or What do we mean by improvement. Improvement generally means a measurable positive change in something over time. read more...

Check out the rest of my photographs on Flickr Last week I made the pilgrimage, on my bike, in the rain to the Futuresonic conference and festival. Not a huge pilgrimage to be honest as it takes place in Manchester down at the Contact Theatre, but an important event nonetheless which collides the worlds of technology, music and art. read more...

Module 1: Analysing the Professional Context This is a piece of assessed coursework for my Masters Degree in case you were wondering why there is a 4000 word blog post suddenly appeared. Please bear with my while I fix all the formatting and cross a few 'i's and dot a few 't's. read more...

You know what I'm like, brain always ticking over and getting sidetracked onto tangents. A couple of times in the last week or so I've seen people moan about something on twitter and thought "You know what, I could make something out of that" First off was an idea for some kind of twitter enabled nutrition and weight-loss service inspired by Jon The Beef - something along the lines of "you tell it what you had for lunch and it works out your calorie intake". read more...

On Wednesday night at Manchester's burgeoning Social Media Cafe or #smc_mcr for short I ran a slightly impromptu session on Mashups. The idea was initially that after getting over the initial hurdle of making sure everyone knew what a mashup actually is or could be we would share some ideas and our favourite ones that we had come across. read more...

The other week I bought a new and rather brilliant digital SLR camera: an Olympus E-510. I am very very pleased with it and have been obsessively carrying it around with me and taking pictures. read more...

Being a bit fed up with my mobile phone costing that wee bit too much I am switching providers to T-Mobile. In fact I started out with them (as One2One) back in 1997 and have thence been through Orange and O2 contracts and more phones than I can remember. read more...

While bumbling around the country on trains doing my job over the last few months I've been doing a lot of thinking about the concept of Personal Learning Environments and ePortfolios - and exactly what a nice ePortfolio system might look like. The point would be to break out of the confines of web-based portals and Virtual Learning Environments, putting the control over what is going on in the hands of the end user (and not the institution) through a bunch of little easy to use tools they can use to organise themselves. read more...

I've done quite a bit of work on Samscam over the past few months - and something which has been in the back of my mind has been the matter of search-engine-friendly URLs. Back in the good old days at Can, the xserve it all ran on let me use paths like this: http://something/script/384347 where "script" is in fact a file called "script. read more...

On the first day of Christmas (well, a week or two before) Our internet connection went down On the second day of Christmas we phoned for some support Pipex can't do nothing and our internet connection went down On the third day of Christmas we tried tinkering with the wires Tried two different routers Pipex can't do nothing and our internet connection went down On the fourth day of Christmas we just had to get online Fifty-six K modem Two different routers Pipex can't do nothing and our internet connection went down On the fifth day of Christmas they booked an engineer Five wee-eeks wait Fifty-six K modem Two different routers Pipex can't do nothing and our internet connection went down On the sixth day of Christmas I phoned them up again Six hours on hold Five wee-eeks wait Fifty-six K modem Two different routers Pipex can't do nothing and our internet connection went down . at which point I think we can skip a few . read more...

The past few years of working on web related technologies has taught me many things of which one of the salient lessons was, "never ever do anything with Javascript and expect it to work. " However it didn't take into account the other salient lesson "what goes around comes around" as Javascript has suddenly become highly trendy in the form of AJAX. read more...

After many months of not being bothered followed by a few more months of waiting for the order to be processed and then a few days of too many other things to do I have finally installed Tiger, the latest revision of the Mac OS. And well it's not really made a lot of difference to my small little life other than having given me the excuse to give our various machines a good old clean-out. read more...

Digital Exchange Products of Leigh has finally made good on the issue of my damaged laptop and provided us with a brand new shiny version of the same thing. We had to endure the school run while passing through various bits of Farnworth and Tyldesley when going to pick it up but the immense feelings of sortedoutness and a nice sunny day made up for it. read more...

I bought this book today, Java in a nutshell (along with a copy of the Origin of Species which I'm supposed to manage to read by Sunday morning - fat chance). Anyway, the Java book has some very nice reviews by chinese people on the o'reilly website which made me laugh. read more...

I had an idea this morning when I heard that Estee Lauder was dead. The results are not infallible but can be found here. read more...

