… no really it has. It’s come up with this fantastic product, the electronic book. It’s so much more than ‘book v1′, it’s interactive. ‘Books v2′ is so much better for the current generation of students. Apple thinks our current generation of students are too stupid to understand words and need pictures and too stupid to understand diagrams, so they need videos. Seriously Apple, is this meant to ‘change education’?

The announcement happened while I was at Lotusphere and I saw some tweets from some people I respect in the academic world about Apple ‘reinventing education’. With IBM failing to provide a working wireless network at Lotusphere I’ve only now had a chance to download the iBook Author and view the Apple announcement. Don’t get me wrong, Apple do a lot of good things with education and well designed ibooks will help provide a more engaging experience for many pupils, but there are so many things that are wrong with the way Apple made this announcement. Students who perform poorly in the Western world, do so because of factors such as:

• Poor discipline – lack of respect from both students are parents
• Poor teaching – poor wages and low requirements for teaching means that (sometimes) the best talent isn’t attracted to teaching
• Large class sizes so students are allowed to fall behind
• The over reliance on standardised testing often produces students who lack critical thinking abilities
• Poor resources and old school infrastructure.
• and simply a difficulty with engaging students with ‘difficult’ subjects such as maths and science in a society that makes them believe everything has a short cut (reality TV such as XFactor)

Many of the problems of Western education are due to society. The countries that perform best are often the countries with better discipline in society as a whole. Countries such as Finland who score highly, are countries were politeness and respect are still prevalent. There’s also a smaller degree of social depravation in Finland. In countries such as the UK and the US, we have generations of society who successively drop-out of school due to lack of encouragement from parents and the social pressures place on them.

The solution(s) to our educational problems are more complex than simply throwing electronic content at students. They require an education system that can engage with pupils who have little interest or encouragement from home. This is not a simple job and requires a completely radical overhaul of the education system, to one that is centred around a students interests and somehow engages not only with them but with them, but also their parents, who have ‘given up’ on the education system. (i.e. something ‘home schooling’ does very well)

So if we remove the ‘hype’ and look at the announcement. What have Apple announced?

1. Electronic books that can be viewed on an iPad.
2. A very simple tool to create electronic books.
3. A simple mechanism to publish electronic books.

As somebody who’s been working in Learning Technology for nearly two decades, here’s my view:

1. Electronic content for education has to be platform neutral. Content tied to an OS is not ‘opening up education’ but closing it off. I regularly count the ratio of student laptops when I leave work. The Macs to PC ratio has been as high as 25 PCs for every Mac. The lowest I’ve seen 2 PCs to every Mac (but there was a Art & Design hand-in that day). In general the ratio is about 10 PCs for every Mac. (Our log files show that 9% of accesses are from OSX, so I think this number is accurate). Increasingly we’re seeing accesses from Android tablets. Should I put our content into something that cannot be accessed by students who choose to use an Android tablet? I thought this was meant to be improving education not creating ‘haves and have nots’
2. The new tool looks incredibly simple to use. But simple authoring tools have been available for two decades. Apple’s own Hypercard was a very simple tool to produce ‘interactive books’. There were tools such as Authorware, and Director, (even VB) that could be used to produce more interactive systems such as simulations, that actually could teach students. But the problem has always been to produce quality content is extremely time-consuming. As soon as it goes ‘multimedia’ it’s requires even more time to produce that a text book. It’s not something that can be knocked together from a few Powerpoints. But if you do manage to produce an interactive iBook, it’s nothing new. The majority of multimedia content produced since the 90s has tended to be nothing more than an electronic book, and these CD-ROMs and websites haven’t radicalised teaching. Books complement learning, but they rarely teach. That’s why we have teachers.
3. Most worryingly for me. Who’s going to provide ‘quality assurance’ for the content? Apple? Do we want to see US religious freaks writing ‘science books’ that are based on a text written by 3000 years ago, yet presenting them as fact? For all their faults, good academic publishers have an editorial process that counteracts these religious zealots and try to ensure the content we present to our children is accurate, or at least follows the scientific method. (God help the US if it continues to allow these idiots to dictate it’s science teaching).
4. There’s also the expense. Yes, you can load a lot of electronic books onto an iPad, but an iPad is a £400 outlay. For this to be successful in the UK, you need an iPad per student pre-loaded with all the courseware for a year, that means maths, physics, chemistry, biology, history, English, modern foreign languages, geography, design, art, music, PE, ICT, and citizenship. That won’t be cheap. As school with 2000 students would have to outlay at least half a million pounds to provide just the iPad and it’s not like Pearson’s are using this as an opportunity to vastly reduce costs with a new ‘software-like’ licensing model where a school can subscribe to a book on a ‘concurrent use’ basis. Every student would have to own a copy. How much would it cost say to provide the core English core texts on the iPad? It seems the profit margin on e-books are even larger than with a print-run. This is of course, unless of course Apple are proposing to give every pupil an iPad for free?

