Thanks to Dave for pointing out Google's XML back-end. Exciting possibilities there.

BTW, XML does not stand for eXtra Medium Large although the term back-end may lead you down that road ;-)

About nine inches of snow have fallen this morning. I've never seen so much snowfall in Dunbar. It's unprecedented. Needless to say the local schools are shut for the third day running and the kids are enjoying this spell of forced layoff from school. Heather is using the time to study for her Biology Higher prelim that she should sit tomorrow but it increasingly looks like that will go the way of the Maths prelim on Tuesday - postponed.

Today is my normal 'working at home day' and thankfully my internet connection is OK. If the bad weather we're experiencing here in Dunbar is repeated across Scotland I doubt that they'll be many staff and students at Strathclyde today.

BBC News | UK | Search for crash bodies to resume

Thirteen people died and 70 were injured on Wednesday when a Land Rover careered into the path of a high-speed passenger train which was then hit by a freight train at Great Heck near Selby, North Yorkshire.

An statistician has reckoned that the three factors that combined to produce this horrific crash were a one in 67 billion chance. A freak accident for sure. But that's no consolation for the families of those killed and injured.

Although I seldom travel on the particular section of the East Coast mainline that was the scene of the catastrophe, I will have often travelled in the actual GNER passenger train that crashed. And even though I know rail travel is one of the safest forms of transport I can't help feeling that the recent spate of accidents shortens the odds on me being involved in such incidents. I know that statistically speaking this is nonsense. (I hope). In a massively cruel twist of fate/coincidence the GNER locomotive powering the train was the same one that was involved in the Hatfield derailment.

The knock-on effect of the crash and the damage to the East Coast mainline service between Edinburgh and London is reckoned to take 4 weeks to clear up. Another massive disruption to the service that was slowly recovering from the aftermath of the Hatfield crash and the rail replacement programme that resulted from this.

Dunno what made me think of a class reunion this morning. It's been in the back of my mind for a couple of years but yesterday several things aligned and their 'gravitational pull' brought the idea to the surface. One of the circumstances was my CAD lecture in which I was harking on about hard disk storage and the comparison of the technologies and capacities when I was a student and the situation today. Seems like the vibrating lectern that I used to illustrate the operation of the ancient top-loading 80MB diskpack disk drives made a lasting impression on some of the students ;-)

The second circumstance was the a visit to the Department by Pat Prosser for a PhD viva. Pat left Strathclyde to join Glasgow last year. Pat and I were together in the class of '77 so we go back over 25 years. Pat noticed for the first time the photo that Prof Douglas McGregor had posted up in the staff coffee room. It was a photo of the class and '77 and Pat and I spent several minutes reminiscing about our time as students and we tried desperately to remember all the names of the staff and students from that era. We also had a good laugh at our own dress and demeanour and that of our friends and colleagues. We could remember the names of most and no doubt the other names will be subliminally recalled in due course. Of course, we wondered aloud how they were all doing now and we were ashamed to admit that we had lost touch with most of our fellow students and old friends from our student days.

Hence this morning's displacement activity! Since we all graduated in July 1977, next year it will be the 25th anniversary of that momentous occasion. Seems to me to be a perfect excuse to try and arrange a reunion. With over a year to organise it there's every chance we'll manage to get a good turn-out. So, I'm going to definitely do something about this. This site - or another dedicated free-conversant site - with it's web/e-mail/news capabilities are as good a way to organise the event as any so I must get round to doing something about this. Hmmm...

Incestuous linking via David SiT -- the Times Educational Supplement - TES and a story in the Scottish edition: Dundee taster course spreads some jam on a university place

Dundee senior pupils who might traditionally shun university are being encouraged to widen their options by linking up online and sampling an IT course normally followed by first-year students.

Thirty-three S5 and S6 pupils at St Saviour's High this week matriculated at Abertay University as part-time students in the latest project to increase participation in higher education. Individual passwords allow them to tap into the university network from their school or homes.

See Free-Conversant Tech Support Message: http://support.free-conversant.com/2361 for the heads-up on the latest Conversant enhancement.

Great feature. Thanks Seth

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.