The Blog: An Update
Jul0
Just to let you know I’ve tidied up the old blog entries, so they now look much nicer and most of the photos have captions. The hotel in Banff also allows me to upload photos from my memory cards, so I’ll hopefully do a ‘best of’ collection for you soon.
Blackboard Updates
Jun0
Today our great and extraordinarily expensive VLE goes down for some upgrades to prepare it for the next academic year, where it’s taken out of the hands of the unfortunate computing students who have been giving it a thorough hammering and replaces the venerable and admittedly shit Virtual Campus.
Will we get features we have been asking for like RSS feeds of course content? Will we finally be able to use the message boards without Java? Will the university finally get it into its head that not everybody uses Word, and perhaps some form of PDF document would be far nicer? Will the academic staff decide on a single, sensible format for all the content so you don’t have to remember how each individual tutor stores their notes?
Probably not. Still, any update which requires the entire system to be taken offline for several hours is either going to be a nice improvement, a major behind-the-scenes set of tweaks, or a total cock-up. I await the results with great anticipation.
Inca Updates
May0
As you may know, I run a small web server by the name of Inca. I’ve also just gone and done a huge set of updates – it now has the latest versions of just about everything.
Hooray for cPanel, it makes my life easy.
Bleeding Edge Again
May0
Just so you don’t worry too much, I am currently running the v2.6 bleeding-edge version of WordPress whilst I prod some features. This means there will almost certainly be some problems somewhere around the site (I’ve spotted a couple), but they shouldn’t be show-stopping. I’m also going to be doing regular SVN updates from the trunk so it should be as stable as any development version is going to be.
Go WordPress! Go SVN!
It Really Just Works
Apr0
My iPhone has been playing silly buggers for a few days now, so I decided to bite the bullet and do a restoration on it. Having had some experience of restoring various gadgets to factory settings and the subsequent pain of getting them back how I liked them, this was something I approached with no small amount of trepidation.
Dock iPhone… it shows up in iTunes and predictably throws up an Unknown Sync Error (-39). No worry, I’ve already decided to click the “Restore” button. A single approval window appears, and I confirm my intent.
iTunes goes away and unpacks the new firmware, wipes my phone, re-flashes it and then restarts it without any input from me. I even went and played on Facebook whilst it was getting on with it. Next thing I know, the iTunes icon is merrily bopping away in my Dock and asking me if I would like to set my iPhone up as a whole new device or if it should just restore my backup.
Simply put, I restored my backup and it’s currently got all my settings (As far as I can tell) absolutely as I left them and is busy restoring all my media/contacts/email and so on. Apple wins for easy fixing of mildly broken phone, infinitely easier than fixing most other broken devices, even those with so-called ‘one-click recovery’. Even so, it worries me that people feel the need to put in a big “Fix It” button no matter how easy to use it is. Perhaps a more elegant solution would be an option tucked away in a menu, and a ‘cock-up counter’ which automatically asks you something like “Your device has failed to sync properly the past 10 times you have docked it – would you like to run an automated recovery and restoration of your backup?”