My State of E-Learning #elearning #coursera #udemy #udacity

Recently I’ve gotten the online learning bug back, not that it’s ever away for long, so I’ve been busy again on Coursera. And thanks to a HTML 5 course I also started to use Udemy. An Eric Ries course is waiting on Udacity for me to start it. In the past I used to use iTunesU to follow online university courses, such as Yale’s Game Theory Lectures by Benjamin Polak.

Coursera

I’m currently enrolled in 6 courses, and I’ve followed a number of courses here, yet none to completion within the time period set by the tutor. Often the amount of time I would need to set aside for the course can be between 6 and 12 hours each week, this is entirely possible and I often do manage to do a couple of hours in the evening. Another issue is that to receive course credit these Problem Sets need to be in at a certain date, or courses which have been running over 1 week it is often impossible to submit these on time to be eligible for course credit.

Coursera does allow you to download all the video’s, so it is possible to view these at a later date, or even from the beach somewhere. And they sometimes offer the course multiple times, so in the example of Model Thinking I have enrolled a second time so I can complete easier.

XBMC BlastDav by Adrianus Warmenhoven

XBMC BlastDavAdrianus Warmenhoven wondered what the minimum that XBMC needs to use a WebDAV server. So he scaled back all the unneeded functionality to create an easy media server for broadcasting te XBMC on any of your devices. XBMC Blastdav Adrianus Warmenhoven  Company Ever since the original XBox with a modchip was capable of running XBMC I used and recommended XBMC to friends and acquaintances as the nicest media player. Now Android and the Raspberry Pi have come … View or comment on Dani??l Crompton’s post »

Flipboard for Android

Flipboard for AndroidLast week Brad Chasenore asked me to quickly review the new Flipboard for Android. So I briefly wrote it up: I have a cheap, slow Polaroid (MIDC010PR001) tablet I’m trying it on, and on there it’s pretty responsive. The navigation is intuitive within seconds I was zooming out of articles flipping through pages. On the tab I have issues with browsers, they mostly lock up, and that happens here too. It was easy to link Twitter and Facebook to Flipboard, they are presented on the first page. However when I first tried linking Google+ the app crashed, this is could be due to the fact that the tablet is not very good. A restart proved me right, although the app was a little less responsive than while linking FB & TW. The first time I was able to add Google+, logged in, verified, etc, it didn’t add Google+ to FlipBoard. The second attempt at linking them brought up the Google 2 step verification window again, which I had asked it to skip the first time I signed up. On this attempt it linked the accounts. Compared to the other Google+ readers FlipBoard makes it easier for me, FlipBoard plays with layout which allows me to engage with the content, and it doesn’t get in the way of reading which is what I want to do. I did have some other issues, for some reason it had given me the Content Guide Edition for the UK, I assume it read it from my locale – language settings – en_UK. Changing this in the settings to Netherlands didn’t make a difference even though it’s a menu option and I refreshed a number of times and even restarted without result. Changing it to US also doesn’t remove the UK politics from headlining the Politics tab. And as I said I use 2 step verification for Google and despite trusting the computer it didn’t seem to skip step two after adding Google+ a second time, or another Google app to FlipBoard. Browsing Google+ was FlipBoard was refreshing, and I see why Scoble is such a fan of FlipBoard. I am certainly happy with it, although I will have to find the killer reason to use it for more than just browsing headlines on a Sunday afternoon. Nice to play with, will keep. Flipboard: Your News Magazine Flipboard brings together world news and social news in a beautiful magazin… View or comment on Dani??l Crompton’s post »

Playing with DataSift #curation

Some weeks ago I got my beta access to DataSift, I was happy to get access and didn’t see time to use it. Yesterday evening I played with it for the first time, it was quite interesting to discover something which I suspected which was that they had their own query/modeling language called FSDL. It contains the ability to do queries over the data, including data over a map geo coordinates, which means I can do some complex queries to get the needed data. Once I submitted the query I was given an option to buy access to a stream of the data.

I believe less is more, so I’m happy to see that they released their service with support for quite a number of services – Twitter, Tweetmeme, Buzz, Digg, RSS feeds – and makes it possible to do matches on different fields within the data set. And they have made the possibility to add your own datasources, which can be modeled in the same way as the existing datasources.

Above you can see an example FSDL that I wrote for the keyword Snypher.

A great tool, with many uses.

