Mobile Mainframe

Well a few weeks back I released rfid Learning Table to the wild and was surprised to find that not everyone else’s PC was identical to mine. ;)  Turns out some folks really did buy Vista and install it on their PC. After sitting down and thinking about that for a while, I realised I would have to find out what was going wrong for my newly found Vista customers.

I booted Vista in VMWare’s excellent VMware Workstation and got to testing. The Learning Table Editor worked fine, but for some reason the Player application kept complaining it couldn’t find the multimedia files to play back.

A little more investigation found that Vista had determined the files were user data and media files and had simply changed the physical location and path to where the files were stored on the PC! Now it wasn’t a bad location it put the files in and really, I probably should have put them there in the first place, but I didn’t and instead had them in the same folder as the executable. Vista was doing a good job of redirecting the Editor to look in the new location, but didn’t do the same for the Player and that’s where the fun started for our Vista customers.

So back into the code and after a day and a half of testing the new and improved rfid Learning Table was Vista compatible.

Anyway it was a good lesson and reminder to delve into the world of Vista a bit more and learn what else has changed...

Trojan 2.0 Crafted Using Web 2.0 Technology

Blogger, MySpace, and Facebook can provide an easily accessible place to store stolen data until it can be collected and deleted, security researchers warn.

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204800655

Interesting read about the possibility of an extension to HTML to support video easily in browsers.

http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/07/12/07/Mozilla-Opera-look-to-make-video-on-the-Web_1.html

So far I have only seen mentioned one application for Second Life that makes sense to me. The suggestion was to use Second Life as a way to simulate the drug trade, so students could see and interact with this culture as part of their learning, without placing themselves or their teachers at harm.

The thing is that everything else I see is something that could be done just as effectively or more so, using other online tools or heaven forbid, in a classroom.

So what is the attraction of Second Life? Is it the promise of what future virtual world technologies might do? What about its fairly significant technical limitations?

If you are using Second Life in teaching I would love to hear how and why you use it?

It’s not like I am opposed to new ways of delivering content, heck I came up with rfid Learning Table, but somehow this one is escaping me.

Maybe it’s the cheesy pre Commodore Amiga generation graphics. J

If you enjoy stories with a message, that are fun to read, then you might want to check out the stories here, from www.businessballs.com.

Well its coming up to Christmas, so I have decided to finally get around to making a toy fort for the boys. Spent a little while browsing the web for inspiration and came across this site, which has some wonderful old fretwork patterns you can download.

Seen driving the streets of Sydney...

Well it’s not every day that the company you buy a car from invites you to Oran Park for the day, so I thought I should take up the offer! Mazda Australia have a great Advanced Driver Training Day they offer free to owners of their higher performance cars and sports models.

It’s a great day out and you learn a lot more about your car and how it will respond in emergency situations as well as the theory behind a lot of the technology and acronyms that litter a modern car and most people don’t look at again after reading the sales brochure. You also tend to learn a little about your own responses and limitations too in a safe environment, which is of course the whole point of the exercise.

Also great to see some of the members of the OZMazda forums were in attendance too. The forums is  a great resource if you own or are looking at buying a Mazda and is worth a look.

The driving instructors were great and it is a lot of fun. This is the second such course I have attended and put simply, there is no way I will allow my two sons to get a driver’s license when they are old enough without attending one of these courses.

If you have never done a course like this, there are advanced driving schools in all states that run similar courses. This will be a great investment in being a safer driver for your family, so go and grab your significant other and book a day now!

Action stations! After receiving a briefing from our instructor, we all head back to our cars to start the slalom part of the training. My car is the black Mazda 6 MPS is the background.

From the drivers seat as I wait for my turn. In front of me a sea of Mazda 3 MPS's and a lonesome Mazda 3 SP23.

Team MX5. There was a good selection of RX8's, MX5's, MPS 6's and MPS 3's at the day.

Highlight of the day is at the end, where you are allowed to do sixteen laps of the main Oran Park circuit at a very good rate of knots. :) Certainly learn't to have a new appreciation for  the handling and perfomance of the MPS 6, which is an awesome car.

At the end of the day we all went home with our certificate, a bag of goodies from Mazda, some new skills, some old skills sharpened and hopefully some bad driving habits broken.

My thanks to Mazda Australia for the day.

P.S. For the geeks among'st you these photos were taken on a HTC Touch phone camera.