After a long hiatus during which our last pair of bikes have been rusting away in the corner of the garden, my wife and I splashed out on a new set of two wheeled touring machines today. Fitness is low: a short trip to the new Swansea Library in the former Guildhall (now “Civic” Center) nearly killed us! Still the wind was blowing in our faces on the way back!

I agree to some extent with Jack Schofield (Apple’s Safari gives Windows users another problem, Guardian Technology Blog, 30th May 2008) when he states that “Apple’s ability to program Windows is a bit of a joke.” There are at least three things wrong with iTunes (especially on Windows Vista): the arrogance of the assumption that when you import your media library you want it to translate all your Windows Media Player files into AAC files!

In today’s Guardian and Media Guardian there where three articles about how Web technologies are having disruptive effects on traditional media and even (in one case) on one Web 2.0 poster-child technology itself. Here’s a quick summary with links to Guardian On-Line: In the Financial Pages Katie Allen discusses the potential effects on sales based on downloading might have on the DVD. In short, it might go the way of the VHS in as little as 10 years!

I have a FaceBook account, but find its walled garden too restrictive, and hate having to login to share something. I’m a child of the World Wide Web (man) and all the sites that I want to share with my social network are out there. Inspired by Dean Shareski’s “Lesson #1: Share“, I got myself an account on FriendFeed.com and added all my available accounts. So now you can stalk me (and become my friend) on the interweb.

I have just finished watching the keynote of the [Google I/O 2008](http://code.google.com/events/io) conference that took place at 9.30 am Las Vegas time yesterday and was posted on [YouTube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk1HvP7NO5w) almost straight away afterwards. The conference is aimed at developers, but there’s a lot that is of general interest and gives insight into Google’s aims for the future. The main message is that Google wants to - make the cloud more accessible; - keep connectivity pervasive; - make the client (browser) more powerful.

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:

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.

I have just posted an article with demo screencasts on my work blog @the.coalface. The article is concerned with using a new feature of Google Docs Spreadsheets: web form data entry. I intend to use it for project allocation this year, but there are loads of other uses both within education and without. To get some additional context, read the following articles first. Stop Sharing Spreadsheets, Start Collecting Information. Google announces its “fill out a form” feature.