Today I installed Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” on my Acer Aspire One netbook. The version is the Netbook Remix version and it looks really nice, as the screenshot above will testify. Hopefully it will be easier to link to the University wireless network than the original Asper Aspire (based on Fedora I think) was. The most difficult part of the installation was getting the image file onto a USB data stick....
http://youtube.com/v/v_UyVmITiYQ I’m probably a few days late in bringing this to your attention, here goes anyway! In the Google IO Conference 2009, Google previewed a really interesting new, open-source, open-potocol platform for collaboration called Google Wave ([wave.google.com](http://wave.google.com)). This video recording of the keynote, published on the 28th May on YouTube, is well worth a look. The presentation takes about 90 minutes, but it’s worth watching it all because some of the more interesting possibilities (for example simultaneous translation) come later on in the presentation....
Today The Guardian published its 2010 University League table which it bases on the national student satisfaction survey (assessment and teaching), staff student-ratio, spend per student, graduate employment, and “value added”. On this basis, which is highly focussed on the Student’s learning experience, Swansea comes way down in the “conference league”, 95th out of 117 places, with a season score of 48.1 points out of the maximum 100. If we were in the football league, we’d be fighting relegation!...
As noted yesterday here and on the Learning Lab Community blog, yesterday was declared “Ada Lovelace Day” (ALD09) by Suw Charman-Anderson. Thousands of people blogged and tweeted about a woman (or women) in technology who they admire. Suw even interviewed Ada herself (at the Science Museum) and appeared on BBC News 24 and BBC Radio 5Live to promote women in technology. Albeit in a very small way, It was great to be part of this global celebration and the social networks that surrounded it....
Google Summer of Code 2009 is open for applications. I think that GSoC, which is an annual event in which Google pays students 4,500 USD to work on an open source project of their choice, is a great project and dream of the day when one of my students takes on this challenge. I try my hardest by ensuring, so far as is possible, that only open source software is used in my courses: so my students have experience as users of LAMP, Drupal, WordPress, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Netbeans and even the Google Code hosting service....