End of an era
I seem to regularly posting long opinion pieces to Facebook. I’m not sure why they don’t end up here, but as I’m going to try and resurrect this blog, I thought I’d start by reblogging this….. This isn’t a post about my feelings about Trump. He’s now in office. All I’ll say is, let’s hope the position makes him more Presidential. This post is about the person leaving office, President Obama. In 2009, I was lucky enough to be at a conference in Florida on the 20th January. I was sitting in a presentation when the presenters cleverly segwayed into a live stream. The live stream of the inauguration of President Obama. It was amazing how many US citizens left the presentation, heading for lunch. I guess they were Republicans. But there was also a spark of excitement amongst the greater number of people who stayed. The presenter (who I…
Change
A year ago I decide to change things and reduce the amount of work I do. Sounds easy? Not for me. Some background. I was a workaholic. Unable not to work. Even when relaxing ‘watching’ TV I’d be doing some kind of work. I’ve been this way since I was 14 or 15. I chose three GCSEs that featured heavy coursework. Two design subjects and IT and spent ridiculous amounts of time working on these projects taking them beyond what was required for GSCE. At A-level This continued. Two of my four A-levels had a heavy coursework requirement. Doing a Design degree probably sealed my long term fate. So moving into a job that offers a constant stream of project work was never going to end well. I love working on projects and get bored and distracted when not doing project work. I know at times in my time in…
Privacy in the modern connected world?
For the last few week signs have been appearing all round campus that include a ‘no photography’ symbol. In the modern connected world, with the ability to instantly grab and share photographs with all your friends, I think the instant reaction from most of us was ‘is this realistic?’. But I think this opens an interesting debate about the future of our right to privacy when just stepping out in public has the potential to undermined an individual’s privacy. As you would expect, almost all our students have camera phones. The youngest generation of our students, those who came straight from college, spend an inordinate amount of time on Facebook sharing photos of their life at Uni. To them, the idea of banning photography on campus is ridiculous. At the moment, most of our students are away for the summer, so few are aware of the new rules and it…
A decade with Domino
This blog post has been a long time in writing. From about 1998, my team was responsible for supporting learning technology projects within the University. The range of projects was diverse from programmable computer chip simulations to supporting more traditional computer aided learning packages such as CD-ROMs or web-based ‘interactive’ learning objects. We also had a responsibility to identify technologies that could be implemented as University services. A number of our early distance learning projects had requirements for on-line support. Our manager heard of a project running in Engineering that was using something called ‘Lotus Notes’ to support their distance learning course. Despite some misgivings on my part, Lotus Notes was adopted for our projects. I have to admit, my first impressions (and continued impression) is that the Notes client is awful. I’m probably the only Domino developer who’s never developed for the client. Luckily as a group, we weren’t…
How do you deal with hacks?
You’ve been hacked and it appears the hack could effect your users computers. What would you do? Do you tell your users that your site has been compromised and point them to tools to fix any problems? Do you investigate the hack to see if it has compromised end-users and decide the risk is small, so you keep quite. After all, why undermine the integrity of your website, if everyone’s safe? Do you keep quite no matter what? I ask this because a page on a very big website (that’s in the top 100 most accessed websites in the world) was flagged up by my browser as containing malicious code. Being curious and working on the fact that I’m a Mac user and the exploit would most likely target unpatched versions of IE, I switched off my security and ventured on to the site. Looking at the source, the site contained…
So what’s your excuse?
(I meant to post this last week but didn’t get round to it) It’s interesting to read the reaction to the abstract rejections for Lotusphere. I’m sure some of the rejected ideas would make great presentations. But I’m not going to go into the pros and cons of the abstract selection process, that’s been covered by many recent blog entries. After I had my abstract rejected last year, I vowed that I’d blog about my particular area of interest, accessibility. After sitting through numerous XPage presentations, from both IBM and developers, I was concerned with the apparent lack of concern about accessibility issues XPages introduced. I came back vowing that this area was too important to wait for the next Lotusphere and vowed to blog about improving the accessibility of Domino web apps. Guess what, I’ve done nothing about it. Yes, I have many excuses: My SysAdmin won’t allow me…