Dan mentioned that I've not got comments on this blog at the moment. Lo and behold, here be comments. read more...

I rarely jump on slashdot bandwaggons, but as there has recently been a certain amount of hysteria as to how the internet makes people into homicidal perverts I thought I might mention this: www. worldofends. read more...

As I've bought a nice shiny device recently I feel like convincing myself that what I got was good value for money. The Register today reviews the IBM T41p, a windows laptop which costs about 800 pounds more than what I paid for my 17-inch PowerBook. read more...

And am not stoned yet. Wonders never cease. read more...

I've got a new and shiny toy/personalproductivitytool/widowmaker/computer and blimey it's nice. I am particularly impressed with the battery life (used it on and off for a whole evening without plugging in), the speed with which it wakes up when you open the lid (instant), snappiness when playing with databases (it's all kitted up with mySQL and stuff now) and am very much looking forward to the wireless box and fancy designer rooksack. read more...

Supposedly, Mattel is continuing in it's proud tradition of creating slightly crazy high tech items with a LINUX distribution called BarbieOS for a revised version of their B-Book laptop. Before you sneer, operating systems for kids are a VERY GOOD IDEA. read more...

Apparently two guys have discovered a new method of generating electricity from water - pretty fab I think. All we will need to do is shake it about a bit and, hey presto, a whole micro-amp of current. read more...

As you can see, the new and improved fancynews is back sooner than expected. All thanks to the object-orientated architecture of Samxom - create another instance, point it at a different folder, and off we go. read more...

Well, here is the aforementioned redesign. <br/>Samscam now runs on a hotchpotch of PHP using Smarty templates. read more...

Jackob Neilsen is up to his old tricks, informing the unwashed masses how to deal with information pollution. The BBC say the following:<br/> Web guru fights info pollution But the net is now so much an machine with all the answers instantly, it has mutated into a "procrastination apparatus", which spews information without much prioritisation Dr Nielsen argues. read more...

Samscam is likely to change soon. I'm going to promote the Gallery and put it on the front page. read more...

Having read said article on Nanobots I think I should say that I find these areas of research fascinating. Not only will we be able to turn the earth into grey goo, but we could make the human race into cyborgs by injection - or even sexual transmission. read more...

I've had a slightly annoying exchange of email with the technical people at Guardian Unlimited today. A story entitled Nanotech moves the future to a new level which appeared in this morning's fancynews trawl had a broken link. read more...

Today is SysAdminAppreciationDay - a much more worthy celebration than InternetShoppingDay. I think I admin a sys or two and would greatly appreciate any gifts or appreciation. read more...

Just remember - software piracy is bad m'kay. Jackie found this charming video somewhere - appears to be popular in blogworld at the moment. read more...

Today the linkorama is out of control. I haven't finished it. read more...

I've been quite enjoying doing the fancynews things, but decided this morning that drag and drop was not good enough. I thought I'd try using Blagg to do it for me instead. read more...

I'm trying out some news aggregation, to go down the right hand side of the front page. It's probably going to involve writing another blosxom plugin. read more...

Apple have managed to launch the G5 which I suppose can only be a good thing. The guy from the mac shop won't have them next week though. read more...

The rumourmills are going into overdrive today, awaiting Steve Jobs' keynote speech at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. Expectations include: G5 PowerMac Towers (with PowerPC 970 processors) 15 inch Aluminium PowerBooks The new version of OSX (aka Panther) It has become rather traditional for Steve to have something up his sleve, and as I'm after a laptop, my hope is that it will be the inclusion of the 970 in the whole PowerBook range. read more...

As a self-confessed geek I am often asked to help people with their computers. To avoid spending all my time dealing with such matters I have written some stock answers to the questions I get most frequently. read more...

I spent hours on the phone last week to a friend who is having terrible trouble with his computer. This afternoon I decided to write an article which might (hopefully) deflect some of this kind of thing in future. read more...

I've been running this blog for nearly a month now, and I'm getting a little fed up with having to categorise things into folders. As regular readers will note I've totally re-arranged everything today, but of course the categories overlap. read more...

I think I'm about to crack. I've been after a new powerbook for ages and have been trying to find a 17 incher to drool over. read more...