December 2006 - Posts
Here is the first of my 'Techie Things of the Year' awards, as voted for by me... (so please don't think these are terribly scientific!
Catergory 1. Handheld device
Shortlist: Apple iPod 5th Gen.
Imate JasJar.
Nitnendo DS LiteA shortlist of three devices that I use everyday - the iPod for music, the JasJar for email, and the DS Lite for games and web browsing
The
JasJar does one thing very well - allows me to access and respond to email. Its absolutely perfect for that - it just works, especially if you have an MS Exchange mail system. But it loses points because it looks ugly, has terrible battery life, and makes for rediculous phone, because of its size. The battery life in particular is a real problem for me. It spends more of it's time as a brick than anything else. I only remember to charge it if I'm going away for a day.
No such battery problems for the next two devices, largely because they don't need to be always on.
The
Nintendo DS Lite is brilliant! It looks great, feels great, and fullfils its function - ie it is fun! It just about has a serious use because of the web browser, althought the web browser is a little slow. If it had 3G it would win this.
But the winner is
Apple iPod 5G. I know, hardly innovative, and who'd want to watch videos or play games on it? But it's the one thing that I can't leave the house without. If I lost it I'd have to buy another the same day! Importantly, it does one thing (ie play music) better than any thing else. By better, I mean, that its is a joy to use, it looks great, it feels great, the battery life is fine, and it always works. For me at least decent multifunction devices are still a long way off!
I got a Nintendo Wii on Friday!
The Wii is the latest games console from Nintendo - in case you've missed the hype the Wii aims to changes the way people play games, making them fun to a much wider group of people. It aims to do this by changing the way you interact with games - instead of a joypad you have a 'Wiimote' - a motion sensing remote control that you wave around, miming whatever activity you are doing - using it as a tennis racket/sword/gun/fishing rod etc. I won't descibe it anymore - Google if you want to find out more. Here are my first impression...
Does the Remote actually work?
Absolutely! Staggering well in fact. Initial reports implied that it may be too sensitive/hard to control etc, but nothing could be further from the truth. It works perfectly, either as a pointer (eg choosing menu options etc) or, more impressively as a motion sensor. The Wii comes bundled with Wii Sports, that lets you use it as a tennis racket, baseball ball, bowling ball (just don't let go!), golf club, and the how things just works! It really, really does just feel like holding a bat etc. The sense of immersion is almost total (especially helped by the fact the Wiimote has a speaker, so you when you hit a ball it goes 'thwack' etc).
Does it really appeal to non-gamers?
Too right! These are the people that loved Wii-sports over the weekend!
Me! Gamer of 20 + years, so no surprises there...
My son - 9 years old - typical Nintendo target
My wife (normally hates games) - loved bowling and cow racing (don't ask...)
My mother-in-law (aka 'Grandma') - never played a game before - played for hours with my son, and loved the 'Mii' feature, where you could design your in game self.
Wife's friend's daughter (aged about 11)
In fact, my wife and mother-in-law happily played Wii Sports until nearly midnight, gradually getting more animated over a bottle of wine...
Are the graphics any good?
OK, it can't compete with PS3/XBox 360, but it doesn't need to. It's not about photo realism, it's about fun. To my eyes at least any of the consoles after the PS2 (ie Gamecube/Xbox etc) are more than adequate for most games.
Is it too much fun?
Maybe! See - http://www.wiihaveaproblem.com/ !!!
Hopefully I'll get time to add some videos/pictures shortly.
Great news! We've just had three student posts approved - two programmers and a designer. The posts, only open to current students, are for 12 hours a week for three months - full details, including rates of pay, will appear on the jobs section of the University web site shortly. We are looking for people to contribute to the development of myLearning Essentials and also to help with an exciting project that I can't say too much about at the moment.
We've not tried this before, but it seems like a great idea, as I'm sure we've got loads of talented students who can contribute, helping us improve our services as well as gaining valuable experience and (and obviously earn some money at the same time!).
We understand that the successful applicants will still be learning, so we can provide plenty of support. The programmers will need to be proficient in VB, and any web programming experience would help (most of our development is in VB.Net). It would be great if the designer was familiar with Flash, although that's not essential - good design flair is far more important.
