bodmas blog

The Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King in Liverpool (otherwise known as Paddy’s Wigwam, but I prefer to use the name that Liverpool’s congregation gave the church) is built from a series of concrete slabs. Between the slabs are narrow strips of coloured glass pieces held in lead as a structural element, the glass is around 3 or 4 inches thick and the pieces are various sizes.

The glass has bubbles and other fold marks frozen in place from the day in the 1960s when the glass was poured. Photographing these bubbles with a macro lens affords the same feeling as focussing through a thick specimen in a microscope. At far focus, the bubble forms an image of the exterior structure of the Cathedral and the skyline. Middle focus emphasises the rim of the bubble. Focussing on the surface of the glass inside the Cathedral presents you with an underwater view.

All the images I took on this dummy run can be found on my flickr account.

This image reminds me of the drawings of a ‘typical sea bed’ that you had in children’s books – one of everything drawn in a small space of water

Red seems to have less rendition of tones than blue using the consumer negative film I had when in Liverpool last week. I shall try again with slide film and a tripod.

The walls and butresses of the Cathedral create a calm raised walkway around the exterior of the church. There is a good view of Liverpool’s sky line.

The interior is that of a working church – I prefer looking for the detail in small parts of the structure. The randomness that happens when a piece of glass (or a concrete slab) is poured on a certain day at a certain time and finished.

I’ve just installed OpenOffice 2.2 onto my Dell L400 P3 using Alien and the same procedure as for installing OpenOffice 2.1. I had to issue the alien and dpkg commands as sudo. There were the error messages about scripts, and I deleted the gnome and kde desktop integration debs before running dpkg. Remember the key is to install and run alien to convert the .rpms into .debs on the machine you want to install onto.

All seems to be working. Now to uninstall OpenOffice 2.1 and re-install 2.2 on the main P4 box.

When Xubuntu 7.04 is released properly, I can install OpenOffice 2.2 from the repositories in place of this messing about.

• OpenOffice on fresh Xubuntu 6.06.1
• OpenOffice 2.1 on Ubuntu Gnome 6.06.1 having removed OpenOffice 2.04

Some April Fool jokes on the Web

• ForkPress
• Microsoft take over drugs company
• Lawrence Lessig joins RIAA board

I’m sure there will be more…

I’ve just completed a fresh install of Moodle 1.8 on hosted server space. Download and extract the Moodle package, check I know the paths on bodmas, create a directory that is not visible on the Web to hold the Moodle data, create a MySQL database using the control panel on the bodmas server, copy over the Moodle directory and run install.php. Then log-in as admin and create a demo course and a few demo users.

All the blocks are switched on by default. I can imagine that we will have to see about the ‘social activities’ block after the fun we had with instant messaging on the last upgrade.

The activites list includes the Hot Potatoes Quiz upload feature. You can just upload a quiz file and it runs within Moodle, and the score is written into the grade book. Teachers will be far more likely to use quizzes if they can write them in Hot Potatoes, the quiz system in Moodle is versatile but complex. I am going to try to add and enable the file upload block for students as the beginning of an e-portfolio.

Does what it says on the packet, but you might need to check my answers. I usually get them right, but rounding is sometimes an issue for students.

• Download ODT file for OpenOffice 2 so you can change the questions
• Download the PDF file for easy printing

jgeanangel’s TeacherTube about using Google as a calculator. TeacherTube uses exactly the same technology as YouTube, but aims to stay clean and safe for use in schools and colleges. YouTube is widely blocked by the content filters that Colleges in the UK use (a poll on blocking policies is being organised on the ILT Champions mailing list), and a version of YouTube that actually stays useable will be welcome.

The community policing model may just work here as teachers (and students) have a vested interest in keeping TeacherTube clear of inappropriate material so the site can remain unblocked.

Now why can’t we have BECTaTube? Only available to teachers in UK schools and Colleges, and requiring proof of status to publish?