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Some people where I work have started signing themselves up for Yammer accounts. If you haven't seen Yammer it is rather like a sort of group blog and twitter which enables you to send short text messages telling colleagues what you are doing. So far I haven't been overly impressed. Comments consisting of "Working on presentations for awayday" or "Been dealing with software issues and emails all morning" aren't uncommon. Some people are using it rather like a forum. I'm left wondering what is wrong with a forum. But then I don't like twitter and am not even that keen on Facebook; although this last does bring people from all round the world together which has to be a good thing. What do you think? To test my theory that age old forums are better than Yammer and twitter you can write what you like on a bulletin board at http://www.googlingyou.com/smf/. It would be good if someone expressed some opinion or other, especially if you have strong feelings about privacy. |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 17 July 2009 )
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Can't see Director Shockwave content? |
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You might not have the free plugin from Adobe/Macromedia which is available here at the time of writing. There have been some fairly major problems with Director Shockwave and Vista 64 bit. That is, until recently it didn't install on 64bit systems. The latest version at the time of writing is 11 and that does. However versions from 10.3 to 11 (so far) do not deal properly with lights in 3d worlds, so the lighting model doesn't always function as it should. Basically the default lighting always seems to be 'on', even when the default lights have been turned off or replaced with others. As usual Adobe haven't been overly forthcoming, so it is difficult to know whether to spend time trying to fix this on a movie by movie basis or to wait for Adobe to fix the plugin so it works as it used to. Let me know what you think. Quick update - at the present time the Shockwave player doesn't even seem to work in IE 8 on Vista but then I haven't investigated and probably won't spend the time as Adobe seem to want to abandon it as a product. It does seem to work OK on everything else |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 17 August 2009 )
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Max has a DWF file format which Autodesk seem to be pushing. It even has its own Publish to DWF item in the file menu while more traditional formats are hidden away in the Export dialog box. I assumed no one would have the plugin so thought files in this format would be fairly useless from the point of view of the regular web user. Not only that, but as a viewer of 3d content it has some limitations. The method of moving round the model is not always intuitive and might well annoy anyone who has used more or less any 3d game software at all. It does have some nifty features; you can make parts transparent or hide them and can select and highlight items by clicking on them. You can also 'remember 'where you have been. Even so I am pleasantly surprised that the quickly made DWF files I have uploaded get quite a lot of hits. So if anyone does want me to upload any more models in this format I'll happily do so. Just let me know. Again, if anyone is going to use any of these models for non commercial educational purposes please let me know and give me a credit and a link. |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 07 March 2007 )
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With hyper-real models you can examine something in many ways, Besides running through, turning round, picking up, putting down, taking apart, showing and hiding you can see how they change over time. At the moment, for example, we can do all sorts of things like walk around a medieval house and see how people used to live. Now for almost the first time we can also follow the way the house looked and how it was used through different times travelling as fast or as slowly as we like. It is quite wonderful to be able to see the building, the people and the artefacts change. Previously this was impossible. In the past if you built a model you could walk round it. If it was small you could pick it up. That was it. You were stuck with it. We are the first generations to be able to change our models dynamically. It is a kind of vision in 4 dimensions. We can show whole palaces changing over time, we can hide parts or make walls transparent and produce instant cutaways. You can even walk run or fly through models at will. You can see the parts of a building that are usually hidden or locked. There need be no private or hidden areas, although you can easily add these along with key finding or quest type game interactions if you wish. The technology to put hyper-real models on the web isn't quite here yet. But it is close and will be here within the next year or so and at present there are workarounds we can use. We can already build models or anything we like and show them on the web with video or game software. In the Historic Houses section are a few 3d models, interactions and flash movies which we can quickly turn into web based, extremely realistic models as soon as the technology arrives. At present these models are more like quickly built impressions rather than scholarly recordings, but they are useful teaching aids and are quite fun to look at. |
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 18 February 2007 )
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For reasons I've yet to confirm lots of images on this site sometimes go missing. Even the media managers thumbnails for many of them do not show up, but the pictures themselves are there. Honestly! I think it mostly affects people using the full Norton Internet Security Suite. As far as I know everyone else can see them. If you can't, or if you know why they aren't showing up for some people, I would appreciate it very much if you let me know by email or by the web form under 'Contact Us '. Good would be to include a screenshot or maybe the problematic URL or article title. By adding this site to your trusted list all the images should show up. With thanks |
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 28 January 2007 )
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I've been impressed by IE7 so far. However it doesn't come with a spell check which is a major drawback and there is at the time of writing a more limited number of plugins available than Firefox users have access to. For whatever reason, maybe startup speed, I still tend to use IE more than Firefox although the latter is the better browser. Because IE7 doesn't have a spell check I downloaded and installed iespell. It sounded promising although I rather unwisely did not read the manual. Unfortunately as soon as I started to use it in this installation of Joomla it quickly became apparent that the rich text editor did not work anymore and the page now reports as having errors. I'll have to look into these. Even worse when I uninstalled it the errors continued. Maybe I'll have to read the manual and maybe use system restore. I'd recommend staying away from iespell for a while. |
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The first blog I used was WordPress. I chose it because it had the nicest templates and did exactly what I wanted it to do. This may account for why I like it so much. Then after a fairly comprehensive evaluation of a few opensource products I felt able to recommended it for a while. I looked at quite a few blogs and seriously considered moving to b2evolution. It is certainly a full featured product, is mostly very easy to use and has an increasingly large number of attractive pre-made themes. For a long time its anti-spam system was much better, but now WordPress is using the Akismet plugin and has a 1 click delete spam button. It seems to me that this is far easier to use than the present B2Evolution system, which can be a little confusing, so at present I’ll stick with WordPress. I'd like it if you would let me know about your favourite blog software out there so I can have a look at it.
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