mikeywil

This article… 

Schwarzenegger’s ebook plans are not a greener option

California’s plans to drop traditional textbooks in favour of online material will no doubt spare a few trees - but Arnie should be choosing the greenest option by rolling out dedicated e-reader devices at the same time, says Duncan Graham-Rowe

via Schwarzenegger’s ebook plans are not a greener option | Duncan Graham-Rowe | Environment | guardian.co.uk .

…plus a conversation with colleagues at coffee this morning has me thinking. If the Guardian article’s references are to be believed, I can deliver you a whole range of statistical snippets. Did you know that:

• the pulping industry is the third largest consumer of fossil fuels;
• it takes 10 litres of water to make one A4 piece of paper;
• in the US alone, half a million trees are felled every week just for Sunday newspapers; 
• reading an online newspaper for 30 minutes a day produces more emissions than reading a paper version;
• the reverse is true if you read them for just 10 minutes;
• Amazon’s Kindle DX uses electronic-paper displays which use hardly any energy to maintain an image (or text) on a screen.

I’d like to know how my team can quantify it’s output. We work hard, and produce, hopefully, some good web developments.

But the team uses energy to do the development work, and then the developed systems sit on servers consuming energy, and are delivered (over a network which consumes electricity) to users on PCs which also consume energy.  

Again, I wonder, can we work in IT in a Hannover Principles (PDF) kind of way? Anyone doing this? 

For those not in the know, The Hannover Principles (Design for Sustainability) are:

1. Insist on rights of humanity and nature to co-exist
2. Recognize interdependence.
3. Respect relationships between spirit and matter.
4. Accept responsibility for the consequences of design.
5. Create safe objects of long-term value.
6. Eliminate the concept of waste.
7. Rely on natural energy flows.
8. Understand the limitations of design.
9. Seek constant improvement by the sharing of knowledge. 

Some sound airy-fairy, but check the detail. Can you argue with number 6, or 4, or 9?

Since I got this netbook I’ve been trying to live life more in the cloud. Now that I have Windows 7 RC on it, I think I need to stay there so that I don’t lose too much if/when I need to re-install.

First off a few weeks ago I started getting our data backed up via Humyo. Seems pretty competitive on space/price. £5 per month for 100GB. Works in a fairly windows-centric way, and so far all our photos and non-music files are now ’safely’ synced into the cloud. 10GB for free.

Also trying out Dropbox. Much simpler than Humyo, and nicer interfacing: very web2.0 unlike Humyo which is quite windows-like. $10 per month for 50GB, $20 for 100GB. Is it worth twice the price? 2GB for free as a taster (or 2.25GB if you use my referral link above).

Also enjoying very much Evernote. Much like OneNote in approach, but nicer media options (include audio, images, etc). Works off the web, or via an installed desktop client. A client is also available for many mobiles and the version on my HTC Touch HD works great. Also it OCRs any text it can see in screengrabs or uploaded images - including handwriting! Syncs across all instances and ‘just works’. 40MB upload per month for free.

So, to get this Netbook working - I’m going to install F-Secure, and then see if these various apps will play with Windows 7.

Here are the steps I took.

1. Ask via Twitter whether or not this would be a good idea!

Ben was kind enough to suggest that he would willingly let me try first… He was also kind enough  to point me at this helpful starting point

2. Step 1: formatting

Couldn’t find a USB stick with 4GB or more, so decided to use one of our new iomega eGo portable drives. It needed to be formatted as a bootable drive, which requires a quick formatting first. The drive is 320GB, so this has taken up most of the day! I’m following the steps on this article (via the first one).

2. Step 2: making boot

Make the drive bootable. The above article suggests I use bootsect from my Vista disk. Oh dear, I don’t have that to hand.

A quick google suggests using: Virtual Clone Drive with which I can mount the Windows 7 ISO I have already downloaded. Have downloaded and installed Virtual Clone Drive (didn’t require a restart, and does seem to just work).

Now back to Step 2. I did what the article said, and got the following:

f:\boot>bootsect /nt60 d:

Target volumes will be updated with BOOTMGR compatible bootcode.

D: (\\?\Volume{c67ac67a-4b61-11de-bcbb-bc67a65cb956})

Updated NTFS filesystem bootcode.  The update may be unreliable since the
volume could not be locked during the update:
Access is denied.

Bootcode was successfully updated on all targeted volumes.
f:\boot>


hmmm. so was that successful or not?

2. Step 3

All copied across OK.

2. Step 4

Get the Netbook to boot off the USB disk. Another quick google says I don’t need to amend the bios, just hold F2 down on a restart. Oh, hang on. That just brought up the bios settings screen. OK - so USB drive goes second after ‘USB CD’ and before the main HD.

