2010/06/23

Conference in Edinburgh - UCISA : Reducing Costs Through Technology and Infrastructure







Sitting in hotel room before the conference tomorrow and thought I'd make a few notes before attending.

The subject of saving money in HE is a hot topic at the moment obviously wi the cuts expected over the next few years likely to make the "tight budgets" of the last few years seem like we've all been wallowing in money. Figures like 25% cuts in government funding in HE have been banded about, and while government money is not the only source of income for (most?) HEIs, it is a very large part and cuts of that depth will not be possible with minor changes to working practice or even reorganisation/mergers.

From my point of view supporting the use of IT I know there is huge scope for IT to be used more effectively to streamline business processes - although translating such efficiencies to cost savings would be another matter that is much more complicated and not technical.

The keynote starting the day tomorrow is "How to save money - best practice in contract management, asset management and procurement" by Gartner UK Ltd. Since UoP is currently looking to renew it's fleet of leased PCs this should be interesting.

The next session "Smarter, cheaper, Greener" is perhaps a statement of the trinity looked for with IT, where each is follows from the former. Since UoP gained the top spot in the recent People an Planet green league table I clearly think we're doing pretty well on the green front already, but there is still huge scope for improvement (eg we have yet to master the power management of the fleet to allow us to realise the extra power/cost/environmental impact savings we had aimed for - with vPro being a little too new in the fleet we took on and needing a lot of kinks ironing out) and there is certainly much scope for working smarter.

Next is a session looking at outsourcing e-mail. I've seen presentations on this before at JISC/UCISA events over the last few years and I've been sold on it as probably the right solution for at least a year and I'm glad that this has now been approved to move ahead with in UoP recently - again, it should be interesting and timely.

"Printing your own money" looks to be about the savings possible by better printing management - which is another hot topic at UoP, and one that has historically caused much debate. I recently visited Cornwall College to see how they had implemented their lean print strategy (using Canon's Uniflow solution), and in particularly how they had "solved" the resistance from the grass roots to having small local printers removed. Unfortunately, the main answer to that question seemed to be that they started with a very flaky old unreliable fleet of small local devices such that users were generally happy to have larger consolidated devices as they worked! Since we're not in that position at UoP I'm not sure we can translate their experience usefully, but the product itself does look very useful. I look forward to seeing if this session introduces any new approaches we'll be able to learn from.

The final session is "Redefine your technology strategy" - I'm not sure of the details of this right now (I didn't copy the outline to the iPhone to check while writing this on the iPad), but I can see that an IT strategy needs to be focusing on delivering real business efficiencies and cost savings ahead of developments of new services.
Edit: checking the programme, it appears this last session has been dropped and the earlier sessions given more time - with one session less, the cost/benefit of attending this conference so far from Plymouth is looking even less clear! :(

(photo is taken from the hotel window as sun set over the city - "enhanced" using a few apps on the iPad...not very subtly :)

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2010/06/13

iPad apps review - RDP







This is another app I had already on the iPhone which added a "free" improved version for the iPad, RDP is very useful to be able to remotely access my work PC laptop when I need to do something that can only be done on a PC or where I only have the data on the laptop hard disk. As such, this app alone make it much more practical to use the iPad as my sole computing platform (OK, the only one I have to actually carry around with me!)

This app works very well, although I wish it had a way to automatically enable the VPN connection before trying to connect as that little detour into the iPad settings before launching the app is something I'm always forgetting until it fails to connect and then it dawns on me why.

I have also needed to install a little app from no-ip on the laptop to publish it's IP to whenever it changes as for some reason, the DNS entry for my machine on campus fails to work. I suspect this is due to my over zealous firewall on the laptop rather than any short fall of this app :)





What else do I need to say about this app? Oh, it has a bit of an odd way of dealing with keyboard entry and mouse events. The keyboard will work with the external Bluetooth keyboard with the iPad, but delete is always very slow on both the external and virtual keyboard. Normal typing is fine and keeps up, but delete takes almost a second to register and drops rather than buffers the key presses. The mouse foibles are dictated by having a touch screen with no mouse over or right click, so the app provides an icon to toggle the mouse behaviour accordingly. This also includes a "wheel mouse" mode for scrolling, but I've never actually used that to know if it works.

The pro version of this app allows keyboard macros to be set up and connection details for oodles of devices to be added and then chosen from a list. I can't actually remember how many as I've only ever needed 2, but it's a screen full of slots :)

The app only allows a choice of 8bit or 16bit graphics for the connection, and it would be nice to be able to tell windows to fall back to a simpler presentation without wallpaper etc as the RDP client in Windows allows, but with a decent wifi connection, or even 3G, the lag dealing with the better graphics isn't too bad so this isn't essential unless you needed to use GPRS - in which case, you probably need a terminal service instead. :)

If you need to access machines running different OS too, you probably also need to use VNC rather than RDP, in which case it would probably be best to install that on any PCs too, so again, this wouldn't be the app for you.

Summary - does what it says on the tin, but only right if you need what's in the tin :)

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iPad apps review - BlogPress


BlogPress was my preferred app for editing and posting blog posts on the iPhone and is one of those apps that includes the improved features for the iPad in a single app, which means I effectively get the better interface on the iPad "for free". I had expected more of the iPhone apps to work this way, but have been disappointed and now resigned to having to pay for the better versions in most cases.

