jonobacon@home

Today I headed over to Coventry to do a talk for the brand new undergraduates on a multimedia and creative computing course. It was their first day today and it was decided they should be plonked in front of me for an hour, poor bastards. I gave them my opensource cool talk, and it went [...]

The hectic week continues, and some good and bad things have happened. Being the optimist that I am, lets start with the bad thing. This specific bad thing lies in the form of pure, unadulterated incompetence from amazon.co.uk. Deep breath Jono…deep breath… As many of you will be aware, I have an Amazon Wish List. [...]

The WMITA talk yesterday went well and it was great to see such a positive reaction to Open Source. I am sure that I will be hearing from a number of the delegates in the coming months. After the event in the morning, I headed back to Birmingham to have a birthday lunch with my [...]

Sheesh its early. I got up today at 5.20am to head over to a WMITA event to talk about Open Source and how it can help businesses. At the event I will be demoing XAMPP, Mambo/Joomla! and WordPress on Windows. Windows is the chosen OS as most of the delegates will be Windows bods. Well, [...]

Had a superb birthday yesterday; thanks for all of your birthday wishes. I am pleased to report that with the help of the bald, I got my SIP phone plugged in and working. It is all working a treat. I have just written and released a new O’Reilly Weblog article entitled Opening the potential of [...]

Wow, 26 years old. This one crept around a bit quicker than usual; I think this happens when you start the process of old-fartification. The mystery present from Sooz was a suberb VoIP phone. Sooz always gets me cool presents – I had not been asking for a VoIP phone, but she thought of it [...]

Kat, I do think formalised education does have a place, but I think your comments are really taking about the huge benefits of mentoring. I am a big fan of mentoring, and anyone who was lucky enough to have a good lecturer benefits greatly working with an inspirational teacher. My cynicism is that as university [...]

Good night last night. Luckily woke up this morning without too much of a hangover. Props to Ron for a great talk about Asterisk. Donald Norman speaks the truth. I am also getting a little tired of the fanfare pushed towards Google regarding usability. There is no doubt that Google were pioneers in providing a [...]

This morning I did a presentation about building dynamic websites with the LAMP platform. The seminar was well attended and the response was positive. We also managed to unload a load of Ubuntu Hoary CDs onto the unwitting delegates. One of the slides in the presentation also discussed XAMPP and it never ceases to stop [...]

Seems to be an interesting day for usability. With the unveiling of the Office 12 interface, its balance of aesthetics and usability seems rather contrived. Taking a look at the shots, it seems like a step back in usability in some areas. Take a look at the following shot: The first thing that strikes me [...]