Argh! Gas leak...

We had a gas leak outside our house, discovered and reported at 10PM, Transco were there before 11PM and the second crew to dig up the pavement are here now, pnematic drill pounding away! All credit to them for being respnsive, but it is midnight on a sunday ... me and the rest of the street need our sleep <yawn>

Cite what you like

Wahey! A useful tool: I'm always looking for another way to organise all the journal papers I intend to read but somehow seldom get around to ... thanks, Jill!

Maintaining standards

General reaction to De Montfort effectively lowering pass marks is of horror, but it seems to me that it's also a good advert for the systems of quality assurance (government review & external examiners) that exist at every university in this country. If we tried something similar we'd get hammered, not just by our externals but also by our internal QA <shudder> people ... at least I fervently hope we would because it'd demonstrate that all the bloody paperwork our QA people keep making us do does serve a purpose ;-)

IMO it's an essential part of the job (as an academic) to maintain standards & that means failing people who should not pass! It surprises me regularly when students complain because they are "close" to passing so feel they should because "they worked hard" ... sorry, I appreciate the hard work but it's tough: Meet the grade and pass! Fail to meet the grade and you should expect to fail!!

The Zen of CSS Design

Now this looks like a fascinating book ... and if you haven't seen the CSS Zen Garden -- why not?! Go there now ;-)

Marking joy

OK, so it's usually marking hell but today feelings of joy: four of the 80 or-so assignments I'm marking have copied students who did the same exercise last year in a clear, unequivocal way <grin> ... gives me a (brief) happy.

The weakest link

Not necessarily what you'd expect: Security rule 1 -- The security of any system is measured by its weakest link <grin> (Snaffled from the web, pointed out by Bruce Schneier)
Or, seeing as this is a blog dominated by dumbasses I liked the original site's caption: Probably an elaborate IQ test. If you sit at the barrier, you fail...

No such thing as bad publicity?

To appear in the Telegraph's "Non-Job of the week" ... is that good or bad publicity <grin> (And WTF is a "Sustainability Facilitator" anyway?!)

Problems with accessibility

An interesting post on 456 Berea Street entitled Accessibility charlatans highlights how difficult it is to tell if a web page is accessible or not ... It's not that hard to design an accessible page if you are already paying attention to web standards and people like Joe Clark. Sadly many sites slap "accessible" badges on their pages as soon as Cynthia or Bobby give no explicit "no" answers, but that's not enough.

The example that the trainees stumbled upon during a recent day's accessibility training was hyfinity whose site (in February 2005 at least) was an inaccessible mess of unsemantic div and span tags with oodles of CSS classes (a clear case of divitis and classitis!) They're a company that proclaims Our Web Accessibility programme is designed to ensure your web applications conform to WAI guidelines but passing Bobby or Cynthia does not necessarily mean your page is accessible.

I suppose it's a case of caveat emptor but how does the buyer know to be aware? Perhaps each country with specific disability legislation needs a certification programme run by genuine experts in accessibility? Sadly it could easily add to the real expense of implementing an accessible site.

MSc by Research success

Not long (in MSc/PhD terms) after our first MSc by research success, today we got our second ... so my congratulations to Millie and Dimitris :-)

First lecture ... a success?

1^st "Databases and the Web" lecture last night and it seemed to go OK. For the first time I recorded the audio from the lecture using a mini disc recorder and tie-clip microphone. It's weird listening to myself witter-on (is that really what I sound like? Blimey!) but the delivery seems clear and not too rambling ... I hope to use SMIL to attach the audio to the lecture slides. Techno-joy ;-) with an e-learning slant. Listening to the recording is also a great way to reflect (teaching & learning tree-hugging language ... shudder!) on the lecture so I intend to continue the practice.