On Monday, I nipped out only to come home and find my Windows 7 machine had a Blue Screen of Death.  That has happened a couple of times recently - I am pretty sure that it is due to an antique wifi dongle, which has been playing up for a little while.  Irritating but not too much trauma - a reboot is all that is needed.  Only this time, the system can't find the operating system.  NTLDR not found.

OK, that isn't too much of a problem; normally.  Of course, what I hadn't realised at that point is that Win7 doesn't use NTLDR.  That was because the system was trying to boot from an old partition on one of my (now) data disks, rather than its system disk.  Why? Well, I still don't know.

The nice chaps in ITNG were able to provide me with an emergency recovery disk.  I was thinking it was just going to be a case of fixing the mbr on the boot disk - but that didn't work.  Indeed, nothing I did, in terms of the system software/configuration worked.  On the other hand, unplugging all the drives and re-connecting them did.  But all the drives had been accessible before, so it wasn't that there was a bad connection - they were reliably present and responsive, except in terms of booting the machine.  Odd.

This morning I woke up late.  As it turns out, only slightly late (about 20 minutes) but it felt like it must have been getting on for mid-day.  And I woke with one of those fuzzy-heads, which means it takes a little while to get going.  On the bright side, this gave me half an hour to play with my Godson which is a nice way to start the morning (if a bit of an insistent way to start it!).  I left home, only to discover the road I usually use was closed.  The detour took me further away from work than home is.  I still managed to get in by 10am though, which was darned impressive.

One of my websites had been flagged by the JANET service as being mentioned in spam.  As it turns out, this was just down to me leaving a social networking test site I had been experimenting with open for registration, and forgetting that it was even there.  I had rather hoped it had been hacked, because at least then I could have investigated to find out what the flaw was.  As it is, the flaw was just me being a numpty!

Hopefully that is the days nuisances over and done with - tonight I am on a panel at a #140conf session, which had to change venue last night; I am hoping that the trip there and the evening will be a lot less complicated than the last couple of days!

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Over the weekend, staff and students may have received an email asking them to update their webmail account.

This is a scam email, and has not been sent from IT Services at the University of Reading. You should not reply to the email or click on any links and you should never give away your password. If an account has been compromised then we will need to block it, while it is secured.

If you have any queries please contact ITS Help at its-help@reading.ac.uk.

ITS Help

We have a server, on the research network, which I am used to addressing just by its machine name in my URL bar - I don't bother with all that .reading.ac.uk stuff on the end, which is good, as it happens, because it doesn't answer to the full version, only to the machine name or the machine name + .rdg.ac.uk

This made me wonder about the addressing mechanisms, and try a couple of experiments.  Much to my surprise, if I type UCL into the address bar, I get the www.ucl.ac.uk web page, and the address is left in the title bar as http://ucl/

However, trying soton doesn't work, because they still have this desire for people to type www at the front of their web address. f you put www.soton in the address bar, though, it works.  But ox doesn't work - that gets redirected to a Google search.

I assume that the machine which works as a DNS server has some entries in its hosts file - anyone got a better explanation?

Who do you want to be?  What sort of person do you want to be when you leave university?

I don't just mean what job you want to get, but more fundamental than that - do you want to be someone who needs to be told what to do and how to learn, or someone who sees opportunities instead of challenges and seeks out new experiences?

University is a great opportunity to change who you are.  Not just masking the old you, but actually fundamentally altering the nature of your personality to be the one you would like to be.  You may have been quiet and shy at school, or you may be coming back to university after having been in work for a while primarily to 'upskill' yourself.  But that doesn't mean you can't take the opportunity to decide who you want to be, and to put it into practice.

One thing you can do to help support any changes you want to make is to write about who you want to be.  You may not want to share this with everyone, of course, so if you want to do it online you should find somewhere (like RedGloo) which allows you to keep a post private.  On the other hand, you might find that sharing it makes it easier for other people to help with advice on how they have changed themselves.

A transition like going to university presents so many opportunities it can be hard to keep track of them all.  Now, I know I am a bit of a geek, but I find it handy to organise most of my life using online tools - making good use of email services and online calendars can help in making sure you don't miss out on things.  And using some sort of project management software can help you see what you need to do, when, in order that you can organise your time to get the best out of it.  I have to admit, one of the reasons I am starting to use this sort of technique is because I have, in the past, been particularly bad at remembering to do the social stuff when I have 'had my head in the books'.  Sad, huh?

