formers and some adults in the evening, I come up against problems with reading, summarising and writing. I have been ‘scaffolding’ complex readings [...]
Explode command on the Note menu can split notes containing lists into one note per line all children of the original note
“On the Friday evening of April 25, 1986, the reactor crew at Chernobyl-4, prepared to run a test the next day to see how long the turbines would keep spinning and producing power if the electrical power supply went off line. This was a dangerous test, but it had been done before. As a part [...]
Dmitri Baltermans was an ‘official’ Soviet photographer. His war photographs are bleak and direct. Mark Bernstein quotes Lilia Efimova about the media coverage of the war memorial on May 9th in Moscow.
“And the irony is that level 3 is what employers are looking for,” she says. “If we are seriously trying to support our local community through economic regeneration, then we have to kit them out with the best qualifications – which, in London, is level 3 and upwards.”-Barbara Field, Principal of Harrow College, quoted in [...]
NeoOffice/J for Mac OS X is an Aqua native build of OpenOffice 1.4 with Java widgets (the file windows look different). But, it does not round trip edit with Word files alas…
Got the message?
BBC News election results service provides a timely source of statistics – I’ll try to get the spreadsheet of all the votes as well.
The GIMP is a powerful open source image editing application that works on both Windows and Mac OS X platforms. I can edit images in the same application at work (Win 2000) and at home (Mac OS X).
“Within three months of opening up of the Internet kiosk, it was found that the children, mostly from the slum, had achieved a certain level of computer skills without any planned instructional intervention. They were able to browse the Internet, download songs, go to cartoon sites, work on MS Paint. They even invented their own [...]
Edward Lorenz was using a primitive computer (it was 1963) to numerically integrate an apparently simple set of coupled differential equations. The computer worked to 6 decimal places and printed out each line to 3 places. Restarting a run, he noticed that the trace started looking similar but became slowly different to a previous run [...]
MacNoteTaker is a possible work around for not being able to synchronise memo pad files. It is a Palm application that allows long notes and a Mac OS X conduit that allows notes to be synchronised and exported as text files. I’d rather just have a conduit for memo pad documents, but this looks better [...]
My little monochrome zire 21 organiser comes in handy for quick notes on the train. The Mac OS X Palm Desktop software is currently at version 4.2.1. If you unstuff and then run the installer, you get a system error message – the installer does not check user rights on the Application folder correctly. The [...]
“When researching new processes we often find ourselves working with different industries. It was interesting working with a confectionery manufacturer. Their experience in the science of translucent colour control helped us understand processes to ensure consistency in high volume.”
From Jonathan Ive’s account of the 1998 iMac design (this would be the slot loader judging by [...]
Processing is a programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional [...]
Paul Graham’s essay on Writing, Briefly took just over an hour to write – and two thirds of that was spent re-writing. I learned about anaphora.
If you need to find out about a star constellation then Richard Dibbon-Smith’s Web site about The Constellations is what you need. The table is sorted alphabetically and includes all 88 constellations (personally, I would have grouped them by Northern and Southern hemisphere with a generous overlap but who is arguing?)
Richard sells a couple of [...]
Tinderbox is a note taking application for Mac OS X. A Windows version is in the works – in fact the author Mark Bernstein’s blog includes a link to his development peekhole for Tinderbox.
Tinderbox has a range of powerful features for organising and visualising relationships between notes – such that I am going to try [...]
“The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the “ratio studiorum” of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, [...]
Paul Graham quoted on Daring Fireball in a wonderfully named article Point, Counterpoint: Mac OS X Is Great for Fortysomething Unix Hackers – the title being very close to home.
“In 1994 my friend Koling wanted to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan, and to save long-distance bills he wrote some software that would convert sound [...]
xephem CD-Roms arrived from US today, about a week after I ordered the package.
The second disc makes the entire Lunar Orbiter photograph collection available to xephem
Click on a lunar disc (viewable up to x6 scale) and bring up the feature name
Apple-click to bring up a dialog box with information
Click a button in the information dialog [...]
Enchanted Learning is a Web site with a large number of simple resources produced by a teacher(?). A colleague uses this Web site for quick lesson ideas when covering absence in the SLDD section, and she really appreciated the resources on offer. The site asked for a small donation to cover the costs of running [...]
