Number 1: Put your new Nikon D40X into continuous shooting mode and make cheap animated movies of birds feeding and post the results to YouTube. Well why not! Selected stills at Picasa.

On returning to work after the bank holiday I found that my email inbox was full of phishing attempts. Unfortunately for the phishers, I have no accounts with the banks I was being phished by, so it was easy to delete them. But I have to ask, why are phishing scams so random? Furthermore, why don’t email phishing filters put on a big notice “DODGY” on such emails? They seem to recognise the links as false, so why can’t they be a bit more proactive at marking the messages themselves?

Swansea University, where I work, has quietly established a WordPress blogging system that anyone who has a University login can use to create a blog. This means that I no longer need to worry about providing something myself and should also make introducing blogging to my students a breaze. I created my blog, which I’m calling @the.coalface, and I intend to use it for reflective issues around e-learning, my teaching, research and University life in general.

[](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/__bnNGgqRugY/SB899gWLtvI/AAAAAAAABb0/HZmxUV064fw/s1600-h/DSC_0065.JPG) It’s May Bank Holiday today and we went for a stroll around Clyne Gardens which is always at its best at this time of year. Azaleas and Rhododendrons are in full bloom and are a riot of reds, purples, yellows and pinks. As usual, more pictures have been posted to [Flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/cpjobling/sets/72157604901590749/). [](http://picasa.google.com/blogger/)

[](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/__bnNGgqRugY/R-k0sl76N7I/AAAAAAAAA7k/edIIkJtL61o/s1600-h/DSC_0027.JPG) Today it was Easter Tuesday and we beat the weather and managed a stroll along the coastal path from Mumbles Pier to Langland Bay. Here’s a view along the path towards the coastguard station at Bracelet Bay. More photos on [Flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/cpjobling/sets/72157604243690444/). [](http://picasa.google.com/blogger/) Comments: iwoods2807 - Nov 1, 2010 Love it!! Not a day goes by where I don’t think … hey, where’s the “Learn This” button. The peril of being a futurist!

In a report in this week’s Technology Guardian (March 13, 2008), Tim Anderson discusses Microsoft’s announcement that Internet Explorer (IE) 8 will be standards compliant by default after all. This is a reversal of its previous position which was that it would be IE 7 compliant by default to avoid “breaking the net”. (To become standards compliant, web authors would have to set a tag in their code: this is known as Version Targetting and was seen by some Web Standards Advocates as a minor threat while others were less sanguine.

Michael Kölling is a Senior Lecturer in Computing at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He was one of the the key developers of the [BlueJ](http://www.bluej.org/) programming environment and is one of the authors of [Objects First with Java](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Objects-First-Java-Practical-Introduction/dp/013197629X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205426224&sr=1-1). His demonstration to folks at Google HQ of [Greenfoot](http://www.greenfoot.org/) , his new Java programming environment for young learners, has just been published on [YouTube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tcwx-I6Arwk). By providing a programming environment based on graphical objects that move in artificial worlds, Kölling hopes to make programming compelling to high-school-age kids and thereby reverse the current UK trend of students thinking that ICT is only about office programs and spreadsheets (and thereby convincing most of them that computing is boring).

In another experiment in Web 2.0 for learning technologies I recorded a soundtrack for a presentation that I make annually to my first, second and final year students, and put it up on Slideshare. This wonderful site is a social sharing site for PowerPoint files. It allows the usual social networking features. So you can upload a PowerPoint presentation, tag it, share it, and comment on others. You can also link it to an MP3 track, and there’s an easy to use tool for synchronizing the audio track to the slides.

[](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/__bnNGgqRugY/R7dEmxprjwI/AAAAAAAAA3o/-oVyNuQgATw/s1600-h/DSC_0380.JPG) A lovely day today (though cold!) so my wife and I took a stroll from Brynmill to Swansea via the seafront and the marina. Nice pint of Tanglefoot in Eli Jenkins on the way back and stiff muscles for the rest of the week! Took a few pictures of which this breaking wave was my favourite. More on Flickr. Comments: Kathleenannjohnson - Oct 1, 2010 This is a great post.

Once again Tony Hirst’s [OUseful Info](http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59) blog has led me to three new pieces of brilliant web technology. In his blog entry [RESTful Image generation – When Text Just Won’t Do](http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/013114.html), Tony describes how MathTran (a Mathematics rendering service developed by the Open University) could be mashed up with with the Google Charts service to provide an easy way to get mathemattical results onto web pages. Lots of interesting stuff to follow up on but here are the highlights: - Jonathan Fine’s blog entry on [MathTrans and Google Charts](http://jonathanfine.

Applied patches suggested by users of my Command Line Interface (CLI) plugin for DokuWiki. This was my first real experience of distributed development in the open source sense. Thanks to Stephane and Andy for the suggestions: it’s nice to know that my minor contribution has been useful enough to someone that they’ve improved it! The new version of the [plugin](http://wiki.splitbrain.org/plugin:cli) is available here. Powered by [ScribeFire](http://scribefire.com/).

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