User manuals – don’ts and dos

Posted on 1 March 2010 | Leave a comment

Sometimes you don’t need a user manual…

and sometimes you do…

I prefer systems like the first one.

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Posted in design, Work

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Web Sequence Diagrams

Posted on 28 February 2010 | 1 Comment

Have been following up a tweet from fooflington… yes it does seem rather cool. With <I’m no expert> applied, I’ve been playing too…

Here’s the text that generated it:

user->form: provides feedback
activate form
form->form: validate
form-->user: request amends
alt if 'content' selected
    form->dept: email dept
    note right of dept
        left with dept
        to sort out?
    end note
else if 'other' selected
    form->service desk: raise ticket
    service desk->web support: ticket
end
form->user: send message received (if email left)
deactivate form
web support -> service desk: resolve ticket
service desk -> user: email resolution message

Here’s a link to the page where it all happens.

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Posted in develop, Work

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Assistant Director of IT Development – University of Kent

Posted on 26 February 2010 | 2 Comments

I have a new job. Following interviews on the 24th I was fortunate enough to be selected for the new role of Assistant Director of IT Development in Information Services at the University of Kent.

This is the first stage of some restructuring for IS. I’m looking forward to working with everyone that will part of this new grouping. It’s going to get quite busy over the next few months but hopefully we can make some good changes.

I decided to update my profiles with this new info. In my online life this has so far involved changes to LinkedIn, Twitter, and this blog’s About page. Not touched Facebook yet and I’m sure there’s a few more…

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Posted in CV, Work

Mittuniversitetet

Posted on 26 February 2010 | Leave a comment

Just back from a quick trip to Mid Sweden University (or Mittuniversitetet). We were at the Östersund campus which is a little further north than the two other campuses, Härnösand and Sundsvall.


View Larger Map

Ostersund (from the taxi window)

Östersund is described as ‘the number one winter city’ and it was certainly picturesque – covered in snow and fairly chilly outside. Yesterday was a beautiful crisp and sunny day so we got to see it at its best (although my taxi-based iPhone image might not convince).

We were guests of Kristen Snyder who was fantastically enthusiastic, knowledgeable and a very welcoming host. Along with her colleagues and Magnus Berger from Avedas they showed us their implementation of Converis - which you can see in action on Kristen’s profile page.

Kristen had also kindly arranged for an early evening meal so that we had time to catch our plane back to Stockholm. It was a good chance to sample the local cuisine so I went for the reindeer – which I can heartily recommend.

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Posted in content, develop, Work

“Come help make the video to demonstrate the ROI of social media in higher ed”

Posted on 19 February 2010 | Leave a comment

via http://twitter.com/timeshighered/status/9336576439

RT @markgr: #highered peeps – Come help make the video to demonstrate the ROI of social media in higher edhttp://bit.ly/aVYj8m #hesmroi

Based on this idea…

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Posted in HE, marketing, social, Work

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New host

Posted on 15 February 2010 | Leave a comment

I *think* I’ve just finished transferring this blog from my own hosted version to the WordPress.com one. The aim being to not have to update the code anymore – it was boring and I’m a bit lazy!

The main difference is the template, since WordPress.com didn’t have the one I was using. I suppose I lose some control, but I sleep easier at night…

Hope there aren’t too many holes. Let me know if you find some!

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Posted in Personal

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We're making some important changes to your account

Posted on 22 July 2009 | Leave a comment

From Capital One:

Dear Mr Wilcox

In recent months, there has been a steady worsening of the economic environment making it necessary for us to review our customer’s accounts. As part of this review we’ve taken the difficult decision to increase some of our rates.

Is it just me or is that a bit of a non sequitur?

On the reverse side of the letter, a Questions and Answers section includes: “How do I opt out?”. It’s not completely hidden, but it’s not that obvious either.

I’m sure there will be Ts and Cs to this opt out, but I think this is one “difficult decision” that I will also have to take….

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Posted in not web

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The internet – costing or saving the planet?

Posted on 9 June 2009 | Leave a comment

This article… 

Schwarzenegger’s ebook plans are not a greener option

California’s plans to drop traditional textbooks in favour of online material will no doubt spare a few trees – but Arnie should be choosing the greenest option by rolling out dedicated e-reader devices at the same time, says Duncan Graham-Rowe

via Schwarzenegger’s ebook plans are not a greener option | Duncan Graham-Rowe | Environment | guardian.co.uk .

…plus a conversation with colleagues at coffee this morning has me thinking. If the Guardian article’s references are to be believed, I can deliver you a whole range of statistical snippets. Did you know that:

  • the pulping industry is the third largest consumer of fossil fuels;
  • it takes 10 litres of water to make one A4 piece of paper;
  • in the US alone, half a million trees are felled every week just for Sunday newspapers; 
  • reading an online newspaper for 30 minutes a day produces more emissions than reading a paper version;
  • the reverse is true if you read them for just 10 minutes;
  • Amazon’s Kindle DX uses electronic-paper displays which use hardly any energy to maintain an image (or text) on a screen.

I’d like to know how my team can quantify it’s output. We work hard, and produce, hopefully, some good web developments.