If you are interested drop me an email (michael.webb@newport.ac.uk) to find out more.
There's been a lot of controversy in the University sector over Skype (software that gives free phone/video calls etc). Although it's obvious why people would want to use it there are two issues:
- Some University have reported that Skype causes huge amounts of network traffic.
- A default Skype install means that commercial traffic could/will be routed over the University's network (and therefore JANET), which may/could/is in breach of JANET's acceptable use policy.
Earlier this year Ukerna published a guide to Skype which, although useful, still didn't really clarify whether it was OK or not in terms of JANET.
Whilst looking for something completely different I found a minute from the UCISA networking group that seems to clarify the issue (see item 2.5). Essentially, running Skype in its default configuration is not allowed, due to the Supernode functionality, but there is an acceptable configuration, and the way to set this up has been documented in an excellent enter user guide by Oxford University - http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/network/voip/skype.xml .
This looks like good news - we'll produce our own local guides shortly (we really need to sort out a way of sharing this sort of thing properly, but that's another topic...)
I'm sure you've all noticed the amount of spam around is increasing all the time. What most people don't realise is exactly how much we actually receive. The year before last the University received about 2 million spams. Last year is was around 9 million, and at the moment it's not uncommon to get over 1 million each week! The bulk of this is rejected before it ever reaches anyone's inbox (despite what it may feel like on occassions). But how does it get people's addresses? And where does it come from?
There are two main types of spam - dictionary attacks, where the spammer attempts to guess likely email addresses, and targetted spam, where the spammer has your email addresses.
The bulk of the spam we receive is dictionary attack spam and this almost never guesses our user email addresses correctly (it never puts the 'dot' in). However, it will guess some of our more obvious deparmental and general addresses, eg appointments@newport, admin@newport.ac.uk etc. Any single word address will be very susceptable to dictionary attack spam. We've a number of departmental group email address that have a single word name and probably don't need to be visible externally, and will be reviewing these, as stopping external access to these could reduce the amount of spam some people get considerably.
If you get a spam email that is addressed to you personally it will be because the spammer has got you email address from somewhere - usually a web site, by a spambot. We need to review how we make our email addresses available if we want to cut down the amount of this sort of spam we receive.
Where does the spam come from? Usually from 'Botnets' computers that have been compromised without their owners knowing, and are then used to send millions of spams. Because so many computers across the internet are compromised in this way, stopping them is almost impossible.
We try to stop spam reaching people by running spam filters. At the moment only about 8% of incoming mail actually gets allowed through - the rest we know is spam. The problem is that spammers are constantly coming up with new ways of defeating spam filters. For example you may have noticed a growing trend in spam messages containing only pictures, as spam filters can analyse text fairly easier, but can't analyse pictures in any detailed way.
Spam filters have settings, so we can control what is let through based on how confident the filter is that the message is spam. This is always a difficult judgement to make - if we set it too low too much spam gets caught, and if we set it too high legitimate mail will get caught as spam. We've increased the settings recently after reviewing was gets caught and what doesn't.
Another side effect of the increase in spam is that the increase in load on our mail system, in particular the spam filters, can mean that email sometimes takes a little longer to deliver. Going off on a slight tangent, email is a queue based system, and isn't designed to be instant, although because it is often very fast, the general perception is the email should always be instant. Obviously Instant Messaging (IM), as its name implies, is instant, and maybe we should be educating users that it is a more appropriate tool to use in some cases. Its a difficult one though, although IM is widely used for personal use (more than email possibly) it hasn't really gained acceptance as business tool.
We've recently added more hardware to our system to try to ensure mail is delivered as quickly as possible, and I'm sure we'll have to continue adding more as spam increases. However, I'm sure that at some point the spammers will win (and I don't mean against us, I mean against all email systems). I know this sounds defeatist, but email as we know it (ie SMTP based, for the techies) was designed in a friendly academic enviroment, and, under the bonnet, just isn't suited to the internet today. There are many debates about what a suitable replacement should be, but replacing such a universal system is a near impossible task. I won't go into the details here, but here's an article that explains more (its three years old, but not much progress had been made since then!)
Anyway, to end on a more positive note, we've just added an extra spam filter, so hopefully University email users will get much less spam for a while - let me know (I'm sure you will!).