Want to play video games and not spend large amounts doing so? This post explains how. Personally, I rather like using LJP on my Palm Pilot and downloading all those naughty emulator games. I've been playing Super Mario Bros 3 on there for a while, but I've got a bit stuck. 
Kevin at HighTouch has been arguing the toss over metadata, taxonomies, folksonomies and so on (via David Weinberger). Of course, codified formal equivalence will save us all.
Oliver Kamm has some thoughts on the recent 'Clash of Civilisations' conference that apparently sucked. Conferences sucking? That never happens in the tech world. 
Niall Kennedy says that nobody is buying Vista in San Fran. I'm betting that my local PC World is hardly flooded with people wanting to get Vista either.
Dave Cross on Celebrity Big Brother: "I don't understand why people are surprised by this. Do people really think that people in the UK aren't racist? If you're surprised by the opinions shown by the contestants then you really need to get out more." K5 has a typically snarky take on it all.
Tim Lee on HD-DVD/Blu-Ray: "Blu-ray discs won't play in HD-DVD players and vice versa. For anyone over 30, this will trigger a sense of déjà vu‹it isn't the first time that the consumer electronics industry has failed to agree on a video standard... But consumers have far less reason to be invested in this fight than they did in the VCR fight of the 1980s. Virtually all of the 20th century¹s media technologies are in decline. CD sales dropped 12 percent between 2004 and 2006. Newspapers have been losing subscribers since the 1980s. And Forbes reports that total DVD sales are expected to be flat in 2006, suggesting that home video may be starting down the same path. That suggests another analogy from the history of home video: maybe both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are the second coming of the LaserDisc, the pricey, high-quality video format that was popular with hobbyists in the 1980s, but never caught on with the general public." Exactly. Nobody cares. It's all about the BitTorrent, kids.
Some blog carnivals to read and/or participate in: Carnival of Software Development, Agile Carnival, Uber Tech Carnival. Whose up for a SemSynWeb Carnival?
FIRE had an article recently about speech codes at American universities and how they are getting their tentacles in to online social networks like Facebook and MySpace.
If I were still at art school, I would have waxed lyrical over Exactitudes. Now I just link to it and say cool. (Via David Galbraith)
I missed linking to How to Grok Web Standards earlier in the month. It's a kind of mental disciplining article to help you overcome the FONT and TABLE tag mindset and replace it with pretty, semantic, validating markup. It's got gems like: "If at first you find CSS restricting your creativity then you probably just need to learn more about CSS."
Technology in education 
I could have told you this years ago, but the Institute of Education at my dear old University of London has published a study of interactive whiteboards which says they're pretty much useless. Which of course they are. I was just finishing school when they started adding interactive whiteboards to classrooms. What they generally meant was that most teachers stopped using the whiteboard because they had to log in to a computer, wait a few minutes, load up an application, wait a couple more minutes and then eventually be able to start writing on the board - rather than just being able to grab a pen and start writing.
Once every few months, they'd get creative and have a fairly rubbish PowerPoint presentation. And once we even had an interactive quiz - we were all given remote controls and had to answer questions on the board. Only some of the remote controls didn't work, which meant that the quiz was more a test of whether the technology worked than whether people knew the answers to the questions.
The other problem with IWBs is that they are often low resolution. A friend of mine had great difficulty reading the board because it was heavily pixellated and was extremely hard to read from a distance. Teachers handwriting generally isn't readable at the best of times, but when it's being dragged through a pixellation process on technology that nobody in the room has been trained to use, it makes it all even more difficult. Worse than this though was the fact that the school would try hard to remove the non-interactive whiteboards from the classrooms, so that teachers would have to start using the technology, even if it wasn't appropriate.
The problem with technology in education is that most of the time, it's implemented extremely poorly. And that implementation is often accompanied by policy decisions at the administration level that lack a trust or wisdom.
At my university, we have a highly-restricted 'walled garden' setup on the machines. There are about four applications that they like - Internet Explorer, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. If you try and use anything other than those, you'll not get very far. Which is fine for 70% of users. But I would rather write my essays in Notepad and save them as ASCII text or XML. No can do. I'd rather use Firefox. No can do. I can't even open up multiple windows in Internet Explorer very easily - the Ctrl + N keyboard shortcut has been disabled.
We've got so many poorly implemented web filters too, even though the students at the college are mature enough not to go surfing for porn on college computers. So many perfectly sane Google queries are filtered because they contain an arbitrary keyword.
The solution to technology in education is simple - listen to teachers, not the government. If teachers start crying out that they want interactive whiteboards, give it to them. Many of them won't - not because they're technophobes or Luddites, but because a lot of the time, they're more trouble than they are worth. As for students, trust them. Punish them when they do wrong, but remember that most of these 'lock down' safety procedures cause more damage than they solve.
Documentation
Another good post you may have missed recently - Christian Heilmann thinks that publishers are, thanks to Ajax and Web 2.0, republishing old JavaScript books with the Ajax label, but not actually bringing them up-to-date. I've been battling with bad documentation - I can't stand Python's documentation, and what I can't stand more are books that take about nine chapters to tell me how to do an if...else. I seriously need to sit down and compile a super-handy cheat sheet for languages I'm learning.
I'd love to have a set of very short articles entitled "I Know What I'm Doing, Just Show Me The Diffs". That way, if you already know how to code, but want to know enough Python or JavaScript to start hacking, you could read them. You don't have to tell me the difference between assignment and comparison, just show me the syntax. If anyone knows of good primers that don't waste time holding one's hand, I'd love to know about them. Good documentation really can be a scarcity. We have too many 900 page schema documents and not enough two page summaries.
Some time soon, I really ought to review some of the tech books I own and post up reviews of them. For instance, yesterday I found that Apress' otherwise excellent Pro PHP XML and Web Services contains no explanation of the difference between using file_get_contents() and using libcurl, except that you should use the latter when doing HTTP POST etc. But why? I know the reason, but that kind of thing needs to be explained.