If you are coming to the University of Reading, you get an email account (remember to check it, and use it for communicating with staff - they might not read emails from fluffypinkbunnyknickers@aol.com) and you also get a personal web space.  Check it out when you get here, and use it to create a record of the stuff you do here.  If you can point to your successes, and to how you learned through your mistakes, you will find it much easier to get a job (whether to help fund your time here, as something to fill in that terrible, awful 3 month gap we call Summer Holidays , for a year in industry or for when you leave to enter the world of work).  You will also find it easier to see how you learn best, and what you can do to match up to your aspirations.

Get involved in talking to people - obviously, you will want to chat to the people you are living with, on your course, that you meet around campus and around town - but if you want to learn as much as possible and get yourself known in your field, you probably also want to be chatting to people online.  One of the easiest ways of doing this is to use tools like Twitter - the conversation does not need to be 'synchronous' (both of you involved at the same time), which means you can get in touch with experts in all sorts of fields from across the world.

Karsten Lundqvist has posted a brief review of the JISC SemTech report.  When I read this, I, too, struggled with the classifications used of soft and hard semantic technologies, and felt there were a number of assumptions being made about machine readability.

There is a tendency to regard content as being machine readable if it contains lots of characters which make it less than readily human readable.  XML is touted as both machine and human readable, but it takes a special type of human to persist through more than a few lines of it, in my experience.  Additionally, the actual content of tags can be quite opaque (to either a human or a machine).  As Karsten points out, the same is true of RDF.

Coupled with this is the problem of using hard ontologies.  Ontologies do not allow for uncertainty (in their basic form), and this is a problem, particularly when trying to provide tools which can operate across a range of subject areas for which different ontologies exist.  Realistically, I cannot see a way of achieving the necessary goals of semantic interpretation by machine without use of fuzzy ontologies or belief networks; and whilst it is possibly to abstract out a 'most likely' hard ontology from these, I have to wonder whether that is actually advantageous at all.

People do not tend to work in terms of absolutes - most things are interpreted in shades of grey, in levels of belief.  Indeed, black and white, all or nothing thinking is widely regarded as being symptomatic of mental health issues.  In terms of educational systems,  concepts such as Topic maps are actually rather too rigid for many people (I believe - I haven't gathered specific evidence on this).  Whilst the SemTech report classifies these as being on the soft side of semantic ontology technologies, I would actually regard them as being 'hard' - they show clear relationships between entities, and can be expressed using languages such as RDF and can have inferencing performed on them.  I am keen to do some work on a 'fluffier' type of Topic map, more akin to belief networks, in order to allow for better learner self expression at the user-end of use, and for a better match through allowing for a degree of mis-match at the instructional design and tool design levels.

Alongside this, the use of formalised language (formalised English would be my preferred option!) allows for reasonable machine readability, whilst maintaining human readability.  Doing more work on this side of things, rather than trying to get people to include semantic markup, strikes me as being much more likely to succeed in producing genuine linked data quickly and reliably.

I agree that a timetable is a useful approach, although I would tend to have quibbles about some of the timings and order of things to be done. But I also think that the report has missed out on some important options which should be considered in more depth.

As part of the LinkSphere project, I am trying to use Kerberos to authenticate against the uni's servers.  Have finally tracked one of my problems down to having a dodgy keytab file, so the server was asking for an ID to be authenticated, but using a made up server name which meant the uni server was not allowing authentication.  I don't appear to be able to create a new one, so am waiting on support to provide me with a valid keytab.

In the meantime, I am intrigued to notice that I can actually programmatically test the response to discover whether the user should actually be allowed to log in or not.  If I send correct details, the error I get is about the server names.  If I send bad credentials, I get an error relating to a failed pre-authentication.  So I could, in theory, ignore the fact that I don't actually authenticate, and use the error messages to decide whether to let people log in or not.  This is not the right way to do it, and constitutes a bit of a hack, but would be possible (although, I don't think I would have enough information to create the user ID within the Drupal install I have without proper authentication - I have to look in to that).  I am a little unsure about whether this constitutes a security risk...

The first problem I encountered was due to our virtual machines not running ntpd (indeed, not having ntp installed) and thus their clocks running at different speeds to 'real time'. This causes a problem for kerberos authentication.  I was also amused (in a 'not very' way) to discover that my Mac only allows me to set its time based on three different 'Apple' time zones, all of which would appear to disagree with 'real time' in terms of the time other devices tell me it is.  Not surprisingly, Apple time is a bit behind the other time services - which might explain many things!

Amidst many, many other reasons for never wanting to move house again (which I say every time I have to move house...) I am having monitor trouble since last weekend's trauma.

