A note advertising Tim Mason's autobiography "The Best That I Can Be" was displayed in the entrance door of a residential home yesterday. I was visiting a friend that I originally met through an ITCH Network support call and read it whilst waiting to be met. The note explained how Tim had 2 stokes in 2004 which left him paralysed and without speech. A request for support by purchasing the book from Amazon was included. I thought I'd pass it on.

I have not meet Tim, though I saw him briefly whilst having lunch with my host. It appears that Tim uses an AAC device for speech and AT when writing. Tim's book has been added to my reading list and perhaps I'll catch up with him to discuss it and AT the next time that I visit.

I'd hazard a guess that when you think of West of England rural activities and farm produce, 'Chilli farming' is not something that comes to mind. So you may be surprised to know that the South Devon Chilli Farm is in the heart of South Devon near Loddiswell, Kingsbridge. A new barn and poly tunnels nestling in the lovely countryside.

Sunday 3rd was the day of the Chilli Festival and we went along to see what was happening. It turned out to be an entertaining afternoon for us and many otehrs. Infact many more turned up than were expected by the friendly owners and their families.

Apart form the new barn there are several polytunnels, one being set as as a display of many varieties showing the wide range shapes, sizes and colours that have been bred. There is also an unassuming bush that turns out to be the ancestor of all the Chillies (which are cultivars). Plants were for sale and we brought an interesting 'Twighlight' which is bushy with small chillies in a range of colours from purple to yellow.

 Live music added to the atmosphere and a Pimms + cider cup washed down a home made chilli which smelt wonderful. All the neighbour hood wasps were trying the apple juice. For me the best food was the BBQed Hungarian Hot Wax chillies stuffed with cheddar cheese - yumm.

There was a chilli eating competition which involved seeing how many raw jalapeno chillies you could consume in 2 mins. I declined to have a go as it was getting late, eh hmm. 

 For the kids there was a Chilli trail mown in the tall crass of a field. At various points there was a chilli to be identified and a pen to colour a 'spotting chart'. The prize for finding all 11 was a lollie. A large red chilli piñata proved popular with Mark and Keziah, especially as the blind fold was dispensed with.

Finally all their wonderfull fresh and natural chilli sauces were available for tasting. They go from mild to 5 on the scoville scale, yeeeoow. My undisputed favourite is the chilli jam which has a wonderful flavour with contrasting sweetness and heat.

 All in all afternoon well spent. There's lots more info on chillies on the South Devon Chilli Farm website.

 

Continuing on from my earlier post Have Linux and Open Source finally become mainstream? I spotted a short review today of Ununtu 6.06 LTS in IT Week with the title 'A home for home for Windows users' (that title appeared in the the print version only). The verdict for general office users is:

 

Belmont Chapel has started the new Belmont Resources web site to provide background resources for sermons. The Colossians series is the first to appear on the new site which supercedes the earlier www.belmontphilippians.co.uk and bibleteach.blogspot.com provided for the Philipians series. John Allan, one of the leaders at Belmont, is providing these interesting resources as part of his desire to make the most of the opportunities the web provides for communication and evangelism. We have had some interesting discussions on the possibilities, and in particular about using Web 2.0 features such as blogs and mashups.

I particularly like the Studying Colossians lens provided on Squidoo. Squidoo is one of the many interesting Web 2.0 applications that provide wonderful educational possibilites as Miles Berry and I described in a Schoolforge-UK article. The article is also part of Terry Freedman's excellent Coming Of Age free eBook. Coming of Age 2.0 is on the way and promises to be even better.

 

Reading The Future of Human-Computer interaction by John Canny triggered a few thoughts on improving switch access for a group of users who have to deal with an very inefficient way of using ICT. Although it sometimes reads like a justification for hiring a HCI consultant the artilce raises a number of important points.