So sorry Apple, if you want to change education, start talking to some people who really understand the problems in the education system and society. Throw some of your vast cash reserves at initiatives to support new ways of engaging disadvantaged students. Something I know the Bill Gates foundation has done. But do not present your new profitable income stream as an ‘education revolution’ as if you’re ‘doing education a favour’.

I usually don’t have much call for business cards. Internally they’re not much use, and I don’t get to many conferences. But it’s always a bit uncomfortable at business conferences when you don’t have cards. So at the last minute I decided to get some for Lotusphere. But rather than having the hassle of sorting cards out through work I decided I this was the excuse I needed to play with Moo.com, a service that allows you to create personal business cards through their website.  
 
I have to say I’ve been impressed by their service.  
I started by making standard business cards. As they’re work related I decided to use photos I took around the Uni last summer. Moo makes the job incredibly simple. You can either upload photos or pull them in from a number of external services, including Flickr. So 10 minutes later I had created a dozen different designs and they were heading off to the printers. 

They’re not cheap, but the cards are printed on good quality card and the quality of the photos is pretty decent. Moo also like the ‘little touches’. The box came with a ‘buzzword bingo’ card of stupid phrases that you should try to slip into meetings.  
 
 
I was so impressed with the service I had to give their mini moo cards a go. These are half height cards and each card can feature it’s own photo or phrase. Again I decided to use the Flickr import routine. This time selecting random photos from 2011 photo sets of everything from airshows to gigs. This time the cards are designed more as a personal card with twitter and Flickr addresses 

We’re late to the XPages game and it’s only in the last few weeks I’ve felt confident enough to push XPages into our system’s templates. I only allow new Domino tech to be deployed when I’m confident that the technology works because we run on a very constrained 32-bit Solaris Domino install. I was ready to use XPages on 8.5.2 but we ran into issues pushing out a XPage Single Copy Design to websites. I tried using standard Domino single copy design templates but whenever we updated an XPage we received various errors. So I waited until 8.5.3 as this version was meant to fix our issue with XSCD.

Although we can now push our XSCD’s through our templates, unfortunately moving to XSCD has not solved our issue. We are still unable to reliably deploy changes to XPages to all servers in our cluster without receiving the error:

HTTP Web Server: Command Not Handled Exception

In the XPages error log:

Exception Thrown
 java.lang.NullPointerException
 at com.ibm.xsp.webapp.FacesServletEx.service(FacesServletEx.java:87)
 at com.ibm.xsp.webapp.DesignerFacesServlet.service(DesignerFacesServlet.java:103)
 at com.ibm.designer.runtime.domino.adapter.ComponentModule.invokeServlet(ComponentModule.java:576)
 at com.ibm.domino.xsp.module.nsf.NSFComponentModule.invokeServlet(NSFComponentModule.java:1267)
 at com.ibm.designer.runtime.domino.adapter.ComponentModule$AdapterInvoker.invokeServlet(ComponentModule.java:847)
 at com.ibm.designer.runtime.domino.adapter.ComponentModule$ServletInvoker.doService(ComponentModule.java:796)
 at com.ibm.designer.runtime.domino.adapter.ComponentModule.doService(ComponentModule.java:565)
 at com.ibm.domino.xsp.module.nsf.NSFComponentModule.doService(NSFComponentModule.java:1251)
 at com.ibm.domino.xsp.module.nsf.NSFService.doServiceInternal(NSFService.java:598)
 at com.ibm.domino.xsp.module.nsf.NSFService.doService(NSFService.java:421)
 at com.ibm.designer.runtime.domino.adapter.LCDEnvironment.doService(LCDEnvironment.java:341)
 at com.ibm.designer.runtime.domino.adapter.LCDEnvironment.service(LCDEnvironment.java:297)
 at com.ibm.domino.xsp.bridge.http.engine.XspCmdManager.service(XspCmdManager.java:272)

