There’s been talk here of using software simulations, plonked in Blackboard, to teach things. Maybe I should dust off my physics honours project, a Semiconductor Simulation, that models the Fermi Level based on various initial conditions. It would certainly be interesting porting it from the original Fortran. I wrote it on an Amstrad something or other and stored it on a 5.25 inch floppy but I also had to print it out to bind it into the project submission so at least I have an archive of it. I envisage some light reading ahead.

Just a few things I should prolly look at next year. (more…)

Last week I got the chance to leave my locked office and head for the big city. Edinburgh to be precise, or Auld Reekie to give it its proper Scots name. The reason for my escape from the coding coalface was the second McShibb meeting at Telford College and Andy Swiffin had asked me to talk about something. So I put together a presentation on our experiences with the Shibboleth to Athens Gateway. (more…)

As part of the Guanxi migration to Spring, I took the opportunity to split the Service Provider into separate Engine and Guard projects, mainly to allow release of either without having to affect the other component. The Guard currently has Java (standard servlet filter, Struts RequestProcessor and Spring HandlerInterceptor) and PHP implementations, while the Engine is constant, in that it is a standalone identity. (more…)

Time’s been really tight on CTREP and I haven’t had time to read up on RDF resource index searching, so find collections in Fedora, I’ve been using XMLBeans to work with the Fedora web services but there doesn’t seem to be an up to date RDF XML schema, so when looking for object relationships I’ve had to break out to DOM land and do Node traversals to find what I need. Then I noticed XmlCursor and it became a whole lot easier. (more…)

Not content with putting a computer behind a wall and telling us to imagine it’s a person, the AI lot have now come up with possibly the most pointless gizmo yet invented in AI land. A professor has wired a moth to a pile of scrap metal that apparently uses the moth’s brain functions to “move out of the way” should you approach the teetering pile of junk. (more…)

I’ve now linked Fedora to Sakai using the architecture I outlined previously and here is the result. I’ve tested all the resource types and the only one that is causing problems is citations list: (more…)

I thought it was time I updated the cakeBlog as I was getting a bit fed up with the narrow layout and lack of widget support. So I plumped for the stardust theme and to celebrate the new look, I also knocked up a WordPress plugin to display Flickr images. There’s an example of the plugin in action on this page. You can download the plugin from here. (more…)