Michael.Wilcox

The internet – costing or saving the planet?

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…

Installing Windows 7 on my Samsung NC10 Netbook

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…

BBC Today: Professor Hans Rosling

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…

Global warming causes 300,000 deaths a year

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…

Chair of Governors

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…

I've been podcasted (nearly)

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 Hannover Principles

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…

More Drupal support

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…

Vista on my laptop

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…