Tom Roper's Weblog

Podcasting

This looks interesting, though my participation in the podcasting revolution will havbe to wait until I get broadband A history of podcasting endgadget on how to podcast

Travellers rejecting hotels with iffy wi-fi service - survey

A BT survey has highlighted the damaging effects of wi-fi internet downtime on hotel brands.From a on September 22, 2004 at 12:59 p.m. [Edu_RSS] I should say so: try booking a hotel in Brighton (a fairly go-ahead place, with the Pier-to-Pier network

This is outstanding; got on the train home from Falmer to Seaford, booted up my PowerBook and it found a WiFi signal, quite strong, all the way home. At first I couldn't believe it at first so I started up MacStumbler which confirmed it. The network was called Nomad and it seems they're putting WiFi into trains. I couldn't connect to it, but I'm sure that can be resolved. Now there will be no need for me to get off the train, I can simply stay on it all day and work away as I shuttle between Seaford and Falmer, except when they close down the track. Seems this is old hat, as the press releases on the Nomad site are dated last year, but I've been travelling on trains daily with a WiFi-enabled computer since long before that, and this is the first time I've got a signal

I’m rather behind with my blogging, which runs against the spirit of the medium I'm afraid, but since I found it so interesting, I offer here my appreciation of a talk given last week at the University of Sussex by Brian Kelly of the UK Office for Library Networking. His overheads are on the web, so it would be futile to repeat them, and he covered a lot of ground, including use of SMS, the convergence of mobile/handheld technologies but he made me realise the potential of FOAF for more or less the first time, as well as instant messaging. I’ve signed up to several IM services, but as nobody I know uses them, so there never seemed to me to be much much point. Most interesting too, were his suggestions about integrating RSS feeds into electronic leaning environments.

TypePad allows the user to create Typelists and I've been puzzling over the advisability and usefulness of developing some for this blog.
There are some fairly compelling reasons not to, not least as in the TypePad manual the principle raison d'être of such things is to show the world what you consume, which strikes me as sitting firmly at the solipsistic and trivial end of blogging.
There are four types of Typelist, books, music, people and websites. Of these, the only one who's usefulness is beyond dispute is the last. The first could be quite useful, though at the moment it only works with Amazon; if it could be made to work with library catalogues (through Z39.50 perhaps), it would be much more useful, for example if I could send readers off to a Library of Congress or British Library record.
Music lists again also work with Amazon and nothing else.
Lists of people strike me, but maybe this is because I'm a middle-aged Englishman, as the worst thing of all. I should think that any friends of mine who suddenly found themselves listed as such on a blog would take prompt steps to end the friendship.

I'm afraid I'm moving away from iBlog and am going to use MoveableType's Type Pad service instead. I'm sorry to do this, as I like iBlog, and it's been very useful, but some of its limitations, for example the way my RSS feed of one of my blogs gets mangled, mean that I realy do need to move to something more developed and sophisticated and MT seems to be the tool of choice.
I did try to get my ISP to let me install MT on my site, but while they were happy to let me install MT itself, they wanted extra money for me to run mySQL , which MT needs (well in fact it needs one of several databases, but I think they would have wanted more dosh to let me run any of them)

Discovered this, an excellent way of sharing RSS feeds. iBlogger doesn't support it yet, but I have suggested it as a possible enhancement on the ibloggers.net forum. In the meantime, I may try to think of a way of using my very limited knowledge of XML to achieve something similar

Coming soon, commenting, courtesy of the rather good Haloscan service, which other ibloggers have used, just as soon as I work out how to put the code into my templates.
Of course no one will use it as I have yet to find any evidence that any one other than me has looked at this blog. Maybe just as well....

Revising my medical education current awareness service which is the other side of this blogging coin, I encounter an odd problem. I publish my pages to a local location on my hard disk (because of the apparent absence of ftp support, though the help files suggest the iBlog should support ftp) and then use Dreamweaver to upload them, along with the rest of my site. But for some reason, it resists putting the very latest versions up. Went into Dreamweaver, deleted everything and republished...didn't fix it though. Have checked all my publish settings, which seem fine.

