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Some while ago my wife brought me a Maplin badged, Watson WH1081 weather station. It has an outdoor unit which measures temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity and rain fall. A wireless indoor unit then displays and logs the data. The indoor unit also has a USB port allowing it to be connected to a computer of some description.

The Software that comes with it is fairly basic, however http://sandaysoft.com offers some free and very powerful software call cumulus.

The cumulus software will talk to the indoor unit, manage the data logger, produce charts as you might expect. Then come the great stuff, it has built in tools to upload the data to a web site of your choosing, via FTP, as well as uploading the data to several weather services. A recent addition to the feature set is twitter. Cumulus will now send a tweet on a predefined regular basis with a summary of the current weather conditions

Mine is now tweeting to http://twitter.com/abbeymeadwx

Today my son turned 13
When I was 13 a handfull of my friends did not have a home phone, nights/days out had to be arranged by the time you left school or did not happen, homework was handwritten, home computers where rare, and ran at 4MHz with between 1 and 16kB of memory, hard disk where unheard of outside corporate circles and a 10 MB disk drive was the size of a washing machine. My TV was a 12 inch black and white portable which recieved THREE channels

Today, 98% of teenage kids have ther own personal mobile phone, a night out can be arranged by text, twitter, facebook, msn from the moble phone while on route to the destination. For his last history project, jake created a well edited 8 minute video and for his next it is a web site, the phone in his pocket runs at 500Mhz and has 8GB of memory, his (yes his own personal) laptop has 2GB memory 2x 2G Hz processors and a huge 250 GB hard disk drive. Jakes TV is a 42inch plamsa with all the toys and over 300 channels to chose from

Oh to be a teenager today

On the flip side when I was a teenager coping a grope with the teenage girl next door was considered a laugh, making a factual reference to someones ethnic background was the norm, and clipping a kid round the ear for scrumping apples was a daily summer time event…… today any of those would get you arrested

Social networks are not NEW,

They have just gained a wider audiance due to improvod usability.

USENET or news groups started in 1979 (long before HTTP), where like minded individuals could gather and exchange puclic messages, very much like twitter today.

The big difference, it was mainly a hardcore GEEK world.

upgraded ro mu 2.8.1

There is a lot of hype in the media of late about privacy, big brother state, Google street view, state owned data base on phone calls and internet use. There has also been some on social networks and gate crashing parties. But on closer examination there is more in common between state / corporate privacy issues and social networking that you might think.

Let’s talk about something we all understand first. If a young college student is doing child care studies, with the goal of becoming a child minder or nursery nurse, goes out and gets very drunk, falls over into someone else and a fight breaks out, a drunk and disorderly (or even GBH) charge may result. She will now fail the CRB check required to work with children. Mind you in extreme circumstance putting you bin out in the wrong day could also cause you to fail future CRB check!

Now apply this to social networking like Facebook, or ANY photo sharing service which allows tagging , naming and comments on photos, Flickr, Picasa Twitpic to name a few..

Now let’s re-visits the above scenario. A young college student is doing child care studies, with the goal of becoming a child minder or nursery nurse, goes out and gets very drunk, falls over, and is then sat in a pool of her own vomit with her underwear on show to everyone. Out pops all the camera phones, and with-in minutes that photo, she would rather forget, is posted ALL over the internet. Add some powerful internet search engine and you have a personal brand problem which is much harder to deal with than any official or corporate database will ever be.

Oh and just to make it worse, you have just been stitched up by your mates, not some organisation out to make money…..

You have been warned !!

Shame it arrive late and i missed it, Due to the reliable delivery system that is “pupil post” , but the local Jnr School ran a “ICT information evening for parents” this week

The note went on to say this….

“A true story which happened in Gloucestershire during the February holiday..

A 10 year old girl was attending her aunt’s wedding, by the time of the reception she was board and her aunt [an IT consultant] spotted her sitting quietly in a corner with her hand-held games console. The aunt enquired what she was playing to which the girl replied ‘don’t tell Mum or Dad, but someone round here has a wireless network and I’ve logged onto the internet’ “

Unfortunately I missed the event to see what stance they presenter took on children and the internet, but I recently had a similar discussion with an English teacher from a local secondary school and was pleased to hear their personal view point was the same as mine.

Over recent years I have too much negative press about the Internet being a dangerous place. The real world is a dangerous place, but you instinctively know NOT to walk done a dark alleyway. That same level of self preservation needs to be instilled into today’s internet users. The internet is a community, and like any community (physical or virtual) it has places you would rather not go. With this in mind I believe you should not try and stop your children from using the internet, but instead encourage safe, knowledgeable and managed used of the internet.

My son for example was not only made to sign an internet use agreement when he started his secondary school, but also, in his first week was not made to read a leaflet on internet safety, but had to produce one. For me that was a fantastic approach, just reading a leaflet would may have gone in one side and out the other, but i am fairly sure some of it actually sank in.

At the end of the day the Internet, Mobile phones, Media player are here to stay, we must embrace the new technology and educate accordingly.

Just found a .NET twitter api class, i can feel some automated twittering comming on http://is.gd/3a9X

Well this is one very embarrassing day. Given my day job

The brand new WordPress 2.7 (may of had so,me 2.6.5 hanging around) instance I setup for my wife, got hacked
Still not sure how, the access logs are not very conclusive, but someone managed to edit every header.php file under the themes folder and inject a trojan “exploit-iframe.gen.c”

I found a similar story hear. http://photocritic.org/wordpress-exploit-iframe-gen-c/

Yes, I admit I allowed apache write access to the themes folder. which i have now fixed

The Code also included a reference to “search_bot111″

Needless to say i am VERY annoyed

Been pondering the use of hi tech stuff including open source in the enterprise and had a bizzare thought

May be it is not to do with the Tech but the People

Top 5-10% of people do the clever stuff, but clever people move on and dont always want to supoprt what they have build
To make somethiing truly enterprise class it needs to be more than clever, but simple and supportable too. Supportable by those people not in the top 5-10%

The Latest tech only works if it is understood by the masses. Education and training helps But true understanding is limited to a select few

This philosyphy is a contribution to Google’s success. A search engine that just just that “search”
No more no less