The first few sites that come up when you google bodmas are
http://www.easymaths.com/What_on_earth_is_Bodmas.htm
http://www.mathspractice.com.au/modules/BODMAS.htm
http://www.gazinotes.com/KS3-GCSE/AT2-BODMAS.htm
http://www.bodmas.tk/
Clearly time for a well thought out information page on the mnemonic acronym with examples, history and a few games. Watch this space…
“In his new book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, Thomas Friedman suggests that because of the universal availability of communications and information processing sciences, the entire global community is now spanned by common technological skills and organizational methods.”
– Alan MillerTranslation If we are going to continue [...]
The bodmas site is now being run through WordPress 1.5 with a few additions…
Default Kubrick theme has been munged to remove images and to present post text as right ragged instead of justified
The Kubrick theme uses excerpts to generate archive and category pages – I have changed this to full post content
The Custom Query String [...]
Xephem is a Unix/Mac OS X based sky chart and ephemeris program. The program costs $80 for a precompiled version on CD-Rs or by download along with a huge set of catalogues and the Lunar Orbiter images. An identical version is available for download only at $60. This is a 1 Gb download spread over [...]
This blog is now running on Wordpress strayhorn using a theme munged from the WordPress classic. Ultimately, I’ll be running the whole site from this blog.
The upgrade was as simple as suggested. Nice one chaps.
“The formula for writing Essays is rather loose. It was invented by Michel Montaign in the sixteenth century. It was a variation on the sermon. A sermon is traditionally appended to an opening biblical text which it refers, or at least alludes to, the holiday when the sermon was delivered. It is a fantasy or [...]
http://www.openquals.org.uk/
Brian Harvey has a nice simple home page. He gives out a free book on programming in LOGO - Computer Science Logo Style based on his work in releasing the open source Berkley Logo interpreter. Berkley Logo was started as a student project.
Brian is also quite rare among north americans in having an interest in [...]
Martin Greenhow’s Study Skills Online page has a lot of information for science oriented students following Undergraduate degrees. You can download the lot as a Word 6 file but the resulting 34 pages of dense text is a little daunting. Better to link into a page now and again from the online version.
Martin has a [...]
Boring meetings and the main culprit seems to be PowerPoint. Edward Tufte has concerns over the Cognitive Style of PowerPoint as reported at some length by Wired Magazine (September 2002) under the headline PowerPoint is Evil.
How to not bore students with PowerPoint
Maximum 5 to 7 slides
Use PowerPoint for what it is good at – drawing [...]
This is the paragraph or two that runs ‘above the fold’ with perhaps just a sentence now and again to set the scene.
The Science for Monks Web site is about science and Maths training for Bhuddist monks. The five teachers involved found teaching the workshops a challenge. Stamatis Vokos has described a session in some detail.
A secondary agenda is about keeping the Tibetan language current by developing a scientific vocabulary. This unusual Web page came from one [...]
Moodle 1.35 asks for more than 8 Mb of RAM from the php process when installing all modules
The workround is to delete modules and then continue to install
Set up the admin account and added a thumbnail (at last) which displayed properly
Got Internal Server Error on index.php
So back to Moodle 1.41 (which is on the main [...]
Moodle 1.4.1 has apparently a problem with saving a blank config.php file and not displaying profile images on some combinations of Apache, PHP and MySQL (including the bodmas server apparently)
Trying a download of Moodle 1.3.5 – older release
C’est la Vie
Enough of v 1.4.1 is working to evaluate the pedagogy and see how usable the teacher [...]
Seems to be working OK
14 Mb of the 25 Mb of script files are actually language packs. Missed most of them out.
Only problem so far is that I can’t get the thumbnails to display properly in the user profile – probably an image processing module missing on the bodmas server
Once files uploaded, and the database [...]
25Mb of scripts to upload
College connection is a bit lumpy
WS-FTP LE complains now and again so have to upload folder by folder
lang and mods are big folders
hacked WordPress templates to match the very plain style used in the rest of the site
not xhtml compliant and currently no DTD specified
removed the comments link
removed all the trackback gubbins
Moved bodmas.org to server space that should allow Moodle install
24 Mb of php files in the Moodle folder so will upload from fast connection at college
Control panel not usable thru’ firewall so will have to configure from home
More than I have had recently
Control panel won’t get thru’ firewall – funny ports
Time delay on scripts
Got internal server errors on first uploading this
Now working
What gives?
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