Protected: More
Friday, March 21st, 2008Protected: No you can’t have the password…
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008Allowed to learn?
Friday, March 7th, 2008Everyone in IT got an email today saying that ISS aren’t allowed to have personal websites on www.soton.ac.uk/~username. I used to use mine for silly little things like practising php, hosting funny (but fully legal) files and putting large files that are too big to email for other people to download. Apparently this is too unprofessional for our new www.southampton.ac.uk brand, so it’s been taken away.
It made me think about (staff) learning at the university. If I look at my bookshelf in my office I can see
- Programming Flash Communication Server [Paperback] by Reinhardt, Robert; Yang - £23 – Bought by me
- VBScript Pocket Reference [Paperback] by Childs, Matt – £10 – Bought by me
- PHP and MySQL for dummies – £20 – bought by me
- SQL (don’t know the details) – £15 – bought by me
- ASP.NET all in one reference for dummies – £35 – bought by me
And most of my programming is done on Macromedia Studio 8, which I bought for £100 ish
The director of IT said that they don’t ‘spoon feed’ people to progress, but they don’t exactly give people opportunity either. Anyone looking to learn how to do HTML or PHP better go buy themselves a hosting package in the remaining 20 days of March. Or just don’t learn anything…
Learning
Monday, February 25th, 2008It’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, 2008Some more uni work. Just a test
Wikipedia
Saturday, February 16th, 2008There 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
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
On a lighter note – Computer central
Friday, February 8th, 2008After 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.
Protected: Working with ISS
Friday, February 8th, 2008The day the dolphin died
Monday, February 4th, 2008So the University dolphin is dead. Long live the… erm… text.
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.
Update: Flash
Thursday, January 31st, 2008A few posts ago I was talking about the work we’ve been doing with Flash and the D-Day that was coming up. Well this is the update to it.
Everyone was pretty happy with the result. We had a bunch of people connect from other universities and (more than I thought) bosses at ISS either had a look at the live stream or came down for the actual conference. I’ve also had to put together a flow chart for the institutions that have emailed the llas and asked how they did it as they want to do it too.
I’ve personally learnt a few lessons from it, the main one being sound. If you have a listen to the presentations (below or on the LLAS website) you can hear some distortion in the voices when they raise their voice. Of course we did all of the sound checks and everything sounded good, then they presented. Of course the voice of a presenter doing a sound check to one person and their voice when presenting to 100 is slightly different. Hell it’s a lot different. And because of the live encoding we’re stuck with what we’ve got.
Have a listen to it and see what you think, and maybe more importantly what you think of the Flash player; because that’s my work*
(I can’t seem to embed the video on this site, look at it here http://streaming.lang.soton.ac.uk/video/index.php?vidid=90a0d16&start=370)
* The bit that plays the video isn’t, that’s someone cleverer than me, but all the stuff around it is mine. Trouble is you can’t really see it as most of the application is security and this video doesn’t have much as it is public.