But the team uses energy to do the development work, and then the developed systems sit on servers consuming energy, and are delivered (over a network which consumes electricity) to users on PCs which also consume energy.  

Again, I wonder, can we work in IT in a Hannover Principles (PDF) kind of way? Anyone doing this? 

For those not in the know, The Hannover Principles (Design for Sustainability) are:

  1. Insist on rights of humanity and nature to co-exist
  2. Recognize interdependence.
  3. Respect relationships between spirit and matter.
  4. Accept responsibility for the consequences of design.
  5. Create safe objects of long-term value.
  6. Eliminate the concept of waste.
  7. Rely on natural energy flows.
  8. Understand the limitations of design.
  9. Seek constant improvement by the sharing of knowledge. 

Some sound airy-fairy, but check the detail. Can you argue with number 6, or 4, or 9?

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Posted in climate change, develop, manage, sustainability

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Living in the cloud

Posted on 8 June 2009 | 4 Comments

Since I got this netbook I’ve been trying to live life more in the cloud. Now that I have Windows 7 RC on it, I think I need to stay there so that I don’t lose too much if/when I need to re-install.

First off a few weeks ago I started getting our data backed up via Humyo. Seems pretty competitive on space/price. £5 per month for 100GB. Works in a fairly windows-centric way, and so far all our photos and non-music files are now ‘safely’ synced into the cloud. 10GB for free.

Also trying out Dropbox. Much simpler than Humyo, and nicer interfacing: very web2.0 unlike Humyo which is quite windows-like. $10 per month for 50GB, $20 for 100GB. Is it worth twice the price? 2GB for free as a taster (or 2.25GB if you use my referral link above).

Also enjoying very much Evernote. Much like OneNote in approach, but nicer media options (include audio, images, etc). Works off the web, or via an installed desktop client. A client is also available for many mobiles and the version on my HTC Touch HD works great. Also it OCRs any text it can see in screengrabs or uploaded images – including handwriting! Syncs across all instances and ‘just works’. 40MB upload per month for free.

So, to get this Netbook working – I’m going to install F-Secure, and then see if these various apps will play with Windows 7.

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Posted in develop, gadgets

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Installing Windows 7 on my Samsung NC10 Netbook

Posted on 8 June 2009 | Leave a comment

Here are the steps I took.

1. Ask via Twitter whether or not this would be a good idea!

Ben was kind enough to suggest that he would willingly let me try first… He was also kind enough  to point me at this helpful starting point

2. Step 1: formatting

Couldn’t find a USB stick with 4GB or more, so decided to use one of our new iomega eGo portable drives. It needed to be formatted as a bootable drive, which requires a quick formatting first. The drive is 320GB, so this has taken up most of the day! I’m following the steps on this article (via the first one).

2. Step 2: making boot

Make the drive bootable. The above article suggests I use bootsect from my Vista disk. Oh dear, I don’t have that to hand.

A quick google suggests using: Virtual Clone Drive with which I can mount the Windows 7 ISO I have already downloaded. Have downloaded and installed Virtual Clone Drive (didn’t require a restart, and does seem to just work).

Now back to Step 2. I did what the article said, and got the following:

f:\boot>bootsect /nt60 d:

Target volumes will be updated with BOOTMGR compatible bootcode.

D: (\\?\Volume{c67ac67a-4b61-11de-bcbb-bc67a65cb956})

Updated NTFS filesystem bootcode.  The update may be unreliable since the
volume could not be locked during the update:
Access is denied.

Bootcode was successfully updated on all targeted volumes.
f:\boot>

hmmm. so was that successful or not?

2. Step 3

All copied across OK.

2. Step 4

Get the Netbook to boot off the USB disk. Another quick google says I don’t need to amend the bios, just hold F2 down on a restart. Oh, hang on. That just brought up the bios settings screen. OK – so USB drive goes second after ‘USB CD’ and before the main HD.

Having re-checked I’ve got no data of importance on there… 

3. Here goes with a restart…

Clicking through the various options and warnings, the main choice seemed to be Upgrade or Custom? The ‘help me choose’ link advised me that there was no upgrade from XP, so I’ve gone for the full monty. 

The installer tells me this will take a while, and involve some reboots. Its now 8.25pm…

8.43pm. OK, this would have been about ten to fifteen minutes quicker if I hadn’t been side-tracked. The install got to a point where it wanted to reboot. But, after it came back from the reboot it wanted to start the installation again (as the external USB drive booted first and setup the install again). 

So, I suspected I should just cancel and reboot without the USB drive in the way, but I wasn’t sure and googled around a bit before figuring that, yes, you do need to get back in the bios, move the USB drive to lower down in the pecking order, and let it restart from the hard drive. 

It’s now “completing installation…”

8.54pm. into the setup screens

9.14pm. oh dear – it wanted my procut key. Dutifuly entered from the label underneath the netbook. I now have a spinning circle of animated lovliness which has been going for about ten minutes.

Maybe I should have un-checked the ‘Automatically activate Windows when I’m online’ box?  

[pause for sustanence & present wrapping!]

11pm. I’m writing this in Windows 7. In answer to the above, it was something wrong with the activation, and leaving this blank made it all work.

Success…

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Posted in develop, gadgets

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