User centred design is vital to develop usable systems. In away that is obvious but we so often let the technology lead. The trail blazing 1977 Xerox Star from the PARC hotbed of innovation is given as a great example. This machine initiated the features we are used to in WIMP (Windows Icon Mouse Pointer) user interfaces having arrived through Mac and Windows. The Star did it in a very cohesive way thus creating a very usable machine. Importantly the user's conceptual model was the basis of the design. Another innovation was using a RAD or Agile development model, long before those terms were used. It seems that John has managed to use as Star, something I have long wanted to do. More recently Willie Walker noted in a video of a CSUN demonstration of Orca screen reader that they used user focused development and perhaps that is part of the reason it is becomming so popular.

Context Awareness is the concept that I think could have the greatest benfit for switch users. The idea is simple, the interface takes into concideration information about the user's contextual situation and environment. For example a mobile phone's geographic location or the fact that the user is about to to eat lunch. History of users choices and contexts is an important for tayloring the interface.

The required technology has a way to go and there's obviously room for confusion (I'm having a late lunch at my desk) but this could provide a powerful way to reduce the options presented to a user based on their context. Advances in AI and machine perceptual interfaces such as computer vision are needed. More importantly colaboration between people in many fields is needed.

Collection of individual history and preferences with personalised services appears to overlap Web 2.0 activity and Artifical Intelligence has an obvious part to play. There are concerns for individual rights and privacy - 'Minority Report' style advertising is mentioned.

John describes in some detail how automatic speech recognition can be improved using contextual information and I extrapolated that to switch users. It will be interesting to see if these ideas can help. As John says there's a lot of research and development to be done.

<rant> I've just hit another case of a web design decision that repeatedly annoys me immensely and is actually rather dangerous, let alone bad UI design.

The problem is URLs that when visited update data.

For example I use the very useful Google Alerts to see if anyone mentions PowerTalk on a web page. The last email had a link on it to delete it and when I in an exploratory frame of mind clicked on it I got web a page telling me it had been removed. That is very very poor practice.

1) There was no opportunity to review and confirm that  I wanted to delete. I was expecting to see the Alert details.

2) It is dangerous. What if I accidentally click on the link in the email or perhaps in browser history or visit it in any other way?

3) Technically it is wrong. A HTTP GET should not update data. Only a POST or PUT should do that.

The link should take me to a page with summary information and a button that performs the delete action.

Let's hope others don't blindly follow this daft example.
</rant>

An open source implementation of the SIF ZIS called TinyZIS has been released by Tom Hoffman on EduForge.

'What on earth....?' you say? Well briefly the Zone Integration Server (ZIS) is the central hub of a system that implements the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) standard for sharing school data. It coordinates the transfer of data in a heterogeneous mix of schools systems. Thus providing a vital service for interoperability within and between institutions. In geek talk it's a message oriented middleware hub. Each application has an agent program that translates it's data into the standard format handled by the ZIS. The ZIS acts a broker and coordinator and the programs get to access each other's data.

SIF is a US based standard but is being used as the basis for EU and UK standards, with Becta showing interest. SIF membership has a high cost of entry so an Open Source ZIS is very welcome and will hopefully act as a reference implementation as well as starting the Open SIF ball rolling. This moves us closer to the possibility of schools information systems working together and sharing data, something that is much needed. 

More importantly SIF provides a route that allows schools to break free from vendor lock-in. This is a particular problem in the UK where most schools use the proprietary Capita SIMS for student records and MIS. If a standard is supported by their systems, schools will be able to access their data from any applications that they choose, and that includes Open Source solutions and tools that schools create themselves. In effect by providing interoperability through a common data format and standard protocols SIF acts like a open document format such as ODF, with all the attendent advantages.

At Schoolforge.org.uk we've been discussing the need for Open Standards, Open Source solutions and interoperability on the MIAS discussion group. Tom has been actively involved and interestingly Capita SIMS also have a presence. Tom Hoffman also leads the SchoolTool project which will undoubtedly provide even greater value by being able to share information with other schools systems.

Techy Footnote: TinyZIS is written in Python and Python 2.5 has been released. 