This appears irrespective of the complexity of the XPages. It doesn’t matter if the XPages included complex code or simply says ‘Hello World’. The server the code is replicated to will 95% of the time display the error message, and the other servers in the cluster fail around 50% of the time. At the point that the new XPages fails. Every XPages in the database fails.  The odd thing is that after an hour the page starts to work. Which suggests some sort of cache is being flushed.
 

Things I’ve tried unsuccessfully:

1. Make a minor change and re-replicate.
2. Make a minor change to the XSCD template directly on the server.
3. Use the ‘Build’ function to rebuild the database and replicate.
4. Rebuild directly on the server.
5. Re-sign the database and replicate
6. Re-sign the database on the server.
7. Delete page and redeployed
8. HTTP refresh
9. Accessing an XPages immediately after the JVM purge period has expired.
10. Changed the page persistence from disk to ‘keep pages in memory’
11. Changed the page persistence to ‘keep current page in memory’
12. Changed the minimum supported release to 8.5.3
13. Uninstalled Notes client and reinstalled, build, re-sign and re-deploy.

Things I’ve tried successfully:

1. Restarting HTTP server (unacceptable with 900 active web users per server, many of whom are students assignments)

Because we run on Solaris and IBM refuse to move Solaris to a 64-bit platform, our JVM is set to 256mb and is set to use OS memory for the HTTP task otherwise our server collapses due to a lack of headroom. So we do not have much leverage to change this figure.

Has anyone experienced this problem?

One of the things I liked about SXSW were the Accelerator sessions where web startups pitched their ideas to a room full of investors, press and the paying public. The winner of News Accelerator was Storify, a website that allows users to curate tweets, photos, videos and web by dragging them into a single stream of information to tell a story. It’s a bit like gathering news headlines in a scrap book. It’s been used during some of the big events of 2011, such as the ‘Arab Spring’ and Worldwide ‘Occupy’ movements as an alternative to the mainstream media.

Since SXSW I’ve been using it to curate my own tweets, photos and videos for various topics. Storify ‘stories’ can be embedded on websites, and I’ve included my ‘Gigs of 2011′ story. It’s recently been revised which has improved the reliability of external services. But it still needs quite a bit of development, for example, it could benefit from closer Facebook integration, and I’ve found that I really need an iPhone app. It also really needs much stronger shared authoring. But having played with it for several months, it’s definitely is a useful tool for creating a story without much effort. With better sharing and with my Learning Technologist hat on, it could be a great tool for education. For example as a quick way to capture the main topics in a lecture or capturing information during a field trip.

Sony recently released a new camera that may turn out to be a game changer, the Sony A77. This new 24 Mega pixel APS-C camera is a DSLT camera. Instead of using a standard mirror like a DLSR. DSLT cameras use a fixed semi-translucent mirror. 70-80% of the light passes through the mirror while the rest is bounced up to an auto focus sensor and because there’s insufficient light for an optical viewfinder, the main sensor is used to generate a live view on an Electronic Viewfinder.

The new weather proof A77 with 16-50 f.28 SSM lens

Sony A77 translucent mirror

Many existing DLSR users will immediately be turning their noses up at the idea of using and EVF. As an existing Sony Alpha user, I have to admit I was unsure of this change. ‘Proper cameras have an optical viewfinder’. Also, like many camera users I’m insatiably hunting for better ISO performance and loosing 30% of the light isn’t going to help improve ISO performance.

Set against this are the benefits this setup offers. To put it simply, the camera can use it’s accurate phase detection autofocus system at all times and does not need to move the mirror out of the way to take a photo. This means the A77 can achieve an amazing 12FPS while maintaining accurate focus. Current DSLRs have to switch to the slower and less accurate contrast detection systems. As more DSLRs are used for video production, there are obvious advantages of this setup.

