Today I received 'thank-you' e-mails from several of my final project students both of whom have done extremely well in their Honours year. It was a pleasure supervising them. It was also very pleasing to receive their messages of thanks - it's nice to be appreciated.

Good luck to Stephen and Dougie - they'll both do well in their future careers I'm sure.

Xbox hackers preview movie player

Only weeks after Xbox mod chips hit the streets, allowing developers to run home-brew code on the device, reports of a working movie player have appeared on the internet...

[later on in the article]

...Last week, a MIT student cracked Microsoft's security systems on the Xbox, allowing him to write custom software that would run on the machine without the need for modification chips.

He plans to find a legal loophole allowing him to release instructions for the creation of custom code.

The Register | Anti-open source 'whitepaper' devastated

"Roaring Penguin's David Skoll has written a fine rebuttal to the ADTI whitepaper. With his permission we're reproducing it whole and unedited:..."

One of the opening paragraphs sets the scene perfectly:

"The AdTI's very weak and poorly-researched paper opens no debate. It simply confirms that Microsoft paid AdTI to come up with something -- anything -- to stem the growing adoption of open-source (especially GPL'd) software by business and government."

Now go read it the article ;-)

I've been so busy in the last week that I've been neglecting my regular site visits. Tonight I was catching up and was totally shocked to read in David Carter-Tod's SiT weblog the announcement he's about to be laid off! My heartfelt commiserations go out to David. What a terrible thing to find out when you return from vacation. If there's any justice in the world, David will be snapped up by another employer immediately. Good luck David.

I'm researching weblogging tools. Just found this list of weblog resources via Scripting News

"The following is a quick list of URLs to pertinent material for building and maintaining a weblog. The list below is preliminary and will expand into its own section of the site, complete with ratings and comments on resources and ways to submit new information to be included."

Lots more research tomorrow and Friday. Thanks goodness for SiT as it's also a mine of information, comments, and links.

Seth has been working on Conversant, Radio, Content Management, and OPML. I'm looking forward to reading more about this - and trying it out - once the workshop I'm involved in next week is over.

The Scotsman | Teachers stalked by pupils in hate campaign

Pupils at a Scottish secondary school harassed and stalked their teachers to gather information for a website which featured intimate personal details, photographs of loved ones, and even threats to kill.

Web Pages That Suck -- Examples of Bad Web Design now uses Radio to publish the Daily Suckers:

"These are the Daily Suckers -- Examples of Bad Web Design -- from WebPagesThatSuck.com. I couldn't predict every new sucky design technique that would come along when I wrote the book because there's always a new way to do something bad. This page will keep you up-to-date."

The aspect of my job that gives me most satisfaction is to see the students that I have taught, counselled, and supervised, graduate with their degrees.

Today was the end of the academic year and the day on which the Honours Boards convene to review the final year students results and to award the final classification of honours degree. I feel proud and privileged to have contributed to their education. Well done to them all.

The Register | Security through obsolescence

What fun is there in breaking into a system running something so ancient only a dad would even consider using it?...