SLOODLE / PhD Research - Survey Invitation
Posted by Peter | Filed under Education, Second Life, Sloodle, Software, Virtual Worlds
Hello readers!
I am plastering everywhere else on the web with this, so I thought I might as well put it on my own blog too! 
I am conducting a survey alongside the SLOODLE project and as part of my PhD work. Your participation would be greatly appreciated:
https://avid-insight.co.uk/limesurvey/index.php?sid=16321&lang=en
It contains 35 questions, taking around 20 minutes to complete, and the software allows you to save your responses for later completion if you are pressed for time. All data will be handled anonymously.
The broad topic of my PhD is usability and user centred design in the context of integrating technologies such as Second Life and Moodle. This particular survey is exploratory in nature, asking for general feedback (quantitative and qualitative) on a few initial concepts for the software.
The front page of the survey provides further information if you would like to know more, and you are welcome to contact me with any questions. It will hopefully be online for 3 weeks, after which time selected data will be released here for the SLOODLE community, and to any individual participants who request it.
Many thanks,
Peter R. Bloomfield (SL: Pedro McMillan)
PhD student / Research Assistant / SLOODLE developer
Supervisor: Dr. Daniel Livingstone (SL: Buddy Sprocket)
University of the West of Scotland (School of Computing)
http://peter.avid-insight.co.uk/research
Splitter
Posted by Peter | Filed under Casual Games, Free Games, Games, Online Games
“Splitter” is a fascinatingly original casual web-game. The objective is simply to get the little yellow dude to the level exit, but you cannot control him directly. Rather, you need to modify the level in various ways, causing it to dynamically respond, achieving your goal, or foiling your plans.
It’s hard to describe exactly how the gameplay works. Imagine it like other physics sandbox games like “Magic Pen“, but instead of creating stuff to achieve your goal, you are actually splitting it with a knife (hence the name) in very precise ways.
The graphics are simple but pleasant, and the audio is reasonable. The interface works nicely, with a wonderfully simple control scheme… just click and drag where you want to cut, and that’s it. The physics responds nicely in various ways, and makes for a very enjoyable playing experience. Limits on the number of cuts you can make in a given level provide a good challenge.
It’s too late at night for me to go into much further analysis… I suggest you just play this game for yourself… it’s well worth it!
What is “hiberfil.sys”?
Posted by Peter | Filed under Software
I noticed that my hard disk was down to less than 1GB free this evening, so I decided to do a clear out. I am running a rather crusty old Windows XP Pro installation, and on my usual rounds, I noticed a large file that I hadn’t noticed before, called “hiberfil.sys“. It was sitting in the root of the C drive, taking up around 1.5GB.
I’ve learned from experience (the hard way) not to go about randomly deleting files, especially when Windows displays them with a slightly faded-out icon, indicating they are supposed to be hidden/system files. Thankfully, a quick web-search revealed what I needed to know.
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Using GDI+ in C++ Win32 programming
Posted by Peter | Filed under Programming, Software
If you do any Win32 programming in C++, then I strongly recommend you learn about GDI+. It’s been around for a while now, but not everybody knows about it. It can be great to have on hand even just to illustrate tests and prototypes.
Why is it so good? It provides an object-oriented way to draw graphics using the GDI, which is much nicer and easier to user than the basic C-style GDI functions and resources that used to be the norm. It also provides a lot of additional functionality which otherwise was not possible (or at least not easy) with the regular GDI functions alone, such as proper alpha blending, matrix transformations, file input/output, and loads more. It’s quite easy to setup too, as I will explain…
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Chronotron
Posted by Peter | Filed under Casual Games, Free Games, Online Games
There have been a few of time-travel related games in recent years, but here’s a nice casual Flash game that uses the concept: it is a platformer called Chronotron. You play as white and red robot, with a damaged time machine (which looks suspiciously like Doctor Who’s Tardis!). In each level, the objective is to find a time circuit, and get back to your time machine. Easy… right?
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Array of Checkboxes in LimeSurvey
Posted by Peter | Filed under Software, University
I’m using LimeSurvey to setup and conduct a survey as part of my PhD, and it’s working very well. (Great work, LimeSurvey developers!) It’s free and open source, and since I have my own server I can host the survey myself at no additional expense (which wouldn’t be the case if I used something like SurveyMonkey).
However, after discussion with a very helpful statistics guru here at UWS, I found that I needed a question type LimeSurvey didn’t seem to support: an array of checkboxes.
Here’s the kind of question I was hoping to display:
Q: Which of these features have you used as a student and/or as a teacher?
Student Teacher
1. Forum [] []
2. Chatroom [] []
3. Wiki [] []
4. Quiz [] []
It’s like the “array” question type, but each [] is a checkbox (instead of a radio button), so I’m basically tracking two independent boolean variables for each category, instead of a single variable on a scale.
After some very helpful (and very prompt) support on the LimeSurvey forums, it turns out that this question type is possible, but I had to upgrade to LimeSurvey v1.81. (I had previously been running v1.72). With the new version, here’s how it’s done:
- Create a label set for your columns of checkboxes
- Add a new question (fill in the usual Code and Question boxes)
- For Question Type, select “Array (Multi Flexible) (Numbers)
- Select the label set you created above
- Under Question Attributes, select “Checkbox layout”, and enter 1 in the box besides it
- Click “Add question”
And that’s it! It’s not immediately obvious at first, but pretty easy once you know how. You might find that the checkboxes take up a lot of room if you only have a few. For 2 columns of checkboxes, I found that an “answer_width” of 50 (under the question attributes) made the layout a little better.
Totem Destroyer
Posted by Peter | Filed under Casual Games, Software
This is a wonderfully addictive Flash game: Totem Destroyer. Like all good games, it’s simple to learn, but more difficult to master. The premise is that there is a tower of blocks, with an idol at the top. You have to destroy a certain number of blocks, bringing the idol down near ground level, without letting it actually touch the ground.
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2d Audio Mixer
Posted by Peter | Filed under Software, User Interface
While Stumbling around the web, I encountered an impressive user interface concept: the 2d Audio Mixer.
When I first loaded the web-page, I was expecting it to be something involving stereo or even binaural sound mixing. However, it is in fact only for producing mono sound. The “2d” aspect refers to the rather interesting way in which you mix the sounds.
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Sins of PowerPoint
Posted by Peter | Filed under Conferences, Software
I was attending the IEEE VS Games 09 conference earlier this week in Coventry. For the most part, the conference was good, and I will probably write more about it later. However, some presentations were fairly poor, usually because of the usual reasons:
Zotero 1.5 sync: tag too long
Posted by Peter | Filed under Academia, Software
I had been awaiting the Zotero synchronization functionality with great anticipation, so that I can easily share my citation library between home and work. I recently downloaded the first beta version of Zotero 1.5, which supports sync, and got it up and running.
For the most part, the library sharing is great (kudos Zotero dudes!)… but I hit one frustrating problem recently. When attempting to synchronize my library with the server, it failed and complained of this error:
“Tag ‘…’ is too long”
