Teaching with twitter ?

I have become mildly obsessed with Twitter - in part because it's exasperating - I can see a lot of use cases to do with getting the message out, eg York's use of twitter for system status messages - but they all turn into sand because of the inanity, spam and general irrelevance of much of the content on twitter.

However there's also been a thread of people trying to make the classroom experience (or perhaps even more the virtual classroom experience) better by providing ways for students to interact, for example there's Wild, and also a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about someone using twitter for classroom interaction.

All good, but why not use some inhouse micro blogging service, or in the case of online learning a chat and post facility ? Can it only be because of the hold twitter has on the group mind?

EasyJet and Ryanair

When we were overseas this year we used EasyJet and Ryanair for shorthaul flights inside Europe.

At the time I blogged that generally EasyJet were helpful and Ryanair out to gouge.

Well on one of our EasyJet flights one of our bags came back from baggage reclaim minus a couple of new items of clothing which had gone in still with the shop tags on. EasyJet were wonderful - even though we couldn't provide receipts (first rule of travel - throw nothing away) they were prepared to accept our reasonable and honest estimates and proposed a perfectly sensible settlement value. Not only that, they sent us a bank draft in Australian dollars to save us bank charges.

Somehow I feel if it had been Ryanair we'd have been told to piss off long ago. So the morals of the story are:

• If you have a choice - don't fly Ryanair - check for alternatives on BMIBaby, AerLingus and the rest - with Ryanair's extra fees you may not be as out of pocket as you think
  
• EasyJet are good people to deal with
• Keep every receipt and ATM docket - you might need them when you get home

Running

I've started running again after a fairly long layoff, basically because I was tired of being slightly overweight, and because quite frankly, at the age of 53 I could feel myself beginning to lose strength and fitness.

Riding my bike to work isn't really an option - too far, too hot, too much traffic - one of the downsides of living out in Fadden. (Weetangera was ok, only a couple of scary bits and they weren't really that bad)

So I got myself a pair of shiny new shoes from Running Warehouse and off I went. The first time I tweeted I'd started running again - something I put down to the adrenaline high, because my performance was pretty pathetic.

Today was better, not much but a little better - and in true geek fashion I've started keeping a note of how I'm going - check out http://scribbled.wikidot.com/running if you're interested ...

ChromeOS

writing from a position of partial ignorance here - all I've seen are the Google posts - but based on my experiences over the past year or so since I started playing with lightweight, ie old, machines - the newest and most powerful being my Asus netbook - aka the ookygoo.

The lessons learned can be summarised as:

• you don't need a whole lot of compute power
• you do need good internet access
• the operating system is basically just a launcher for the browser
• you spend most of your time in a browser

in fact you spend almost all your time in a browser. In fact I even find myself using zoho and google docs at work simply because it's easier. Both the Asus eee and Crunchbang linux show that realistically all you need is a reasonable user interface to the host operating system. And a decent display - eg google reader doesnt't display well in the Eee's 7" display - on the other hand this would be less of a problem on the slightly larger 10"/11" displays more common in current netbooks.

ChromeOs apparently uses a debian derived (apparently partly via Canonical/Ubuntu) to provide a fast browser launch - so your browser is the user interface, and as life's about the cloud these days that's all you should need (other than a 3G modem and a decent data contract ...)

The more interesting question is wether we will see ChromeOs bundled on machines to provide an instant-on environment the way Splashtop is on some devices, the instant-on environment providing an alternative to other more heavyweight environments with a marked startup time - the use cases including using the splashtop environment for flight checkins and email checking in snatched moments in a cafe but the heavyweight OS to run a preso ...

Playing hooky ...

Faced with an unseasonable 34C day and still waiting for the man to come and install the evaporative cooling system, we decided to play hooky and drive down to the coast.

Typically, by the time we got there the sky was full of dark threatening stormy looking clouds. Still squid and chips at the Quarterdeck in Narooma, a rootle round Tilba followed by a long walk along the beach at Camel Rock made for an excellent day.

What made it even more excellent was to be rewarded by the sight of a group of whales offshore waving their flukes. We watched to see if one would breach, but of course they didn't.

Fortunately I'd forgotten my camera, elsewise we'd have a montage of black blobs against a wine dark sea. We thought we might swim but the ocean was still cold after winter's storms, so after our free whale watch it was back up Brown Mountain in thick mist and back across the high plains to a cooler Canberra ...

slight complication in the epub game ...

good news and bad news time: Stanza does happily import pdf's and export them as epubs without difficulty. The bad news is that as most pdf's are created without a lot of the metadata fields filled in originating pdf, meaning the resulting epub created has the name of the document and the document author set to 'unknown'.

Stanza doesn't care - it opens the file you ask it to open and so if you've created a file called thing.epub it will open the file as thing.epub.

The Cool-er is annoyingly cleverer. It knows the file is an epub so it opens the epub file to display the document name - not the filename, and of course as the document name is unknown as it was never set in the original pdf that's what you get - a document called unknown (and often created by unknown). If you have two such documents it picks the first one it finds and doesn't display the second - logical but annoying.

So the next stage is to unpick an existing epub - edit the files appropriately and then zip them back together ....

a little later ...

which following the jedisaber.com tutorial turned out to be fairly easy.

Let us say we're editing a file called lnt.epub - my sequence was:

$ mv lnt.epub lnt.zip
$ unzip lnt.zip

edit the following files on the OEBPS directory using the text editor of your choice

content.opf
toc.ncx
title.xhtml

replacing all the unknowns with appropriate text - title, author etc

then

$ zip -r lnt.zip OEBPS/content.opf OEBPS/toc.ncx OEBPS/title.xhtml

(if you're feeling paranoid or your version of zip doesn't support this could be done as three separate commands)

$ mv lnt.zip lnt.epub

Check the result with Stanza. Now this is where there's a problem - in my version there are two spurious unknowns. Now originally I didn't edit the title.xhtml file and that produced an epub with four spurious unknowns. Editing the title.xhtml file got rid of two of them so I'm guessing there are a couple of other fields - and certainly changing the appropriate values in part1.xhtml got rid of the unknowns, even though I didn't change the values in part2.xhtml - something I thought might provoke an error by the application parsing the epub

Now I'm hacking this - the jedisaber tutorial doesn't mention doing this so I'm going to guess I'm working with a revision to the format which I don't quite understand as yet, certainly there should be a way of supressing these values ...

What also is clear that given a suitable application to extract text from a pdf and convert it to xhtml it would be reasonably simple to write a perl script to build the supporting files programmaticaly from a template.

It also means that it os relatively straightforward to anyone with text that can be converted to xhtml to package their books as epubs - an ideal way for small specialist publishers to redistribute their back list.

making epubs from pdf's

As I've said earlier, I've found that epub files are definitely easier to work with on e-readers than pdf's.

My initial thought was, given I've a reasonable amount of stuff in pdf format to convert it. But how?

PDF files are essentially modified postscript with some embedded metadata but epub is a zip file based format with a manifest, formatting css and the document source material in xhtml - conceptually not unlike an open office document file in structure.

My initial thought experiment, based in part a very useful howto on hand creation of epub files was to write a print driver (ok, a ppd) to print the pdf to xhtml based on public domain pdf to thext and pdf to html code, apply a default style and create a manifest based on the embedded metadata.

However Stanza also allows the saving of pdf files in epub documents. Given that they have the technology, and I suspect that their epub conversion is perhaps a little more sophisticated given both that their native format is epub and they are now an amazon subsiduary.

A bit of creative play might be in order ...