Having re-checked I’ve got no data of importance on there… 

3. Here goes with a restart…

Clicking through the various options and warnings, the main choice seemed to be Upgrade or Custom? The ‘help me choose’ link advised me that there was no upgrade from XP, so I’ve gone for the full monty. 

The installer tells me this will take a while, and involve some reboots. Its now 8.25pm…

8.43pm. OK, this would have been about ten to fifteen minutes quicker if I hadn’t been side-tracked. The install got to a point where it wanted to reboot. But, after it came back from the reboot it wanted to start the installation again (as the external USB drive booted first and setup the install again). 

So, I suspected I should just cancel and reboot without the USB drive in the way, but I wasn’t sure and googled around a bit before figuring that, yes, you do need to get back in the bios, move the USB drive to lower down in the pecking order, and let it restart from the hard drive. 

It’s now “completing installation…”

8.54pm. into the setup screens

9.14pm. oh dear - it wanted my procut key. Dutifuly entered from the label underneath the netbook. I now have a spinning circle of animated lovliness which has been going for about ten minutes.

Maybe I should have un-checked the ‘Automatically activate Windows when I’m online’ box?  

[pause for sustanence & present wrapping!]

11pm. I’m writing this in Windows 7. In answer to the above, it was something wrong with the activation, and leaving this blank made it all work.

Success…

Beautiful statistics on the Today programme…

Professor Hans Rosling has been credited by Microsoft’s Bill Gates as one of his inspirations to give so much to charity - the reason? Beautiful graphs.

Mr Rosling makes animated graphs, like the above graph comparing the UK and China over the last 200 years, for his non-profit organisation Gapminder.org.

Using data from international organisations such as the UN, he hopes his graphs will persuade people to give up their misconceptions about the modern world.

via BBC - Today.

I thought the style of graphic looked familiar to an aspect of Google Analyzer. Guess who bought Trendalyzer from Gapminder in March 2006? 

Here’s one looking at CO2 output of America and China

Many more videos of statistcs here, and you can use their tool to compare your own choice of statistics with Gapminder World.

Guardian article with a striking statistic…

of the 12 countries considered least at risk, including Britain, all but one are industrially developed. Together they have made nearly $72bn available to adapt themselves to climate change but have pledged only $400m to help poor countries. “This is less than one state in Germany is spending on improving its flood defences,”

via Global warming causes 300,000 deaths a year, says Kofi Annan thinktank | Environment | guardian.co.uk .

Unfortunately the Guardian’s article fails to provide the report’s title or a link, but I think it is called the Human Impact Report… 

Summary of the Report:

Climate Change is here. It has a human face. This report details the silent crisis occurring around the world today as a result of a global climate change. It is a comprehensive account of the key impacts of climate change on human society. Long regarded as a distant, environmental or future problem, climate change is already today a major constraint on all human efforts. It has been creeping up on the world for years, doing its deadly work in the dark by aggravating a host of other major problems affection society, such as malnutrition, malaria and poverty. This report aims at breaking the silent suffering of millions. Its findings indicate that the impacts of climate change are each year responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths with hundreds of millions of lives affected. Climate change is a serious threat to close to three quarters of the world population. Half a billion people are at extreme risk. Worst affected are the world´s poorest groups, who lack any responsibility for causing climate change. 

 Full executive summary here.

Just a short post to mark a significant day for me.

I’ve been a parent governor at my daughter’s school for about a year. So far it’s been an interesting challenge, albeit fairly demanding in terms of time and commitment. However, it is about to become significantly more demanding… Earlier tonight, I was elected Chair of the Governors.

I’m honoured (and indeed a little bit proud) to have been considered a suitable candidate for the role - I hope I can do a good job. Obviously, I’ve not done this before so there are many unknowns ahead, but thankfully there are experienced governors still on board (including the previous chair and a very experienced new vice chair). I’ll need an awful lot of their input and advice to ensure that things are handled properly.

It’s clear to me that I was nominated, and subsequently voted in, partly because I’m seen as “the new kid on the block”. I guess I bring a degree of knowledge as a parent, and as an internet professional, that could be very useful. I hope I can live up to the other governor’s expectations!

JISC came to see us at lunchtime today. David Flanders (and journalist Basheera Khan) paid a visit in order to present the List8D team with their winning cheque.

We had a nice lunch (with pop), a photo op, and two podcasts were recorded: one of me, John Sotillo and Keith Mander, and the other was the team, namely Ben Charlton, Matt Spence , Matthew Bull and Matthew Slowe. 

Best bit was the opportunity to chat about what we do with external people. It turns out that what we do is good. We knew this (I think), but having it underlined feels good.

I’ll add links to podcast etc when it’s live.

One of the things I’d like to consider (pipe dream / pie in the sky time) is how me and my team might consider applying something like The Hannover Principles to our work.

