Rocket Science

I read this article on WebWorkerDaily about the Hotel Room of the Future.

Two items on their list that are high on mine:

• More outlets, with better locations and that are surge protected. Both on the desk and on the nightstand.
• Reliable, high-speed Wi-Fi connections. I usually take an Apple Airport Express with me to form my own reliable wireless network. I don’t like being tethered to the desk just for a reliable network connection because of the flaky hotel wireless connections.

So I participated in a conference call today where we were asked to use WebEx conferencing.

Here’s the pop-up dialog box I got when trying to log in from my Mac using Firefox 3.5.

Um, I’m sorry WebEx, you’ve given me zero reason to let you have UNRESTRICED ACCESS to my computer. Why do you need it? All I want to do is participate in a conference, not necessarily let you do whatever you want with my computer.

Turns out if you hit “Deny”, there’s no feedback at all. I get back a mostly white screen. No error message saying I need to allow access, and so on. So, there’s no conference. Um, ok. Gee, thanks.

That’s bad programming, and bad communicating.

Ok, so I guess if I want to participate in the conference I have to say Ok. Over the next two hours, we were uncermoniously disconnected from the teleconference portion, probably when the 1 hour time elapsed. No warning. Buh-bye. And then after re-logging back in, and redialing the teleconference, at some point I got this warning message.

Um, I have 4 GIGAbytes of RAM in this computer, with over 2.2 GB free. How is it I’ve run out of memory?

Bad programming. Bad software.

So, one of the things I’ve been doing is testing out stuff that we could be doing at my job at OEIT–for my team, our office and the university. I’m struck by…why aren’t we doing this? (And yes there’s a back story.)

The final set up is really quite sweet. A member of the university goes to https://blogs.lincoln.ac.uk for the first time and logs in with their usual credentials. The first time they login, they are signed up. That’s it. No sign up page needed. It’s as if they were already a member of the social network, which, being members of the university, they are of course. From there, they see the BuddyPress home pages, can join groups, change their profiles and, when they’re ready, create or join a blog.

Winn, J. (2009, February 17). BuddyPress: A university’s social network. Retrieved June 18, 2009 from ../learninglab/joss Web site: http://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2009/02/17/buddypress-a-universitys-social-network/

Aside: I’m not sure I really like the BuddyPress user interface nor how much WordPress MU seems to lag behind the regular WordPress releases, but I do really like the notion of social network, collaboration and publishing platform.

Thanks to Brian Lamb’s post for pointing this out.

So, just shooting zombies is fun…but we need more purpose in life…

–Narrator

Um, why?

-or-

How can Skittles and your iPhone save the world from Zombies?

I just ran across this awesome augmented reality game for mobile devices from O’Reilly’s Radar. In ARhrrrr you have to kill zombies (and I guess…save townspeople…that “purpose in life” above). I’ve embedded the video below.

I always liked Zombie games…

I was browsing a mechanics (as in engineering, not cars) website today and ran across a couple interesting links.

I found a source for a cgi that can be installed on any web server that lets the user write TeX expressions in HTML and have them rendered on the fly as images by a cgi processor. John Forkosh has developed two programs MathTeX (if LaTeX is installed on the server, math is rendered in higher quality) and MimeTeX (for all other servers).

And I found an article by published in March 2009 that sums up the state of Math on the web–basically the same conclusions I came to after an hour or so of poking around in May.

“The truth is, the basic protocols of the Web offer almost no support for rendering mathematics or other specialized notations such as chemical formulas. Presenting such material on a Web page often requires software add-ons or plug-ins to be installed by the author or the reader or both.”

Source: Hayes, B. (2009, March). Writing Math on the Web. Retrieved June 16, 2009 from American Scientist Web site: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2009/3/writing-math-on-the-web/1

Note: his is a followup to my post on Math in webpages published about two weeks ago.