It appears that I'm not the only Smeed that keeps a weblog. Smeed's LiveJournal is another, much cooler, weblog from someone called Sean who calls himself Smeed and who is, apparently a UtahGoth! He also has a geocities web site where there's a little more about Smeed. Here's my favourite insight off that page:

6 out of 6 Oompa Loompas agree: punching Smeed in the wedding tackle is great fun

If I didn't know better I'd almost be inclined to believe it was a spoof site set up by one of my (ex-)students ;-)

Brent reports on the Seattle earthquake. Glad to hear Sheila and Brent are OK and no damage was suffered by them.

Good links on the weblogsInEducation: Weblogs - The Pedagogy of Nudges! site. So far my one completed experiment of weblogs in education - http://friday.editthispage.com - has been very positive and it was a great success. I think the secret is, indeed, to keep nudging the students. That's what I hope to do over at http://www.arspentia.org but it's going to take a bit more nudging ;-)

The Register: Project Jackson - why SMT is the joker in the the chip pack

Simultaneous Multi Threading - the business of making one processor look like several software applications - is being snuck into Intel's Foster. Although officially Chipzilla won't say a word about Project Jackson - multithreaded P4 - before it's due to be unveiled in the summer. But if you've grown weary of listening to the treadmill of higher clock frequencies and process shrinkages every few months, then SMT will be real news. You do need to know about this stuff for lots of interesting reasons. So here we cover a few...

This is a test of the modified Weblogger Bookmarklet that now incorporates the label menu. It's not exactly what Jim was looking for but it's getting there ;-) This message should be created with 'Highest' rating. Fingers crossed.

Scottish Computer Assisted Assessment Network - Home

The Universities of Glasgow, Heriot-Watt and Strathclyde established the Scottish Computer Assisted Assessment Network (SCAAN) in mid-1999. It is funded through the SHEFC WebTools initiative which is designed to disseminate information and evaluate web-based learning tools. The particular focus of this project is web-based assessment.

via hbwt:
Dive Into Python

Dive Into Python is a free Python tutorial for experienced programmers. You can read the book online, or download it in a variety of formats.

and xml.oreilly.com -- The Relentless March of Computer Abstraction

Good links Jim.

The How to think like a computer scientist book (Python Version).

The goal of this book ... is to teach you to think like a computer scientist. This way of thinking combines some of the best features of Mathematics, Engineering, and Natural Science. Like mathematicians, computer scientists use formal languages to denote ideas (specifically computations). Like engineers, they design things, assembling components into systems and evaluating tradeoffs among alternatives. Like scientists, they observe the behavior of complex systems, form hypotheses, and test predictions.

Another introductory programming text that uses Python is Learning to program and is, according to the author, a wee bit more comprehensive than How to think like a computer scientist.

The Register

MSN is considering charging Net users £60 a year to access its content.

They've got to be joking. Right!? I really hope they do this and shoot themselves in both feet - that'd add to the lead in 'em ;-)