Flickring into life
Posted by Peter | Filed under Websites
I haven’t blogged in a few days, so here’s a “filler” piece. My Flickr stream is, after a year of no use whatever, finally being resurrected… at least a little. I’m using it to post pics of my side-projects, such as the Slide Toggler, and Stackable Graph Cubes (the latter gaining surprising popularity, and prompting the development/request of some interesting spin-offs).
I also have a newly rejuvenated YouTube channel for hosting videos and tutorials of the projects, mostly to save me bandwidth! Getting quite a few views already… although nothing groundbreaking.
Aside from anything else, the pics and vids provide a bit more exposure for the tools… not so that I make money off them (because they are free and open source), but hopefully so that folks will find them useful, and maybe even learn a thing or two from the source code. Honestly. Fame isn’t my goal at all.
My avatar, on the other hand, is all about the fame… 
Making Videos
Posted by Peter | Filed under Websites
I’ve been making some videos of Second Life stuff lately (tools I’ve developed, including the Slide Toggler and the Stackable Graph Cubes). It’s a learning curve, but I’m getting there, and I’ll likely have to make more soon to document the SLOODLE tools.
What’s involved? First of all, I need to record what I see on the screen, which I do using FRAPS — you can get a free version which lets you record up to 30 seconds of video at time, so I just do everything in 30 second chunks! That produces a bunch of ‘AVI’ files, which I then load into Windows Movie Maker, which I use to stick them together, with simple intro and ending title screens.
Still in Movie Maker, I record the narration to go with the video. That usually takes a number of attempts, and I’ve found it’s useful to ad lib it a few times to get a feel for the timing, then write down the script, and then record it for real. Different approaches work for different people I guess.
Next comes the music, which I typically get from the wonderful SoundSnap website. Unfortunately, Movie Maker doesn’t seem to be able to mix audio tracks, unless one of the audio tracks is already embedded in a video. The sneaky way round that is to render the video out to WMV (or whatever other format), load that back into Movie Maker, and add the music tracks (cropped to fit as necessary). Finally, it’s rendered out, and uploaded to YouTube for the world to see. I also like to embed the YouTube videos on the site at useful locations.
You can check out my YouTube channel to see my results.
Oh alright… I’ll Twitter…
Posted by Peter | Filed under Software, Websites
I seem to remember encountering Twitter a couple of years ago, and at the time giving the sound judgement that it’s silly and won’t last. Who’d bother with a site which just allows a tiny bit of text?!
I failed to realise 2 salient points:
- Twitter is part of the larger “web experience”, so limited and simple functionality is actually a refreshing change
- Integration! (I’ve added mine to FaceBook)
On the integration front, here’s my Twitterific self in action:
Folks seem to be using Twitter for lots of things, and it seems pretty effective from what I’ve heard. If you can’t beat them, join them. Or at least attempt to thinly justify this as a “research exercise” in personally evaluating socially constructed and interaction-driven web resources. Or something like that…
SLOODLE website gets a face-lift
Posted by Peter | Filed under Sloodle, Websites
After much discussion and chatting and ideas and then silence for a few months, we have finally given the SLOODLE website a face-lift. I am really very pleased with the result. Check it out:
The theme was based on a Moodle theme called EduMoodle, which was itself based on a Joomla theme by dudes at EduGeek. Our little variant was originally modified by our good friend and Sloodler, Chris Surridge, using screenshots (swiped) from the inimitable Sloodlebrity, Gia. I then tweaked it a touch to suit our needs, and also mercilessly hammered it into the approximate shape of a WordPress theme, to keep our SLOODLE blog looking nice and consistent. (I nearly hammered my computer mercilessly too… I hate CSS sometimes! Silly float attribute…)
The astute observer will also notice that we have some handy new pages in our lovely new navigation menu: About, Research, and Tutorials. They are still under-construction, but well worth checking-out.
Chemistry for the YouTube Generation
Posted by Peter | Filed under Education, University, Websites
OK, I know I’m guilty of the horrible generalisation of calling anything technology-related a “generation”… but it seemed like a good name for this entry. I’ll be brief! If you’ve never seen it before, I strongly recommend checking out the Periodic Table of Videos, starring some of the lovely folks from the University of Nottingham. It’s a series of videos, with one for each element in the periodic table, some short, some long.
It’s a wonderful endeavour, making lots of interesting chemistry facts available to folks like me who sometimes watch far too many videos online! Thanks Nottingham Uni dudes… great work! 
Give them computing… but not too much!