This year’s articles about programming #2010

In 2010 I was less focussed on programming articles on the blog than previous years, still I have managed to create some interesting articles with code in 2010. This is an overview of the activity:

Sync Web with Phone #html #javascript #scratchpad

Having some fun today with QR codes, JavaScript and the Google Analytics URL …

The Structure of a Daily Scrum #agile #scrum

The only questions that are asked in the Daily Scrum, aka Stand-Up, are: What…

Features I Still Miss in Mail #mail #email

UPDATE: GMail has introduced my number 3. YEAH! (Gmail introduces Priority In…

YouTube Channel Unsubscribe #bookmarklet

I like YouTube, and often subscribe to new channels and unsubscribe after a w…

PCI is nice (or what I do) #pcidss

Since I started working for my company I’ve been exposed to PCI DSS (Pa…

Solving the URL shortening problem #twitter #tweet

I don’t understand why url expansion after url shortening is such an is…

VeriSign PIP Browser Certificate workaround (PIN Request) #identity #openid

VeriSign – Personal Identity Portal is a OpenID provider with multiple …

Image source D’Arcy Norman

Just Finished Reading: “Islands in the Net” #wikileaks #books #datahaven

I’m reading Bruce Sterling‘s Islands in the Net – Amazon describes it as

Slightly dated science fiction about the near future can be fun, especially when it evokes a strange, chaotic, and dangerous world that’s uncomfortably close to our present one.

And the irony is that Amazon is involved in a situation with chilling parallels, with Wikileaks and lesser known Amazon customers being called data pirates, similar to the way they are described in the book.

Of course there are already existing data havens like Sealand, and there is the new creation of a data haven for journalists and free speech in Iceland.^[1] Other data havens are almost certainly in creation, as described in another work of fiction Cryptonomicon. I believe that these are most probably currently being hosted in encrypted clusters by Google and Amazon, with or without their knowledge, and almost certainly these exist in smaller countries.

The next parallel is the violations of copyrighted materials by these data pirates, there is serious money in piracy just look at China and the streets of New York or any other major city. It’s already possible to become a paid member of a piracy group online – comparable to a piracy Netflix – where in exchange for your payment you get a monthly allotted number of points to use to download films and television series collecting points by sharing a fixed ratio more than you download, and where everything is tracked by the torrent tracker.

There are other parallels, but for that I advise you read the book…

1. Wikileaks and Iceland MPs propose ‘journalism haven’

TIME’s poor “Person of the Year” poll #web2.0 @time

I’ve been voting in “Who Will Be TIME’s 2010 Person of the Year?” The way it’s set up I need to remember that I gave certain people certain points; Mark Zuckerberg 78; Hamid Karzai – 15; Julian Assange – 90; Glenn Beck – 77; etc. Wouldn’t it be better to rate them in order?

It’s quite simple really: drag and drop the names and/or images or names of the candidates in the order of the ranking and based on that TIME can actually rank all the people correctly. When you believe Karzai is more influential than Jobs, put him first; less influential than Assange put him after. It’s really not much harder than that.

Please enter this century TIME, it’s not so scary here.

FaceBook: FarmVille #games

I must say, although I don’t often play games, some of the FaceBook games are fun and some of them are highly addictive, in one I noticed some of my friends playing FarmVille they weren’t applying simple logic to their game play.

FarmVille is a level game, and with each level – gained by earning experience points (XP) – certain new crops are released. One of my friends, at level 24, has the following crops which are released and you can see that RaspBerries are the best to grow if you have enough time to play, these mature in 2 hours for an average profit of 13 gold, although for 10 gold and 1 XP you can best grow BlueBerries. The next are tomatoes or coffee depending on whether you have 8 hours or 16 hours until your next session. People who can only play once a day should grow Peppers.

Naturally this is so for level 24, but for your level you can also find your optimal crop with little difficulty. The table below is ordered as it comes out of the FarmVille Market.

Flogs #calendar #ical

Michiel Mol, known for his Spyker Formula One team, is creating a new service called Flogs. Flogs is an iCal service, which integrates into Google Calendar, Apple’s iCal and can even send updates to the CrackBerry. The service is similar to iCal World, although the former includes exclusive data which is tailored to the user.

I’m wondering what the business model is, possibly advertising.

CutCommercials #project #commercials

The father of a friend of mine, a former journalist, started CutCommercials as an outlet for him to bitch about misleading or stupid adverts. A great idea, geared to the Dutch market where the word kut means cunt, although it is considered a far less profane than the English, more towards shit or crap.

With the integration of YouTube and some fixes to the forum it is sure to be a fun community to hang out with.