Welcome to the home of Graham Robinson

Learning

Monday, February 25th, 2008

It’s been an interesting week for me and mostly about learning new things.

I had a talk with the IT depearment’s human resources person last week about progression through ISS. It wasn’t a job interview but a ‘what can you do’ talk. I think this is a great idea as people on the main campus never actually see us down here and it takes something like the Flash video before people realise you can do something clever.

In the meeting was a person from the web applications team and it was an oppotunity to see what they know, so that I would know what to learn. As it turns out that seems to be .net.

ASP.net is a programming language by Microsoft. People don’t use it because people use PHP. This website is written in PHP. It’s free. Microsoft stuff costs money. Businesses have money, businesses use Microsoft. You see where I’m going with this.

Fortunately Microsoft seem to have been kind. They have ‘express’ editons of their software that are free so that people can learn how how to write in their language before paying for the software. So I’m having a go at that.

Also below you might have seem that I’ve been playing with iFrames. The most interesting thing I’ve learnt about iFrames is that if you put something in the middle of it then the RSS readers and other readers pick it up.

<iframe src=”bbc.co.uk”>This is an iframe for the bbc.co.uk website</iframe>

On another note, I’m sorry Mum. I’ve written another blog post that you (and everyone else who actually reads this site) doesn’t understand.

Flash player

Monday, February 25th, 2008

Some more uni work. Just a test

Wikipedia

Saturday, February 16th, 2008

There really should be rules for Wikipedia. Maybe I should start off a list

1. Never use Wikipedia.
1a. If you do use Wikipedia do not admit to it
2. If you use wikipedia do not include it on your own website (www.southampton.ac.uk/isoton)
3. Never ever edit your own Wikipedia page to look good

Soton Wikipedia

3a. If you do edit your own Wikipedia page from

Reaction to the branding has been primarily negative.

to

Initial reaction to the new logo has been mixed.

Do not, and I cannot stress this enough, make your bloody username the name of your company

Sotoncomma

Geek Alert: It’s a thing of beauty

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

Being valentines today I obviously have to mention Amy as my beauty but we do have another here at the moment for the geek in all of us

Archos video player

Archos web browser

Stand up comedy

Monday, February 11th, 2008

We watched a fantastic routine by Mark Watson in the Nuffield theatre last night. We don’t get to watch much live comedy so this really was something special.

The only bad thing is that Russell Howard, who we want to see even more, is sold out already. We only bought Mark’s tickets a week before hand (granted we were at the back) but this one is exactly a month away and sold out.

And I bought a double decker today… but I guess you had to be there.

If you are reading this on a feed

Saturday, February 9th, 2008

If you don’t know what a feed is then you can ignore this.

If you have subscribed to my RSS feed the address has changed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/mediaguy

Passworded

Friday, February 8th, 2008

After talking to my dear mother I’ve password protected the ISS post until I get to re-read it with a critical eye.

On a lighter note – Computer central

Friday, February 8th, 2008

After that mammoth rant…

There were a lot of screens in our place today. GC had a new laptop, PS had an imac into build a mac laptop and I was building 4 laptops to go into a room. In the end every inch of desk space had a screen on it and it looked like 10 incredibly thing people worked in our office.

My Office

Protected: Working with ISS

Friday, February 8th, 2008

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The day the dolphin died

Monday, February 4th, 2008

So the University dolphin is dead. Long live the… erm… text.

New logo

Also, I don’t really like iSoton www.southampton.ac.uk/isoton (oh and apparently it’s southampton.ac.uk and not soton any more). The idea of having user uploaded content on there surprises me. Just wait for youtube videos of happy slapping, flickr images of drunk students, delicious tags of ‘crime’ and ‘dropout’ and wikipedia being changed on the clearing day to say we are terrible.