Uncategorised

One of the highlight’s of yesterday’s History of Computing Collection launch was Steve William’s presentation of the history of the University’s web site which he gathered from the Way Back Machine at the Internet Archive. As I developed the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering’s web site from 1996 through to around 2006 I thought I’d visit the Way Back Machine to look at how that web site http://www-ee.swan.ac.uk/ developed. I will probably have to write down the technical details one day, but for now, here are the key development stages:...

The British Computer Society (BCS) was founded in 1957 so this is the tail end of its half century celebration year. As part of its local contribution to celebrations, Professor John Tucker took the opportunity of using the Annual General Meeting of the South Wales branch of the BCS to launch his History of Computing Collection (HOCC), which is being developed in conjunction with Library and Information Services (LIS) here at Swansea University....

Continuing the saga of the Firefox 3 (FF3) trial, I just installed the beta version of the del.icio.us plugin for Firefox 3 (see previous post). Bookmarks are one of the key new features of have FF3 (see Top 10 Firefox 3 Features (Lifehacker) and Create Your Own Smart Bookmarks on Cybernotes), and I was interested in seeing how they worked with the new plugin. I made a small Jing screencast (sorry no sound) which shows that the del....

A problem with Firefox 3 is that not all plugins are ready for deployment. The attached image shows my current set (on my laptop I have a couple more). Of particular note are del.icio.us, ScribeFire (for in-browser blogging) and Zotero (bibliographic database). Google gears is also not yet compatible so support for offline working for Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Docs will not work. I find that I don’t travel enough with my lap top for this to be an issue....

I installed release candidate 1 of Firefox 3 today. I will be giving it a trial run and reporting on any nice features in a future blog. First impression: nice sexy Windows Vista look and friendly welcome page (illustrated). I’ve only installed it on my office desktop so far because my laptop is my main machine and it has a few plug-ins that might not work. So I’m hanging fire there which gives an opportunity for comparison....