Zotero premium service
Posted by Peter | Filed under Academia, Software
The team behind the open source Zotero citation management software has been actively developing “sync” functionality for quite some time now. It allows you to work with your references collection from multiple computers by storing the latest copy of your collection on the Zotero servers.
An optional part of the sync system allows you to store PDF files and such like in your collection (full-text copies of papers etc.). Zotero provides 100MB of storage free to everyone, but towards the end of 2009 they introduced an optional premium service, in conjuction with Digital Scholar.
Epidemic security flaws
Posted by Peter | Filed under Software
Automatic updating is becoming very widespread on the Windows platform at the moment, particularly with security software such as firewalls and antivirus. I will wholeheartedly agree that many users simply don’t have the time and/or inclination to learn how or why to initiate updates manually, so they are at risk without automatic updates. Additionally, the average user probably wouldn’t know or care that an update is going on. Even if a popup appears saying “update complete”, many users have tunnel vision or myopia, so they just won’t notice it.
Unfortunately, painting all users with the same brush leads to a big security flaw…
SLOODLE / PhD Research - Survey Invitation
Posted by Peter | Filed under SLOODLE, Software, Virtual Worlds
SURVEY CLOSED
Thanks for your interest, but I’m afraid this survey is now closed. I will be running the next set of evaluations in the coming months, so pleased stay tuned if you’re interested.
——————————————
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〈=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
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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Array of Checkboxes in LimeSurvey
Posted by Peter | Filed under Software
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.
2d Audio Mixer
Posted by Peter | Filed under Interface and Usability, Software
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 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”
Google Docs
Posted by Peter | Filed under Software, Websites
Over the past number of years, I have found myself steadily moving more and more of my day-to-day computing activity online… in keeping with much of the computing world, I suppose. However, I had not really moved into the realm of online document editing until recently, largely because I had no need.
I started using Google Docs when I was collaborating on a paper to be submitted to a journal, and was immediately impressed by how simple yet powerful a tool it is. It is now becoming almost indispensable to me, as it allows me to create and edit documents from nearly anywhere I go, without needing to download software or synchronize copies. I can keep things private, or ’share’ documents with specific people to whom I want to give read and/or write access, or open them up to the world. It’s certainly no replacement for fully-fledged office software when it comes to final drafts for print or such, but it’s amazing at what it does, and it is reliable. (Regular automatic saves, and document revision history… how can I live without it?)
That’s just the word processor. I have looked over-the-shoulder of somebody using the spreadsheet, and was astounded by how slick it all is. The integration with form-based input for users is amazing too.
I am also turning to Google Calendar more now, which I have found to be very useful in many ways for organising my (hectic) schedule. Alongside other useful stuff I use regularly, including GMail and GoogleCode, and of course, the inimitable Google Search Engine (with all its handy tricks), I really am a big fan of this .com giant, founded by some crazy/genius blokes who couldn’t spell googol properly.