I am now the proud owner of a Lenovo laptop that dual boots Edubuntu Linux and Windows XP Pro. The pending trip to the Mozilla and Gnome accessibility summits prompted me to finally equip myself with some mobile technology. The main uses will be notes, correspondence and info searches as usual but in addition I want to ensure I get help setting up any various tools and development environments (Aaron's suggestion). I wanted Linux as well as Windows partially as the focus of many of those at the summits will be Linux and also as a promotor of Open Source Assistive technology (see OATSoft.org) I wanted more experience of the Linux AT world. The decision to use Ubuntu was based on it being the most popular distro and the fact that accessibility lead Henrik Omma. is active at OATSoft added weight. In addition it is Debian based and uses Gnome which is rather more active in accessibility than KDE.

Actually I installed Edubuntu which includes various educational programs which will be usefull for the the kids. I knew from its popularity with several members of Schoolforge-UK that it will install as a Linux Terminal Server (LTSP) but decided on a plain workstation setup to start with (Laptops can make useful LTSP servers for very portable systems). The Edubuntu CD is a little different from the vanilla Ubuntu as it is not a Live CD and does not include the Windows FOSS programs, presumably due to space restrictions. I installed 6.0.6 LTS, also know as Dappy Duck.

After a little research into laptops and Linux on Laptops I purchased a Lenovo 3000 N100 model 0768-6ug from PCWorld Business (Dixon's group). This has proven to be a good machine with a good display and excellent keyboard. The only disapointment is the speakers which are total rubbish, strange as with a widescreen it is obviously meant for multimedia. A mild annoyance was the inclusion of the intstruction booklet for Lotus SmartSuite but you have to send off £10 in order to get it, cheeky. Battery life is not as good as I had hoped either, about 2 hrs with mild use. I also got a Netgear WG602 wifi access point which 'just works' and the excellent Pakuma Akara K1 backpack carry case.

I got everything working under Windows, including setting up Wifi, removing all the preinstalled kack like Norton security, added malware protection and created recovery disks. The next step was to do a basic Linux compatibility test by booting an Ubuntu Live CD. I knew it should work from resources such as TuxMobile and  Ubuntu Lap Top testing team.

All seemed basically OK so I pressed ahead with the edubuntu install, hoping that the partioner would leave Windows intact for a dual boot configuration (my worry was that the windows defragger left files at the end of the disc). I selected a simple partition structure, just adding / and swap for Linux (no /home) by using half the Windows partition and leaving the recovery partition untouched.. A serious heart stopping moment was when at some point near the end of the installation the display went blank except for a couple of small white squares. I just waited till all disc activity stopped and hit return. The CD opened so I hit return again and the PC turned off. A deep breath, and powerup soon had the familiar Edubuntu Gnome desktop up. Phew. 

After that I made the small changes for sound and display resolution mentioned on several forums for the N100, I installed the firefox pluggins for pdf, flash, Java and Real Player (for BBC listen/watch again), followed by FireBug and a few other useful extensions. The RealPlayer and Java both need installing as SU and for some reason I could not type the  Java release directory, I had to cut-n-paste it for the soft link in the moz plugins directory. 

The big problem I had was with getting the wireless networking to work. The GUI is just too simple and did not have the options I needed. I eventually got this going and learnt quite a bit in the process. Wireless support is actually well implemented in the unix fashion of commands + text files. I'll detail this in another post but the critical setting was defining the channel as 11 and key mode to restricted (or Open), Perhaps it defaults to a US setting rather than using locale info?

I now have a pleasing machine with Edubuntu and Windows, dual boot giving the best of both worlds, though I expect to use Linux more and more. And yes I'm doing this from Linux. I still have a few minor issues to resolve; the battery monitor icon is often broken as is the lower power handling and I have not got the internal microphone or web cam to work.

What I really want is a little Tux sticker to place next to those that laptops have for Intel and Windows. Still I Improvised a little:

As a footnote, the Lenovo comes with a hidden partion for recovery which contains NT. This takes ages to boot and I can't help wondering if Linux would be a good choice for this too.