MicroMemo voice recorder for iPod

Argh!!! XtremeMac iPod Audio Accessories: MicroMemo for iPod with video how long must I wait??

It's been mentioned on Gizmodo twice now and the manufacturer's site currently says shipping this summer :'-( When I first got excited about it in January it was due in spring, then in June it was early July now it's f******g summer <groan> I've even pre-ordered one, I'm that keen...

Update: Hurrah! Mine arrived today, August 24^th & I'll make a more detailed post later...

@media 2006 feedback

Now that I've had time to take a breather, recover from my recent hectic schedule and the mad-rush of the "results period" has almost gone at work I've come up with some specific comments about @media, other than it being excellent ;-):

• Jeffrey Veen used a neat example of the presentation of information as part of his talk (e.g. see this photo by Jan Brasna on Flickr) where he progressed from an unsemantic table of meteorological data to an application allowing users to explore the data. As a meteorologist <grin> I refrained from commenting at the time that the final step, where the rainfall data values were replaced by graphics, was a bad idea (from my pov) ... but it depends on who your users are/what the data/application is for: I preferred seeing the values in the web app.; others might prefer the raindrop symbols, depending on the purpose. I guess what I'm trying to say is don't sacrifice accuracy at the expense of simplicity -- e.g. make it the user's choice whether they see the graphics or data...
• In the final panel session it was suggested that few, if any, educational institutions were sufficiently fast at adapting courses to reflect the latest trends in web development. Whilst I agree with that in general (typical approval processes mean it takes more than a year to get a new course up and running in the UK -- e.g. a colleague here is just starting to look at "Web 2.0" for a master's level course and it might be approved to start in September 2007!), modules on established courses can adapt quickly and so:
  1. my 2^nd year JavaScript module is up-to-date in that it teaches how to write scripts using DOM methods;
  2. my 3^rd year "advanced web design" module this year covered things like accessibility, unobtrusive JavaScript, CSS-based layout and content negotiation;
  3. new this year we started a 3^rd year module on XML, including XSLT, XMLDOM.
  Admittedly this is because there are a few standards enthusiasts in my Faculty, but that'd be the same everywhere ... So at least one institution in the UK offers a half-field in Computing that uses web standards in a majority of modules :-D [There are more of us out there! Check out this SimpleBits post...]

XHR progress towards standardisation?

Thanks to Jeremy Keith on domscripting.org for pointing this out: The W3C has published a draft for a specification standardising the XMLHTTPRequest object (upon which Ajax, Hijax, Lojax etc are based [in fact I thought I was making the latter up, but not so!])

Prompted by talking to Andy at @media, after a quick skim-read I can't see that they're standardising the this keyword inside event handlers :-( According to Flanagan (page 365), DOM2 doesn't so I guess we're stuck...

Bloody weather!

OK, I know us Brit's have a reputation for being weather-bores but I am a meteorologist ;-) so feel I should have some leeway: Bloody weather! It's too hot, I must work, we have lots of critical meetings at this time of year, virtually no air-conditioning, so it's been bad enough being too hot. Today, after the excellent thunderstorms (fab just being able to stand in the rain getting wet...) my damn optical mouse is sticking to the desk! Everything seems to be conspiring to make it difficult to work :-(

Meme: Web development skill levels ;-)

Kinda pointless but what's your level? My self-assessment is:

Levels of HTML knowledge

HTML Level 5

Levels of CSS knowledge

CSS Level 5

Levels of JavaScript knowledge

JavaScript Level 4½: Woohoo! with Jeremy Keith! :-D

JavaScript Level 4½ -- my definition:

var button = document.getElementById("hello");
button.onclick=function(event) {
    hello(WORLD);
}

Research: EuResist

Recently I've become involved with an EU research project entitled EuResist, which is an international collaborative effort whose goal is to create a system to predict patient response to HIV -- a radical direction change from my usual meteorology/statistics research! As it happens, I joined a multidisciplinary team here at Kingston University (KU) where I'm the "technical" guy (general databases, statistics, software, maths) in a team containing a microbiologist, a social/sports scientist and a statistician plus a PhD student doing the work. The social scientist was responsible for getting KU involved in the project; we three joined at the last minute when the project started and she realised she couldn't do the work alone.

The project had a successful meeting in Stockholm last week (beautiful city) where the microbiologist and myself presented the preliminary work done by the student, but primarily we were asking for clarification as to what our role in the project is. Happily we now know and will be able to make progress...

So why mention this here? Because (a) it's an example of the pressure lecturers are under to do collaborative research in addition to a full teaching load and (b) it happens to provide a bad example of cooperation & leadership for me to moan about  :

Our coordinator, the social scientist, accepted the project in summer 2005. It was only in January 2006 that she realised she needed a team to provide the necessary skills, so at the last minute (literally, 3 days over a weekend before the initial "kickoff" meeting) she asked the microbiologist, who asked me and I asked the statistician to join in. We (3 newbies) refused to rush to the kickoff meeting unprepared, and she refused to go too, so the team at KU was pretty-much left to our own devices until last week.

Moreover, 3 weeks ago the social scientist mentioned in a meeting with the PhD student how she "had been trying to get rid of the project since August"! (a) How demotivating for the student and (b) how underhand -- she never mentioned this when she roped us in but wants to step back, keep the kudos of having brought in the project, presumably get her name on publications, but do no work plus leave the administration for the remaining 3 of us to do!

As I said, bad cooperation and leadership; we'll see what we can do to keep her involved...

@media 2006

Five words are sufficient to describe this year's @media conference: even better than last year! Let's leave it at that for now...

Marking hell 2006

I've been too busy to blog for ages (too much work!) but had to 'share' this: It's that time of year again (marking hell: 2004, 2005), now 2006 but rather than moan about how much I have to do (I do!) I was momentarily amused by some indecipherable hand writing in my Databases and the Web exam ... what the student wrote is "this stage is about the layingaut the links" and what amused me was that he was probably thinking "laying out" but wrote using joined-up letters "layingaut" which is probably exactly as he'd pronounce it! OK, I am sad...

(Reminds me of my dad's favourite anecdote from years of A-level marking: One paper a couple of years ago had the same squiggle at the end of many lines. After pondering what the student was trying to say he realised that at the end of every sentence rather than finishing with a full-stop/period character the student wrote innit! I kid you not...)

The First Smiley :-)

Who says Microsoft staff don't have a nerdy sense of humour -- they found the first smiley :-) !

Now, who's wasted more money with this: them, for doing the research, or me for posting to my blog? Considering my salary & the industrial dispute surrounding it ;-) I reckon it's them!

The BFG, your cat's handy home-helper (Dr Fun)

There are times when only a Big Fraggin Gun will do ;-) [df20060426.jpg]