(As usual) I’m no expert, but I think the HPs are focussed on buildings and objects. We build web digital applications. Each time we create new systems we’re creating requirements for more and more servers, more storage, and more use of energy.

Is this sustainable? Should we be trying to work out how to produce more information services but with less resource requirements?

Thoughts on a recycled postcard please…

We’re currently using Drupal to build a CMS for the university I work at. It’s great to see it get more and more backing… 

From an enterprise level, Sett Gottleib celebrates Finally, Drupal Gets Deployment. His post points to Greg Dunlap’s work on a Deploy module. Sett also references the Drush module which can handle filesystem level deployment. 

At the university we have a similar set of requirements and have been developing our own mechansim (with support from a friendly local development company). I’ll provide links to our efforts as and when they’re available.

From a major player perspective, Dries Buytaert tells us Obama is using Drupal.

I didn’t know that Obama was also a web developer, but it is a great vote in favour of Drupal.

Around two and a half years a go I became the proud owner of a Toshiba Portege laptop running Vista. But I had a few problems - mostly because it didn’t have enough RAM (only 1GB to start with). 

Over the years I have tried various ways to speed it up. For a while I stuck a 2GB SD card in and ran ReadyBoost which helped. Also I tried the advice on the first two items on this list: http://mostlysavingmoney.com/top-10-windows-vista-speed-tweaks/ which seemed to help.

Eventually I upgraded to 2GB of Ram and things have been fairly decent since then. I stopped using the ReadyBoost as it seemed to make things slower on wake-up (probably too much of the session in memory).

But one thing I didn’t revert was the indexing (first point of advice on that URL above). So now I am, and I thought I’d just make a note of this here so that I can come and revert back if the need arises.

Just for the record really, but am reading The Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester. They accompany the book with a website which includes a profile tool. For this to make sense you need to understand their ”Social Technographics®” classifications which describe: Inactives, Spectators, Joiners, Collectors, Critics, and Creators.

Their profile tool includes data for the UK from 2008, and provides the following slices organised by age group.

Data from Forrester Research Technographics^® surveys, 2008. 

I’ve been playing with my phone, installing various apps. I figure that any moment soon I’m probably going to crash it, so here’s a reminder just for me of what went in, in no particular order…

• Touch InCall Screen Tweak (makes the screen light up during a call if you take it away from vertical - i.e. away from your ear)
• BsB G-Config (adds G-sensor options to apps that don’t support it natively. not sure this works - or at least it doesn’t help google maps).
• CeTwit - small twitter client. Ok, but could do with better finger-scrolling
• QuakkSetup - just about to try this
• .NET compact framework 3.5 (needed for some of these apps)
• Diamond Saber (yes, a lightsaber application)
• GoogleMaps itself (did I install this? did it not come with the phone? I seem to have the .cab file lying around)
• SkypeForPocketPC (this actually works, but doesn’t do video yet AFAICT)

I liked a post on Robert O’Toole’s blog: The Ikea effect – why we should build a flat–pack V[R]LE

He’s talking about a V[R]LE which I’m assuming is much like a VLE. But I thought the aspects on how people like to build their own things, especially when it’s made easy, related well to our CMS project. 

Our CMS strategy is in two phases. First we are building some backend elements - we’re calling these Content Factories, and these will manage certain types of content to enable easy re-use. These Content Factories will provide content to a variety of web properties regardless of whether they are CMS-driven. So we could use them to inject content into Sharepoint, a Portal, and even a flat HTML page (because we run PHP over most of them).

Secondly we’ll be building a “CMS Kit” to hand out to our departments. This will provide them with a standard CMS web interface to edit basic flat content, but will also be pre-prepared to use the Content Factory feeds. 

So this “CMS kit” we’re planning is an IKEA flat pack.

I also liked the note of warning about people getting over-invested in the things they build. Our web authors are currently using some very nice Dreamweaver tools and snippets that we’ve developed over the last two years. Getting them off those and into the CMS might be hard. The solution is to make the CMS so much easier that they’d be silly not to use it.

Frosty leaf

I’m liking my Christmas present. It’s not big but it’s quite clever… 

More on my Flickr (via the Slideshow in the main menu). EXIF-aware peeps can figure out what I got from Santa too…

It’s 29/4/09, but I’m pre-dating this post so that it appears when the article I’m referencing was published…

I was interviewed by Sun/MySQL for some info on how we use MySQL. I (nearly) said: “Sun’s MySQL database is the de facto standard of databases. Our staff knows it, and developers with MySQL skills are very easy to find. As developers, we’re very happy with the environment. I’d have to have a very good reason not to use it.”

http://www.sun.com/customers/software/kent.xml

Another animation from JISC. Not embeddable I think - probably due to some sort of IPR issue ;-). Anyhow, here’s a screenshot that I’ve not asked permission to show yet…

Have you got permission to wear a hat like that?

