via Wes [HtP] - Schools need servers, not PCs

A growing number of technologists and educators think they know a cheaper and more effective way to get computers into the classroom. Instead of individual PCs, they argue, schools should look into client-server architectures, perhaps even using handhelds for the client side.

Interesting synergy. Yesterday at work I was attending the Information Strategy and Advisory Group (ISAG) - a high-level committee of the University. This particular meeting was notable because there was a preliminary report on the evaluation of the Millennium Laptop Initiative pilot scheme. I can't divulge the contents of the extensive report that was tabled at the meeting. Suffice to say that it was an in-depth report and an interesting read. If/when the results are made available for public consumption via the web I'll provide a link.

FWIW, I am not convinced that equipping all students with a high-spec PC laptop is the most cost-effective way of delivering IT support to all students. There will be situations where it's the most appropriate technology but I hope that the University will consider alternatives such as the client-server model suggested by the EE Times article.

If there are any of my students reading this I'd be interested in their comments and, in particular, the pros and cons of requiring students to have a standardised laptop PC.

No doubt I'll return to this pilot/initiative as it unfolds.

via Slashdot - BBC Online - H2G2: the BBC takes on Douglas Adams' H2G2 online community.

Endeavors Top Press Releases:Endeavors Technology Leads Small Device P2P Development and Ports Python to the Palm Operating System

Computer scientists at Endeavors Technology have successfully developed a highly optimized, open source port of Python to the Palm OS(r) platform to stimulate interest in creating Python-based applications for Palm(tm) handheld computers and other devices that use the Palm operating system.

I have several colleagues who are going to be interested in this news. Also...

Endeavors is making this port freely available to the developer community. It can be downloaded from the official Web site for Pippy at http://www.endeavors.com/pippy.html

Speculation: Zope + Pippy == Zippy ;-)

More on Slashdot...

Taking a leaf out of Wes' book

I unsubscribed from all the mailing lists I wasn't reading

I finally got round to doing the same thing for lots of lists. I can always keep up with most of them from their archives. It's certainly quieter in my in-box now ;-)

via Doc Searls Weblog - Fight the gatekeepers! FEATURE: STATEMENT OF PROFESSOR LARRY LESSIG AT "BROADBAND AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST" FORUM

I think the soul of the Internet's extraordinary growth is somewhere else. It is the architecture of the Internet. It is that innovation that is built into the values embedded by this architecture. It comes from the access made possible by this architecture. It comes from the control disabled by this architecture. And if we are to preserve the innovation and preserve the growth that this architecture has given us, we must understand it. We must understand its principles and we must defend them.

Doc's has taken to...

...calling unlinkable pages bogs. Like blog without the L. They're link-hostile. Against the grain of the Web. A sand trap among the golf links of cyberspace. A place where connections get bogged down.

I wonder if Doc knows that 'bogs' have another meaning entirely in Scotland? ;-)

Incidentally it's not just Conversant served pages that suffer from Freeserve's broken cache. I needed to trick the cache by appending a '?1' to the Updated Manila Sites URL to get the most up to date copy of that page.

Microsoft's Q209354 - HOWTO - a spoofed URL so it's not a genuine Microsoft howto. Had it been genuine they would have gone up in my estimation ;-):

This article demonstrates how to read the fucking manual, as popularised by the RTFM directive.

It's amazing how quickly these links get circulated. I received an e-mail with the link at 14:50pm GMT and I posted this weblog entry within a couple of minutes and almost simultaneously one of my students - Gordon - also posted the link on this site here.

I am having severe problems of getting up to date content out of www.smeed.org when connected thorugh my daytime ISP Freeserve. Freeserve are using a transparent cache. The culprit is Network Appliance - Products - NetCache. Here's the evidence from a traffic transcript:

>000091BA> HTTP/1.1 200 OK  
>000091CB> Age: 605  
>000091D5> Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 11:17:31 GMT  
>000091FA> Content-Length: 19449  
>00009211> Content-Type: text/html  
>0000922A> X-Pad: work around browser bug  
>0000924A> Server: UserLand Frontier/7.0b25-WinNT  
>00009272> Via: 1.1 webcacheMP2 (NetCache NetApp/5.0.1R1DEBUG2), 
>000092A8> 1.1 webcacheM07 (NetCache NetApp/5.0.1R1DEBUG2)  

Using Freeserve I cannot reliably update and edit the pages on this site. It seems that NetCache is insisting on serving stale pages. I didn't use to have this problem so perhaps Freeserve have changed their configuration. Hopefully, it's just a case of adding a suitable header server-side.

Apropos my cache investigations the Cacheability Engine at web-caching.com is a great tool:

This service allows you to check Web pages to see how caches will handle them.