Apologies for the lack of updates over the past couple of weeks.  I am currently updating the Wordpress theme for this site and thinking about another new blog.  As you can imagine this is taking up most of my time…even though I have a little time off work right now. (more…)

My wife is currently finishing her PhD thesis.  The past few days have been interesting as she is currently losing her mental stability due to the compilation of the reference list.  References are crucial to any thesis, if you don’t know where the quotes come from you can’t use them!  However, much to her relief I introduced her to Google Scholar.  It is in beta testing just now, but it is very impressive and could prove to be crucial to students at college and university.  These websites are always best shown by example…  For instance, say you are searching for, oh lets say totally at random, a paper about glacial sediments written by Adam and Knight, the result would be here.  This service can not only help you find references when you mislay them but more importantly it can help you find papers on the subject that you are currently working on.

Much has been made in academic circles regarding students using the net for cheating in essays, whether this is through paying others to do their essays or just plagiarising large sections of other people work.  I feel that this advance (that has been out for some time now) by Google gives back some of the credit to the internet that other cheating students have taken away.  Cheating by students has been well documented, a quick search on Google will bring up many hits.  While doing some research for this post I found a service that teachers can use to submit student essays to, TurnitinUK. This service can be used to check if a student is plagiarising essays.  It enables institutions and staff to carry out electronic comparisons of students work against electronic journals and also other students work.  

This brings up two obvious questions that I hope someone out there could answer in a comment.  Do students at university (at least in the UK) now have to hand in their essays in electronic format?  Are essays stored that are submitted to the service, and if so, what other information is kept along with the essay.  

I would think that the answers to these questions could bring up many more interesting questions.  I also wonder if the students have to agree to their essay being submitted to this kind of scrutiny?  However, I digress, the point of the post (if not already obvious) is:

• keep control of your reference list
• don’t copy others work without giving credit

Just a short blurb about an online video I saw today, originally posted by Dooce and Blurbomat.  Heather & Jon Armstrong, with Sarah Nielson on the show On the Record.  For anyone new to blogging this is an interesting 25 minutes of blogging introduction.

Could anyone not see this coming?  Especially after the cut in price from T-mobilein Germany, where you can get your iPhone for 99 Euros.  Reported this week that 02 and the Carphone Warehouseare dropping the price of the iPhone by 100GBP.  A substantial drop by any measure.  Although, if you have purchased one in the past 30 days they are giving refunds of 100GBP back to make up for this.  O2 is also upgrading existing customers (activating their handsets before 1st February) to one of the new iPhone tariffs.  It is worth noting that Apple shops are not (or haven’t yet) dropping their price…and that the price drop only applies to the 8GB version of the iPhone.

It does raise some questions.  Is the cost of the iPhone at 269GBP to prohibitive for most people?  Is 169GBP more affordable?  After the massive debut, is it now just not selling?  Have people figured out that although it is an amazing interactive experience for a phone, it lacks a good camera, 3G and the ability for developers to release their own applications?

There are a few reasons going round the internet as to the price drop.  A 3G version of the iPhone was announced by Steve Jobs last year, to be released this year.  O2 may simply be trying to get rid of their stock before the new version comes out.  Apparently you can get the iPhone at this price whatever contract you take out.  This ’special offer’ is to remain in place until 1 June, and someare suggesting that this may be when the 3G iPhone may be released.

The price of the iPhone dropped in America last September.  Apple took $200US off the price and as you can imagine this left a lot of existing iPhone customers very unhappy, although Steve jobs promised a $100 store credit to anyone who bought an iPhone before the cut in price.

I think the next couple of months are going to be filled with rumours about the next iPhone, but I am glad that I resisted the temptation and went with the Nokia N95 8GB.  I am looking forward to seeing the next generation iPhone though…

I was invited to join the beta testing of social thing yesterday.  As you can imagine I was more than a little excited, having recently posted about this new social networking service.  The aim of social thing in simple terms is to collect all your social networking services in one place and allow you to post to them all (or individually) from one place.  As far as I know it is the only service of its kind just now.

After signing up yesterday there are seven services available so far, Twitter, Pownce, Flickr are services that I signed up for (others available include Vimeo and Facebook).  It does exactly as it says on the tin, it went to these services and brought back the things that had been going on recently in these services.  I was also able to post to the services that I wanted without any trouble.  You can set the ‘Lifestream’ up in a time-line, by service or by person.  There is also a voting section on what services you would like to see, Wordpress being high up in the list as is QIK.  They also tell you exactly what they are working on right now, it is good to know what to expect over the next couple of months.  The only down point I found (and it is really minor and normally I wouldn’t care) was that it doesn’t run on Internet Explorer.  I would like to clarify this before people start questioning my sanity for using Explorer.  Where I currently work I have a locked desktop which allows nothing to be installed, so I am locked into IE6 (yes, 6).

I honestly think social thing is going to be massive and I would like to thank them for inviting me to help test it out, I hope I can provide them with useful feedback and that it gets released to everyone soon!

I also downloaded twibble desktop last night.  I have been using twibble on my mobile phone for a while now, this is a service that allows me to post straight to twitter with my location taken from the GPS built into my phone.  The mobile service also lets you see your twitter line.  The desktop twibble desktop service sets up your twitter line in a neat small window, it allows for three accounts to be running and can pick up your tweets 60 times per hour, or once per minute if you prefer.  Twibble also has location awareness, you can see where your twitter contacts are in Google maps.  I don’t know why but I think this is a really cool feature.  The twibble twitter desktop client is built on top of the Adobe Air platform.  I have to say that I was really impressed with twibble desktop and I am looking forward to ‘twibble web’.  Their website says that ‘twibble web is a fancy interactive mash-up that integrates your virtual social life’, perhaps something to rival social thing in the future?  Hopefully it will be available soon…

The main task of my evening was actually to PDF my PhD thesis.  My supervisor (PGK) has been looking for a copy to send to another of his students.  Normally this wouldn’t be a hard task, however, last night it turned into a massive headache.  I have Adobe Acrobat 7 and I have never had trouble with it until yesterday.  It turns out that I couldn’t get a word 2007 document to become a PDF with acrobat 7 as Word 2007 is newer than Acrobat 7 and at the time I installed Acrobat 7 Word 2007 wasn’t available.  Now, if there is a fix for this I really don’t want to know now, but tell me anyway!  I dug out an old Dell Inspiron Laptop that weighs roughly the same as me (especially with the two batteries in it) and booted it up.  I was pretty sure that Word 2003 was on this and had the bright idea of installing Acrobat 7 onto it.  The installation onto the laptop took 30 mins… I honestly couldn’t believe it.  I then got the documents that made my thesis up and set up Acrobat to PDF it into one document.  Well, that was interesting.  I set it going last night around 9pm and went to bed at 12:30am with it 30% through PDF’ing the document.  It was finished when I got up this morning!  It’s just under 50 mb in size!  The laptop was wheezing and coughing after a hard nights work!

Although this old laptop is mainly used as a paper weight or doorstop nowadays I am glad that it was there!