As a group, the Integrated Technologies folk here have started thinking about how to test what we produce and what sort of options are open to us, both as software engineers and learning technologists. Having worked in software testing for a time many years ago and finding it interesting, I thought I’d write down some of the techniques I’ve used and am still using to test the software and systems I produce. (more…)

We’re currently using the Shibboleth to Athens gateway in production, which lets us login to My Athens using our institutional credentials and it’s all fine and dandy. Shibboleth seems to work just fine and the users have set up their ecosystems in the various dynamic services such as RefWorks. The community were of the opinion, helped along by JISC information, that the gateways would be funded up until 2011. So there would be no need for a financial outlay in using the gateways until then. Or so we thought. (more…)

Guanxi codename “haggis” release, in honour of the Bard! (more…)

I was reading this post on the Fishbowl and thought I’d give it a go. So hot on the heels of my code generation using Google, here’s my Web 2.0 defined album!

Fred Ahern, “All the other ages you’ve been”

I was reading an interesting article by Jeff Atwood on Understanding User and Kernel Mode and it got me thinking back to my printer driver days and the time I used to develop in kernel mode on Windows NT4 and how, looking back on those days, it related to the practice of eremitism, which is defined by dictionary.com as:

“monasticism characterized by solitude in which the social dimension of life is sacrificed to the primacy of religious experience” and “The state of a hermit; a living in seclusion from social life”

I wouldn’t go so far as to claim a religious experience but kernel mode debugging with SoftICE was in many ways the act of a hermit retiring from the world for a few days to experience a spiritual solitude in the digital cave. (more…)