So, aside from back pain, no internet at home and not being able to find things, I also have the small issue that after a while (an indeterminate amount of time) my lcd monitor will go white.  Sometimes, switching it off and back on again will fix it - sometimes it won't.  It doesn't appear to be getting overly hot (often a cause of time-related faults with electronics, I find), and the cables are securely in place (and not moving at all, so it is unlikely to be related to them).  None of the pins on the cables appear to be damaged.  I have tried the second monitor output socket on my graphics card, and the same thing happens.

Of course, this may be graphics card related.  One other slight oddity is that after this first happened I tried booting into windows safe mode in order to just check things out - and rather oddly instead of getting a screen resolution of 800x600 which I expect in safe mode, I got 1600x1200 which the card does not normally support.  And it was still in 32 bit color.  So, graphics card weirdness is a possibiliy - I am guessing if this is the problem then it is scrambling the signal it is sending in some way, and the poor old monitor is coping as well as it can.

Anyone got any suggestions?

We have produced a Digital Identity Workbook as part of the This Is Me project.  It is a set of learning materials to help people when teaching or learning about the different views people can take about the subject.

Some people prefer to be private, and not publish any information about themselves online, whilst others use the technologies to promote themselves to a wide community.  Some people "only" use social networking sites, although the information they put there may be used by recruitment companies or employers - so it might be misleading to think that the use is only social.

The materials have been published under a Creative Commons license.  Within a couple of days of announcing this, Nancy White, (who is a leader in the field of Communities of Practice) had re-purposed the material for use with non-governmental organisations (NGOs).  She has re-focussed some of the stories, and added some great photos, making a lively new version which is well suited, I believe, to her target audience.

A Twitter-friend that Shirley & I met online, Mel (or @3quarks as I tend to think of her!), is also re-using the content which we have produced, aiming it at a specific group of her students.

Now, apart from it being wonderfully gratifying that the stuff is actually being useful (!), the use of a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license means that anyone can build on the materials and the community gets to benefit.  At the same time, we have our name associated with the original work, and so it helps build our reputation too.

I can only imagine what would have happened if we applied the old-fashioned copyright approach to the material - personally, I think it is unlikely that they would have been used outside of our own institution.

Anyway - I will shortly be ordering 100 copies of the book, all printed and bound, and am looking forward to being able to let people have copies.  You can download a copy for free from the site (above) or order a printed copy (at cost price - which is cheap, but P&P makes it a bit more pricey).

Cohere is a useful looking tool from the Open University.  It is quite like the MeAggregator tool, in that the user builds up an ontology or concept map from ideas which can be related to URLs.  MeAggregator focusses less on the user thinking about how the concepts work together, and more on making it easier to find and organise the resources, but the same ideas are there - nodes (or resources), URLs which they link to, relationships between them (which are handled by tagging in MeAggregator).  It looks good, though auto-discovery of its RSS feeds doesn't work.  On the other hand, they have code snippets for embedding a view in another web page, and another aspect I haven't tried yet is that they have a tool for creating web pages from within the web app.

 Amplify is fromthe same people as Clipmarks.  It provides users with a 'clog' - clip log - which is essentially a slightly enhanced blog.  You can put entries in to your clog manually just as you would with blogging software.  This service is currently in a private beta, but I managed to blag a login from the nice chaps at Clipmarks.  I like it - and it gave me the idea of clipping Tweets (micro-blog posts in the Twitter service) and using them for the basis of a clog post which then has a comment thread attached, allowing for discussion of a resource between a group of people.  Coming soon, the service will also provide a system of groups, which will allow a collaborative clog to be run, which could be an excellent tool for group projects to use.  Privacy currently is either public or private, but presumably with groups there will be a group setting too.

Academia.edu is another interesting one - essentially it is Facebook for academics, (and uses the Facebook log in methods so you can link directly in to Facebook with it) and has universities and departments within its hierarchy, along with research interests.  I am not sure I was meant to really select all the areas I have a research interest in (I ended up with 240, and I deliberately didn't select some - although, to be fair, some things in the list appear more than once as I selected them as main categories and as sub-categories of other areas.  Perhaps it should filter them!).  This service is also a bit wiki-like.  You can add new research areas, new departments and the like for your university (and probably for others...).  You can also add other people, and there is a 'this is me' link (not directly related to the project of the same name!)for people to claim identities which have been set up there.  I am not sure how long it will take for someone to abuse it!

So - academic social networking, collaborative concept mapping and a web page clipping blog system.  All pretty good stuff (admittedly with some rough edges, but I am certainly not complaining about that!)