Posted by Peter | Filed under Education, Games, Technology, Websites
All around the world, we are seeing the pros and cons of computers. Education is a major part of the thrust in various aspects of computing right now, whether it is computing classes for prisoners in Pakistan or senior citizens in Illinois, virtual classrooms for universities in India, or even a double-glazing company donating computers to a school in the UK.
As many people have alluded to, genuine computer skills are very important now. The existence of courses such as the ECDL shows this; it is not enough to say simply “computer literate” on your CV now… employers often want to know exactly how computer literate you are (which is entirely fair and valid, because being able to make a pretty Bebo profile is not what I’d call a ‘transferable skill’).
On the flip-side of the argument, I am sure we have all seen many protestations over violent video games. Beyond that, people are now complaining about kids getting addicted to web-games in local cybercafes, with very genuine concern that it could even lead to gambling habits in the future. On a personal note, I am rather appalled at how the number of online Bingo (and similar) sites has ballooned lately (there are numerous TV adverts for them here in the UK). I do not begrudge the choice people have to throw away their money as they see fit, but particularly in such a financial climate as this, convenient at-home gambling — often under the guise of a purely ’social’ activity — is rather a cruel enterprise.
As with everything, moderation is the key. I myself have fallen victim to over-use of computers in the past. Mind you, I don’t even rememeber what I did on the computer all day before I had an ‘always-on’ Internet connection! Perhaps one of the key skills that is not being taught is the most simple of all… how (and when) to switch it off!
Community Etiquette
Posted by Peter | Filed under Software, Websites
I recently had a run-in with somebody on the community forums for an open source piece of software. I was trying to give advice to folks, based on my experience of the software (which is what community forums are for, right?), and this individual took it upon himself to rather harshly decry much of my assistance, because there were points with which he didn’t agree.
I won’t say where or with whom this occurred, but simply that I view it as a rather unnacceptable behaviour for somebody who claims to be supporting a community-based software project. Communities are full of lots of people of varying levels of knowledge and expertise, and not everybody will always agree on the best way to do anything. Even if a person is flat-out wrong, getting angry at them (or worse yet, talking angrily to other community members about them by name on the public forums) is a sure fire way to alienate and push people away. This is the kind of attitude that breaks up communities.
What’s my response? I’m not 100% sure yet. Part of me wants to leave that particular portion of the community forums alone because I don’t want to cause unnecessary dispute, and yet perhaps the bigger part of me knows that unless somebody sticks it out against this guy (and hopefully wears his attitude down), he’s going to keep doing it to other people too. Community forums belong to the community, not to any individual
When tabs go bad
Posted by Peter | Filed under Programming, Sloodle, Websites
I am a Firefox fan-boy… and more than that, a tabbed-browsing junkie. It comes in very handy when working on the Sloodle project, and I’ve got our main site’s forums open in one tab, alongside documentation, a webmail folder (or 5), and a locally hosted Moodle site for testing on.
One thing I’ve learned the hard way recently though is to be really sure of what tab you’re using at what moment. Having tried a few things out in the Sloodle code on my local installation, I wanted to uninstall it from my local Moodle, and re-install it to see if my changes worked properly. Unfortunately, the Moodle tab I had open at the time wasn’t the one on my local machine… but rather, the one on my web-server. I didn’t realise until a fraction of a second too late!
I didn’t lose any seriously important data… this time… but it was quite a nuisance anyway.
I now simply don’t keep more than one Moodle open in the same instance of Firefox at the same time. It’s not worth the risk!
Project[N]ReSource
Posted by Peter | Filed under Programming, Websites
Two fantabulous announcements in one. First of all, Project[N]ReSource has had a face-lift, and our new site is chock to the brim full of features and forums. We’re building a collection of info about our projects, various resources, book reviews, tutorials, links… and more… all relating to computer games and how to make them!
Also in the news is our very first game to be released! Hurrah! “Yokai Valley” is a simple strategy game set in ancient Japan. You have to take charge of a band of villagers, defending the valley from the evil invading Yokai.
Mosey on over to the site to check it out and try out our game and our forums:
http://www.projectnresource.com
;D
Security not Obscurity
Posted by Peter | Filed under Websites
It warms the cockles of my web-development heart to read about ‘Keep You Safe‘, over at one of my favourite blogs, Linux.com. I won’t expound too much on KYS myself, except to say that it’s an online data-vault idea, so you can keep all your important data elsewhere (as a ‘disaster-recovery’ measure). I can see the benefit of this, as I use the open-source TrueCrypt software locally to store encrypted data, but perhaps I should consider an off-site storage medium also, just in case!
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