Just like a viewfinder on a full-frame camera, the setup offers a 100% view of what you are capturing. Unlike a DSLR camera the EVF represents the actual shot you are composing. Useful information such as histograms can be displayed as you are composing a shot. But also most settings can be viewed live so (for me) there’s less wasted shots. The EVF is also surprisingly good in dark situations since the EVF will boost the image to match the ISO you are using, making it easier to compose images in low light.

Everything you need is presented on the EVF

The SLT technology is Sony’s future direction. They’ve stated that future cameras will all feature EVFs. So having invested heavily in Sony lens, it was either upgrade to this new technology, or switch to a different camera manufacturer and slowly rebuild my lens collection. After much deliberation, I decided to upgrade.

Obviously a SLT camera will live or die on the quality of the EVF. A complaint of Sony’s first generation of SLT cameras was the quality of the EVF. So Sony have crammed a high density OLED EVF into the camera to improve colour, contrast, resolution and reduce ghosting. So how does it perform? After several weeks of use I can now confidently say that in most situations the benefits of the EVF outweigh the negatives, but there are negatives. At times in very bright sunlight the EVF can ‘wash out’. In low-light it can be a bit noisy (though I wouldn’t have seen anything with an optical viewfinder). But ghosting is minimal and the ability to compose the shot while seeing useful information such as histograms means that once you’ve adjusted to it, you wondered how you lived without these features.

My first test with my new unfamiliar camera (I only received it two days beforehand) was at the Duxford Autumn Air Show. I had used my A700 and A100 at a previous air-show show. The quality of the images and the ease of capturing fast moving aircraft was a big improvement over the A700. Few images were out of focus and the combination of 12FPS and new 24 mega pixel sensor made light work of fast jets. The EVF was more than capable of tracking the aircraft, although I did experience a few white-outs when the sunlight was very bright. My big worry, ISO performance, was also put to rest with some decent images from within the museum. Although to be honest, the A77′s ISO performance unlike many of it’s other features, is nowhere near a ‘group leading’ performance. But overall, the quality, despite having to shoot in JPEG due to the lack of RAW processor on the Mac, was noticeably better than my a700.

I’ve also had an opportunity to use the camera in dark conditions at a Blues gig in our Student’s Union. The quality again was much better than my A700, despite using a slower F2.8 lens compared to the 50 1.4f I’d normally use on my A700 in the same conditions. Whereas on my A700, I would avoid going above 1600 ISO, the images from the A77 are more than usable (for web use) up to 6400.

Captured at ISO 3200

Accidentally captured at ISO5000. RAW cleaned in Adobe Camera RAW

The thing I’ve found to be a revelation is the massive increase in FPS. Capturing macro images is so much easier. The amazing autofocus means that few images are out of focus. The downside is that the A77 will only capture a second’s worth of images and depending on your SD card may take dozens of seconds to clear the entire buffer.

A ladybird captured using a 90mm Tamron macro lens

Alongside the viewfinder. The A77 offers live view via an amazing articulated screen. Having moved from a DLSR with no live view, it’s aleady proven to be useful when capturing photos in awkward positions.

Screen can be flipped, up, down and sideways

Captured high up on a wall that normally I wouldn’t have been able to reach

Since it’s a Sony camera, it’s packed with electronic goodies such as built-in GPS, picture effects (JPG only), full 1080P 60FPS HD video (using AVCHD 2.0) and Sony’s excellent sweep panoramic. Some of the features, such as the picture effects, I’ll probably never use. I have the same picture effects on my NEX5 and rarely use them. But they’re an extra tool I didn’t have on my A700.

There are some negatives. The main one is that there are reports that the camera is buggy and at times slow. The camera was initially released with incorrect firmware. This caused many of the first batch of cameras to turn into expensive bricks. There’s also a slight delay when switching from the live-view to the EVF, which some people will find annoying. I’ve never been a fan of Sony’s JPEG engine and some of the low-light JPEGs aren’t great. But overall, the new A77 is a great camera and I’m loving using it. Although the EVF is not perfect, I do believe this technology will only get better and EVF offers so many benefits over an optical viewfinder, that more manufacturers will start to adopt similar technology.

