philwilson.org

I almost forgot to say that I’ll be in York on Monday at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007 presenting “The eternal beta - can it work in an institution?”, I’ll be covering practical ways that Universities can incorporate web 2.0-style technologies into their software development, rollout and maintenance lifecycles as well as how to harvest staff/student-based feedback in an intelligent way.

The title is the most boring ever but I wasn’t quite confident enough to name it “University 2.0″ which is what was suggested to me. Rather like the title, the abstract was knocked up in under five minutes and remains now as it did when I wrote it. Obviously it’d been a day of meetings

The slides are now online, probably the most reliable place to get them is here on slideshare

At work we’re playing with Openfire, the Java-based Jabber/XMPP server. There are parts that are *cough* sub-optimal so we want to fix them. It’s open source and builds using Ant. So far, so straightforward.

I want to modify some core code so went looking for the unit tests to make sure that my changes wouldn’t break anything. Oh dear lord. A few hours of sobbing to myself later and I can only hope that they get someone for this job really soon.

Going on holiday is a bad idea. A recent rundown:

• Paris, September 2004 – Beslan school hostage crisis
• Cornwall, July 2005 – London bombings
• Norway, August 2006 – transatlantic aircraft plot
• Birmingham, June 2007 – Glasgow International Airport attack

I mean, it’s just coincidence, right? Right?