Author Archives: Michael

BBC Today: Professor Hans Rosling

Posted on 1 June 2009 | Leave a comment

Beautiful statistics on the Today programme…

Professor Hans Rosling has been credited by Microsoft’s Bill Gates as one of his inspirations to give so much to charity – the reason? Beautiful graphs.

Mr Rosling makes animated graphs, like the above graph comparing the UK and China over the last 200 years, for his non-profit organisation Gapminder.org.

Using data from international organisations such as the UN, he hopes his graphs will persuade people to give up their misconceptions about the modern world.

via BBC – Today.

I thought the style of graphic looked familiar to an aspect of Google Analyzer. Guess who bought Trendalyzer from Gapminder in March 2006? 

Here’s one looking at CO2 output of America and China

Many more videos of statistcs here, and you can use their tool to compare your own choice of statistics with Gapminder World.

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Posted in climate change, Global

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Global warming causes 300,000 deaths a year

Posted on 30 May 2009 | Leave a comment

Guardian article with a striking statistic…

of the 12 countries considered least at risk, including Britain, all but one are industrially developed. Together they have made nearly $72bn available to adapt themselves to climate change but have pledged only $400m to help poor countries. “This is less than one state in Germany is spending on improving its flood defences,”

via Global warming causes 300,000 deaths a year, says Kofi Annan thinktank | Environment | guardian.co.uk .

Unfortunately the Guardian’s article fails to provide the report’s title or a link, but I think it is called the Human Impact Report… 

Summary of the Report:

Climate Change is here. It has a human face. This report details the silent crisis occurring around the world today as a result of a global climate change. It is a comprehensive account of the key impacts of climate change on human society. Long regarded as a distant, environmental or future problem, climate change is already today a major constraint on all human efforts. It has been creeping up on the world for years, doing its deadly work in the dark by aggravating a host of other major problems affection society, such as malnutrition, malaria and poverty. This report aims at breaking the silent suffering of millions. Its findings indicate that the impacts of climate change are each year responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths with hundreds of millions of lives affected. Climate change is a serious threat to close to three quarters of the world population. Half a billion people are at extreme risk. Worst affected are the world´s poorest groups, who lack any responsibility for causing climate change. 

 Full executive summary here.

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Posted in climate change

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Chair of Governors

Posted on 20 May 2009 | Leave a comment

Just a short post to mark a significant day for me.

I’ve been a parent governor at my daughter’s school for about a year. So far it’s been an interesting challenge, albeit fairly demanding in terms of time and commitment. However, it is about to become significantly more demanding… Earlier tonight, I was elected Chair of the Governors.

I’m honoured (and indeed a little bit proud) to have been considered a suitable candidate for the role – I hope I can do a good job. Obviously, I’ve not done this before so there are many unknowns ahead, but thankfully there are experienced governors still on board (including the previous chair and a very experienced new vice chair). I’ll need an awful lot of their input and advice to ensure that things are handled properly.

It’s clear to me that I was nominated, and subsequently voted in, partly because I’m seen as “the new kid on the block”. I guess I bring a degree of knowledge as a parent, and as an internet professional, that could be very useful. I hope I can live up to the other governor’s expectations!

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Posted in school governor

I've been podcasted (nearly)

Posted on 29 April 2009 | Leave a comment

JISC came to see us at lunchtime today. David Flanders (and journalist Basheera Khan) paid a visit in order to present the List8D team with their winning cheque.

We had a nice lunch (with pop), a photo op, and two podcasts were recorded: one of me, John Sotillo and Keith Mander, and the other was the team, namely Ben Charlton, Matt Spence , Matthew Bull and Matthew Slowe. 

Best bit was the opportunity to chat about what we do with external people. It turns out that what we do is good. We knew this (I think), but having it underlined feels good.

I’ll add links to podcast etc when it’s live.

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Posted in manage

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The Hannover Principles

Posted on 15 April 2009 | Leave a comment

One of the things I’d like to consider (pipe dream / pie in the sky time) is how me and my team might consider applying something like The Hannover Principles to our work.

(As usual) I’m no expert, but I think the HPs are focussed on buildings and objects. We build web digital applications. Each time we create new systems we’re creating requirements for more and more servers, more storage, and more use of energy.

Is this sustainable? Should we be trying to work out how to produce more information services but with less resource requirements?