For the last few months my iPhone’s home button has been unresponsive.  Double clicking would often take me to the search pane and not the multitask bar. This is getting to be very annoying. I’ve been hoping that the button would hang on until the iPhone 5, next summer, but in the last few weeks it seems to have got worse. So much so, I’d even started to use the assistive technology in the iPhone to by-pass the requirement of using the home button. 

Doing some research this morning, it appears that the button is a serviceable part that Apple can replace in-store but there were also claims that sometimes the problem is causec by particulates that get into button via the connector port. Blasting air or vacuuming the connector port can fix the problem. Although it sounds ridiculous, blowing very hard into the connector port seems to have fixed it. 

We’ve just implemented a Dojo Date picker to replace an old calendar tool we were using.

In testing, the date picker correctly defaulted to the European date format of dd/mm/yyyy. However, all this testing was on PCs. Testing the same code on my Mac in Safari, the date format has switched to US format. My Mac is setup as a UK machine with UK date format, but it’s still defaulted to incorrect date format.

As we’re a University with many international staff and students, assuming that their computers will be set to European format would not be sensible and as the date is being stored in Domino and Oracle we need control over the date formats to ensure the correct date objects are created.

Luckily there’s a very simple solution. If you’re using html markup and the dojo parser to generate the date picker, you simply have to add:

constraints={datePattern:’dd/MM/yy’}

to your input box’s html and it will default to the European format.

We’ve just upgraded a server to 8.5.3. We have an agent that runs as a ‘web user’ but has ‘full admin rights’. The agent basically reads a view with documents that have readers fields and assembles them for display to the user. The agent needs to grab info from a protected database so has ‘full administration rights’. Previously the documents were read with the ‘users’ access permissions. So readers fields were obeyed. Various versions of this code has run this way for 10 years. Under 8.5.3 this is not the case. The readers fields are being ignored. Has anyone else experienced this issue?

I’m posting this on behalf of my colleague David Harding (@dharding) who’s been investigating XPages Single Copy Design. I think it’s best I leave it to Dave to explain:

We are looking to roll out XPages Single Copy Design to several thousand databases.  So far, we have not been able to find a recommended practice for rolling out the XPages Single Copy Design flag and template path to all of these databases.

Documentation on the Lotus Notes and Domino Application Development wiki (http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ddwiki.nsf/dx/Single_Copy_XPage_Design#Does+employing+SCXD+typically+have+a+positive+or+negative+affect+on+speed+of+performance%3F) suggests that setting the options in the template should propagate to databases that inherit from that template.

Quote from page:

“Is it true that selecting or de-selecting SCXD in a template does not propagate to applications already created with that template?

This is not the case. If a template is set to use a SCXD database and an application is created from this template then the new application will have the XPages from the SCXD database. And changing the template to say another SCXD or no SCXD database set will reflect in the database that inherits its design from the template.”

In testing, we have not found this to be the case.  Testing adding in the Xpage template path and checking the flag in the template*, combined with all combinations of HTTP Restarts and Design updates do not seem to visibly update the database.properties file in the inheriting database to include the $XPageSharedDesign and $XpageSharedDesignTemplate items.

*When I say Template here, I am referring to the ntf file that the database inherits from, not the Xpages source database that will be the path in the $XpageSharedDesignTemplate item in the database.properties file.

In an attempt to find an alternative, reliable method of deploying this setting we have looked at using a NotesNoteCollection to access the database.properties file and adding in the values.  There doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to locate this file, though tests have indicated that it is the only one in the database with a $Daos item, so we have been able to get a hold of it by filtering for that in the NotesNoteCollection.

So the questions are, is there a ‘best practice’ for rolling out the Single Copy XPage flag? Is the NotesNoteCollection method a no-go area?  Why are our experiences with the template not in line with the claims in the aforementioned quote?

I ran into a problem installing Lion on my Mac Pro. The install screen appeared to be stuck at 33 minutes with no sign of progress. Several reboots later and still no luck, I noticed that there were a lot of disk errors in the install log that appeared to stop the installer in it’s tracks. It appears the installer doesn’t validate your hard disk before installing and is unable to report failures when encountered. So before installing, run ‘Disk Utility’ and save yourself the three hours I wasted.

If you do reach this point and there’s no sign of progress. You can still boot back into Snow Leopard by selecting ‘startup disk’ from the Installer’s menus.