This is fascinating and perhaps even useful? I've now implemented GeoURL on my web site. Fascinating, though I'm not sure why. If you enter your location as latitude and longitude, it allows you to see what other sites are hosted nearby. If you want to see what interesting net neighbours I have go to http://www.roper.org.uk and click on the GeoURL button. I've set it up to list sites near my home in North-West London. If I can work out how, I may set it up to run a search for sites near the University as well (I tried using the code twice in the head of the webpage, but it obviously only works from the first set of coordinates)

WiFi on the train

This is outstanding; got on the train home from Falmer to Seaford, booted up my PowerBook and it found a WiFi signal, quite strong, all the way home. At first I couldn't believe it at first so I started up MacStumbler which confirmed it. The network was called Nomad and it seems they're putting WiFi into trains. I couldn't connect to it, but I'm sure that can be resolved. Now there will be no need for me to get off the train, I can simply stay on it all day and work away as I shuttle between Seaford and Falmer, except when they close down the track. Seems this is old hat, as the press releases on the Nomad site are dated last year, but I've been travelling on trains daily with a WiFi-enabled computer since long before that, and this is the first time I've got a signal

Brian Kelly at Sussex

I’m rather behind with my blogging, which runs against the spirit of the medium I'm afraid, but since I found it so interesting, I offer here my appreciation of a talk given last week at the University of Sussex by Brian Kelly of the UK Office for Library Networking. His overheads are on the web, so it would be futile to repeat them, and he covered a lot of ground, including use of SMS, the convergence of mobile/handheld technologies but he made me realise the potential of FOAF for more or less the first time, as well as instant messaging. I’ve signed up to several IM services, but as nobody I know uses them, so there never seemed to me to be much much point. Most interesting too, were his suggestions about integrating RSS feeds into electronic leaning environments.

TypePad and type lists

TypePad allows the user to create Typelists and I've been puzzling over the advisability and usefulness of developing some for this blog.
There are some fairly compelling reasons not to, not least as in the TypePad manual the principle raison d'être of such things is to show the world what you consume, which strikes me as sitting firmly at the solipsistic and trivial end of blogging.
There are four types of Typelist, books, music, people and websites. Of these, the only one who's usefulness is beyond dispute is the last. The first could be quite useful, though at the moment it only works with Amazon; if it could be made to work with library catalogues (through Z39.50 perhaps), it would be much more useful, for example if I could send readers off to a Library of Congress or British Library record.
Music lists again also work with Amazon and nothing else.
Lists of people strike me, but maybe this is because I'm a middle-aged Englishman, as the worst thing of all. I should think that any friends of mine who suddenly found themselves listed as such on a blog would take prompt steps to end the friendship.

Goodbye to iBlog

I'm afraid I'm moving away from iBlog and am going to use MoveableType's Type Pad service instead. I'm sorry to do this, as I like iBlog, and it's been very useful, but some of its limitations, for example the way my RSS feed of one of my blogs gets mangled, mean that I realy do need to move to something more developed and sophisticated and MT seems to be the tool of choice.
I did try to get my ISP to let me install MT on my site, but while they were happy to let me install MT itself, they wanted extra money for me to run mySQL , which MT needs (well in fact it needs one of several databases, but I think they would have wanted more dosh to let me run any of them)

OPML

Discovered this, an excellent way of sharing RSS feeds. iBlogger doesn't support it yet, but I have suggested it as a possible enhancement on the ibloggers.net forum. In the meantime, I may try to think of a way of using my very limited knowledge of XML to achieve something similar

Commenting

Coming soon, commenting, courtesy of the rather good Haloscan service, which other ibloggers have used, just as soon as I work out how to put the code into my templates.
Of course no one will use it as I have yet to find any evidence that any one other than me has looked at this blog. Maybe just as well....

Odd publishing thing

Revising my medical education current awareness service which is the other side of this blogging coin, I encounter an odd problem. I publish my pages to a local location on my hard disk (because of the apparent absence of ftp support, though the help files suggest the iBlog should support ftp) and then use Dreamweaver to upload them, along with the rest of my site. But for some reason, it resists putting the very latest versions up. Went into Dreamweaver, deleted everything and republished...didn't fix it though. Have checked all my publish settings, which seem fine.

GeoURL

This is fascinating and perhaps even useful? I've now implemented GeoURL on my web site. Fascinating, though I'm not sure why. If you enter your location as latitude and longitude, it allows you to see what other sites are hosted nearby. If you want to see what interesting net neighbours I have go to http://www.roper.org.uk and click on the GeoURL button. I've set it up to list sites near my home in North-West London. If I can work out how, I may set it up to run a search for sites near the University as well (I tried using the code twice in the head of the webpage, but it obviously only works from the first set of coordinates)