duncan.smeed.org | Duncan's Jotter

Paying for Twitterific (Again!)

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 04:04:32 GMT

Seth Dillingham is encouraging Twitterific users to join him in Paying for Twitterific:

People who use this hack are stealing money from the Icon Factory: they didn't pay for the software, and they're not showing the ads.

I only remembered that I'd already registered my copy of Twitterific on the release of v3.0.1 back in November after I'd paid again just now ;-) But I'm happy to have stumped up again to show my support for the Icon Factory. I can't understand the mentality of those that try and undermine the efforts of others. If people like "Captain Marc" don't want to pay to remove ads then surely they can just stop using the app!

Quick-thinks: The Interactive Lecture

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 17:24:35 GMT

Now that (a) the new academic year is under way, and (b) the admissions process for entrants this year is well and truly over, and (c) the next round of undergraduate applications is not due to start for a couple of weeks, it's about time I started blogging again since I will have some time to draw breath.

So, for no particular reason other than I'm always on the lookout for things to help improve my lectures, here's my first link after the summer hiatus: Tomorrow's Professor Blog: 818 Quick-thinks: The Interactive Lecture

A study by Ruhl, Hughes and Schloss (1987) compared lectures presented without pauses with lectures where, every 12-18 minutes students paused for two minutes and discussed and reworked their notes (without interaction with the teacher). Students in the latter group performed better on free-recall quizzes and on a comprehension test. In fact, the differences were so large that they would have raised the performance of the experimental students' one-two letter grades (depending on grading scales used).

Sounds like a good complement to the One-Minute Paper scheme I use at the end of every one of my lectures.

Inbox Zero talk

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 15:50:10 GMT

I'm listening and watching to the Video for Merlin's "Inbox Zero" talk | 43 Folders. Good stuff.

Update: 51 minutes into the talk Merlin mentions http://inboxzero.com which redirects to his 43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero.

Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services Talk at Strathclyde University on Monday 23rd July at 5pm

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 15:43:33 GMT

I've been helping to organise the Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services Talk at Strathclyde University, Graham Hills Building, Room 5.14 on Monday 23rd July at 5pm.

The organiser - Steven Livingstone aka weblivz - has just sent round the following confirmation to those people that had already expressed interest in the event:

As you may know i have been trying to get the Amazon Web Services talk confirmed for a while. Thanks to Duncan Smeed at Strathclyde University we have managed to get a great venue in the centre of Glasgow.

Jeff Barr, Senior Manager at Amazon Web Service Evangelism will talk about Amazon Web Services. He is in great demand and we're lucky to get him in Glasgow during his "European Tour", where his meetings include groups at the BBC Future Media Journalism, Oxford University, Xml Summer School as well as visiting many European countries over the next two months. His talk will be focused mainly on the technical side of Web Services.

The event has now been confirmed for Monday July 23rd in Glasgow at 5pm.

Full details can be found at http://tinyurl.com/3bkevb

There are a maximum of 100 places so please make sure you confirm your attendance.

The best way is clicking the "I'm Going" on the Eventful link above.

Given that there is less than two weeks before the actual event it seems that the best way to publicise it is my 'viral' means. So, please help by picking up this news and blogging about it and/or sending the details to anyone you think might be interested in attending.

Within the first hour of the above announcement 10 people had already confirmed their attendance. It will be interesting to monitor the pattern of responses over the next week or so. Hopefully, there'll be an excellent turn-out for Jeff's talk.

MySQL in Frontier, and Conversant!

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 01:38:25 GMT

Seth [TW] has just posted some thoughts on MySQL in Frontier, and Conversant!. I've been following the Frontier developments with interest - wondering what this would mean for the future of Conversant. Now that there's the possibility of migration of data out of Frontier's object store (database) into MySQL this opens up all sorts of possibilities. One of which - as Seth has shown - is migration away from a Frontier code base (Usertalk) to one of the more popular scripting languages. IMHO, Conversant's CMS architecture is one of the most elegant/powerful there is. I'll be delighted to see a re-implementation of the architecture in a more popular scripting language and the flexibility and longevity that this will bring.