This is a screen-grab from my new MacBook Pro and it’s running Windows 7 in a OS/X window. It’s not magic, it’s the free open-source VirtualBox virtualizer from Sun Microsystems. At less than half the price of Parallels! It works. It took no time to set up. And it means that I can continue to run some of the essential windows-only software (such as Camtasia Studio), Windows Live Writer, etc, during my transition from PC pragmatist to Mac Zealot....
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve started getting comment spam attacks on this blog via my comments stream. There’ll be comment like “I visited your blog and I’ve saved to read later” from a (presumably) bogus user. But the comment will include a number of links to dubious services. I use Disqus for my comment handling and I’ve had to gradually turn up the moderation settings so that now all comments have to be moderated....
I’ve just spent the afternoon with the wonderful celebration piece A people’s history of the internet: from Arpanet in 1969 to today that was published last Friday on the Guardian Technology website. What’s amazing to me is how recent it all really is! I started at Swansea University in 1985 and electronic communications was a difficult issue then. I remember the protocol wars of 1986 when JANET wanted to use X25 when the US was about to standardise on TCP/IP (I recall the our LIS wanted to toe the party line, but that Computer Science wanted to go the Internet route); I remember trawling Gopher for software to download using FTP and putting together tar files from shell archives of multiple USENET messages....
The BBC encourages the sharing of this video from Dame Shirley Bassey’s recent appearance on the electric Proms. So here it is, with the “Girl from Tiger Bay” (which Shirley is of course) composed by James Dean Bradfield, who’s playing guitar. It’s a good song! Enjoy! http://www.bbc.co.uk/emp/external/player.swf
Clive on Learning: E-Learning Debate 2009 as mentioned by Jane Hart, a recent debate at the Oxford Union “This house believes that the e-learning of today is essential for the important skills of tomorrow.” has been summarized by Clive Shepherd. The debate (including video clips of the speakers is here: www.epic.co.uk/elearningdebate and there’s a tweet feed here. Which side would you be on?