Thoughts on a recycled postcard please…

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Posted in develop, manage, sustainability

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More Drupal support

Posted on 15 April 2009 | Leave a comment

We’re currently using Drupal to build a CMS for the university I work at. It’s great to see it get more and more backing… 

From an enterprise level, Sett Gottleib celebrates Finally, Drupal Gets Deployment. His post points to Greg Dunlap’s work on a Deploy module. Sett also references the Drush module which can handle filesystem level deployment. 

At the university we have a similar set of requirements and have been developing our own mechansim (with support from a friendly local development company). I’ll provide links to our efforts as and when they’re available.

From a major player perspective, Dries Buytaert tells us Obama is using Drupal.

I didn’t know that Obama was also a web developer, but it is a great vote in favour of Drupal.

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Posted in content, develop

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Vista on my laptop

Posted on 14 April 2009 | Leave a comment

Around two and a half years a go I became the proud owner of a Toshiba Portege laptop running Vista. But I had a few problems – mostly because it didn’t have enough RAM (only 1GB to start with). 

Over the years I have tried various ways to speed it up. For a while I stuck a 2GB SD card in and ran ReadyBoost which helped. Also I tried the advice on the first two items on this list: http://mostlysavingmoney.com/top-10-windows-vista-speed-tweaks/ which seemed to help.

Eventually I upgraded to 2GB of Ram and things have been fairly decent since then. I stopped using the ReadyBoost as it seemed to make things slower on wake-up (probably too much of the session in memory).

But one thing I didn’t revert was the indexing (first point of advice on that URL above). So now I am, and I thought I’d just make a note of this here so that I can come and revert back if the need arises.

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Posted in not web

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The Groundswell – figures for UK 2008

Posted on 17 March 2009 | 1 Comment

Just for the record really, but am reading The Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester. They accompany the book with a website which includes a profile tool. For this to make sense you need to understand their ”Social Technographics®” classifications which describe: Inactives, Spectators, Joiners, Collectors, Critics, and Creators.

Their profile tool includes data for the UK from 2008, and provides the following slices organised by age group.

Data from Forrester Research Technographics® surveys, 2008. 

18-24

25-34

35-44

45-54

55+

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Posted in design, develop, manage

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HTC Touch HD – apps I've installed

Posted on 11 March 2009 | 2 Comments

I’ve been playing with my phone, installing various apps. I figure that any moment soon I’m probably going to crash it, so here’s a reminder just for me of what went in, in no particular order…

  • Touch InCall Screen Tweak (makes the screen light up during a call if you take it away from vertical – i.e. away from your ear)
  • BsB G-Config (adds G-sensor options to apps that don’t support it natively. not sure this works – or at least it doesn’t help google maps).
  • CeTwit – small twitter client. Ok, but could do with better finger-scrolling
  • QuakkSetup – just about to try this
  • .NET compact framework 3.5 (needed for some of these apps)
  • Diamond Saber (yes, a lightsaber application)
  • GoogleMaps itself (did I install this? did it not come with the phone? I seem to have the .cab file lying around)
  • SkypeForPocketPC (this actually works, but doesn’t do video yet AFAICT)

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Posted in gadgets

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CMS kit = Ikea flat pack

Posted on 5 March 2009 | 2 Comments

I liked a post on Robert O’Toole’s blog: The Ikea effect – why we should build a flat–pack V[R]LE

He’s talking about a V[R]LE which I’m assuming is much like a VLE. But I thought the aspects on how people like to build their own things, especially when it’s made easy, related well to our CMS project. 

Our CMS strategy is in two phases. First we are building some backend elements – we’re calling these Content Factories, and these will manage certain types of content to enable easy re-use. These Content Factories will provide content to a variety of web properties regardless of whether they are CMS-driven. So we could use them to inject content into Sharepoint, a Portal, and even a flat HTML page (because we run PHP over most of them).

Secondly we’ll be building a “CMS Kit” to hand out to our departments. This will provide them with a standard CMS web interface to edit basic flat content, but will also be pre-prepared to use the Content Factory feeds. 

So this “CMS kit” we’re planning is an IKEA flat pack.

I also liked the note of warning about people getting over-invested in the things they build. Our web authors are currently using some very nice Dreamweaver tools and snippets that we’ve developed over the last two years. Getting them off those and into the CMS might be hard. The solution is to make the CMS so much easier that they’d be silly not to use it.

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Posted in develop