The editor in BlogPress is very simple, providing very few tools to help composing posts (no bold, italic etc shortcuts) instead relying on the author to include any HTML mark up needed. The only concession it does make it to include a tool to add images which can be scaled to a thumbnail with a link to the original with both thumbnail and original uploaded and the link added.

So what features do I like? Well, mostly it's the number of different blog formats it supports which critically for me includes both Google's blogger and Wordpress. (if anyone knows a tool that works with Sharepoint blogs behind custom HTML authentication then that would allow me to post to my other work blog too).


Is that all it's good for I hear you ask? Well, no. It also allows the images to be uploaded to a whole range of services, uploading video to YouTube, Twitter and Facebook notification integration, local drafts for composing offline and easy access to meta data like tags as well as setting a publish date/time.

There are probably better wysiwyg editors for blog posts, but i haven't spotted another with this range of services supported so it keeps my vote so far.

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iPad apps review - iRepton

I loved Repton back in the 80's on the BBC micro, and the idea of playing it on the iPad appealed to me (see my earlier blog post about which retro games I'd like to see ported) so I was delighted to stumbled across this little gem with a search of


the app store for the word "retro". It's perhaps humbling to realise that ones teenage years are now seen as retro, but any how...

Anyone who's plays rubble trouble or any number of similar games will know the idea behind Repton. Move your character around a 2d map collecting gems with gravity acting on certain object such that they fall down the screen if nothing is supporting them. Repton includes eggs which break to hatch into monsters that chase you and can only be killed by either dropping a rock on them or pushing a rock into them horizontally. It also includes keys which turn safes into gems. Where safes have a flat top and rocks can rest on them, rocks will slide off the top of gems unless soil or something else is in the way. Thus, getting a key can trigger rocks or eggs elsewhere in the map to fall.

The other thing to know is that with a rock on your head, you can do the "Repton shuffle" to quickly step aside and back to allow the rock to fall AND push it to one side - vital for many of the puzzles in the maps.

This implementation of the game can use the same mode 5 graphics of the BBC micro as in the screen shot or updated 'better' graphics. The new graphics add nothing to the game play and defeat the retro object of the game for me so are rather wasted, but I guess might appeal to people for whom this is a new experience.

The game also includes the same old music and sounds or updated versions of these too. The music was good for it's time on a home computer in 1984 ish but even then, it quickly became irritating and thankfully there is the same option to disable it that I always used back then!

The first set of maps are included from the old game (Repton 3 maps I think it is rather than Repton 1, but I can't be sure of my memory on that), but also additional new levels and further additional levels are available as in app purchases.

It doesn't appear to include the level editor which made this game so compelling for my mother and I - creating levels to challenge each other, and I doubt it's likely to see me dreaming in Repton graphics which I often did back then, but it is a welcome addition to the casual games I can pick up and play for a few minutes on the iPad, and for that it's worth the asking price :)

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iPad apps review - Weather Pro HD

Weather pro was my preferred weather app on the iPhone and the new version for the iPad looked sumptuous from the screen shots so I decided to try it. Quick summary - it's OK but...

The source for the forecasts is vital for a weather app to be useful and MeteoGroup seems fine for this app and has certainly been pretty accurate in my experience. However, the things which made this app for me on the iPhone was simple access to both radar data and satellite images so I can make my own judgement on the forecasts, and this is where this app currently lags slightly behind the iPhone version.

On the iPhone, if you pay a little extra you get additional image frames for both the radar and satellite views and also some 'predicted' frames for the future for the radar. Although the premium account is transferable to the iPad, the app currently doesn't provide these additional features, although it does increase the resolution of the other forecast data (windspeed/temp/rainfall/humidity/sunshine) to be hourly instead of 3 hourly.

The interface uses multiple pop over frames in line with most iPad apps compared to separate screens on the iPhone which works nicely (see screen shot).

Summary: nice, accurate, but just slightly disappoints.

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2010/06/04

Retro games I'd like to see on the iPad/iPhone

One of my more random blog posts, but inspired by a tweet from @andytuk:

These are games from the BBC micro, C64 and other retro machines I would like to see either emulated or re-coded into new versions to play on the iPad/iPhone - in no particular order:

C64 versions:
Impossible Mission
TrollyWally - for the music more than the game
Little Computer People

BBC versions:
Thrust
Sentinel
Arkanoid
Llamatron
Hampstead
HHG2TG
The Hobbit
Repton 1, 2, 3
Airlift
Arcadians
Starship commander
Elite (this was the game mentioned that started me thinking)
Exile
Thunderstruck
Citadel
Manic miner
Jet set willy
Castle Quest
Alien 8
Nightlore
Sabre wolf
Uncle Claude
Imogen
Chuckie Egg
Frak!
Cholo

Others:
Speedball
Gobbiins 1, 2
Barbarian
Tempest

I'm very aware (having played many of these recently on emulators) that they would really need sprucing up to stand up today, but they all had that "just one more game" element to their gameplay that many more visually polished modern games lack.

Ah, e by gum an' by 'eck, I remember when all this was fields...or Mode 2 graphics. :)

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