They’re promoting a site called Web 2 Rights which has various toolkits which may be of some  interest.

• IP toolkit
• IPR diagnostic tool
• IPR Flowchart (PDF)

Thanks to jennabanana’s comment on this Instructable we made a quick, no cooking required, batch of homemade play dough. Stan requested it first, but they all jumped in for some fun. 

playing with homemade play dough

Here’s her recipe:

• 3 cups flour
• 1/3 cup salt
• 2tbsp oil (veg)
• 1 cup water
• 7 drops food colouring.

1. Mix dry ingredients with oil.
2. add food colouring to water and mix together.
3. add water to flour/salt/oil mixture slowly ~ about 1/4 cup at a time and mix together with a spoon.
4. once you’ve added all the water, knead the dough with your hands.

The recipe I should have cooked tonight:

KALE WITH ANCHOVY AND CHILLI DRESSING

This pungent, piquant sauce, somewhere between a dip and a dressing, is quite delicious with earthy kale - or broccoli, or almost any other robust green vegetable. If you like, you can turn it into a more substantial supper dish by cutting the kale into thick ribbons and tossing them, along with the sauce, into hot buttered pasta. The leftover dressing will keep in the fridge for a couple of weeks. Serves four, as a starter.

500g curly kale, or purple sprouting broccoli, washed and trimmed

2 knobs of butter

For the dressing

50g anchovy fillets, drained

150ml olive oil

2 garlic cloves, peeled

Leaves from a sprig of thyme

A few basil leaves

½ small red chilli, or a pinch of dried chilli flakes

1 tsp Dijon mustard

2 tsp red-wine vinegar

A few twists of black pepper

Blend all the ingredients for the dressing in a liquidiser until completely smooth.

Steam the kale or PSB for just 3-4 minutes, so it still has a bit of crunch. Toss with a knob of butter. Warm the sauce over a low heat, whisking in a knob of soft butter as it heats up. This should help to emulsify it but don’t worry if it separates a bit; it’ll still taste fine. Arrange the kale/PSB on warmed plates and drizzle over a generous amount of the warmed dressing. Serve at once, with soft brown bread to mop up the sauce.

This is of course completely copied from the Hugh and the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2007/mar/10/foodanddrink.features

Emma cooks this all the time and it’s fab. My feeble attempt tonight was more complex and not as good. (Although I suspect that my olive oil-drizzled baked beadcrumbs as a garnish may well make a repeat appearance!)

As of today, our Library has a nice new web site. Last week our IT Services were re-launched.

Thousands of pages have been converted to a new template. New structures have been tested and implemented. New ideas have been included. Lots of consultation and feedback happened. Many stakeholders have pulled together and finally the work can see the light of day as it goes live.

The team doing this project have been working incredibly hard on this over most of the summer. They’ve had many issues to deal with and remarkably they are still standing and still smiling. (Well done to Fran, Sarah, Leon and everyone else for all their hard work.)

So what happens on the day this thing goes live?

Well… lots of people find that their tea bags go splat on the floor.

I shall explain via a quick anecdote. After having lived in our house for three years we realised one day that the kitchen bin was in the wrong place. It was by the back door and not very near to the sink and cooker. So we decided to move it.

In fact we moved it to inside the ‘kitchen triangle‘. That’s the area between your fridge, cooker and sink which is meant to be the optimal zone of efficiency. Placing the bin inside this triangle is a very good design.

The trouble comes the day after this change has been implemented.

7.30am and the kettle goes on. 7.38am and the first cup of tea has finished brewing. Time to remove the tea bag and add the milk. So you take the tea bag out and chuck it in the bin. Only the bin isn’t where it used to be so the tea bag hits the floor.

Tea bag splat.

It doesn’t matter how good the new arrangement is, for the first couple of the weeks the tea bag keeps hitting the floor. Does this mean the new design is bad? No, of course not. It just means that when you’re used to one way of doing things, a different arrangement can take some time to get used to.

Many of the feedback comments about re-launched web sites can be safely filed under ‘tea bag splatters’. However if you’re still getting tea bag splats after a few weeks then you might have a problem…

I suppose I reserve judgement on whether you can proclaim any idea to be the number 1 secret, but it certainly gets attention. A post in Seth’s blog (Time) reveals to us:

the #1 most overlooked secret of marketing

It turns out to be two things: show up on time (as an individual and in the things you are responsible for delivering); and cherish my time (show you care about me and help me save time).

The second idea is illustrated by a spam example:

automate the process so three minutes of your time wastes three minutes of the 1,000 or one million people on your list

and this reminds me of a comment I read recently about meetings…

How long does a one hour meeting take? The answer is to multiply the hour by the number of people in the room. So for a meeting of a dozen people you are using 12 hours. Add in some preparation time (for reading papers) and some post-meeting activity and it quickly becomes a very time consuming event.