Software, Software Development and other Atrocities

British Telecom one of the biggest broadband, phone lines and mobile products, digital TV, web hosting, online security and networked IT services for home.... providers in the UK have been giving me various headaches lately. And this is the story:

I recently moved to a new place in the south of England, and of course needed a telephone line and broadband connected to be able to work from home. I ring BT (after finding out that other providers aren't that good, or at least other broadband providers needed a BT line installed... so I decided to go for the whole package with BT.) Give them my new address and tell them I want a telephone line and broadband. They say they will get back to me.

Two days after: someone rings and says they cannot connect my line because it has been taken by another provider and they didn't know who. So they asked me who? And of course I didn't know (although I tried to find out before asking our state agents, but with no success.) Thing is I would have to pay the price of a "reconnection" £125 (aaahhhh). I say Ok I needed a line and broadband quickly. They book a technician to visit me in 10 days. (!!!!!!)

Ten days after: the technician comes. (During those 10 days I went to a local coffee shop and local library to use the internet.) The technician connects what he has to connect inside and outside the house. Then comes back to me and says. There is a problem. Your broadband should be working but the telephone line isn't. There must be a fault in the "exchange" and he was going to report the problem. So I connect my BT Hub which arrived that same morning and Yes the broadband was working! :)

Being able to at least work from home I was not bothered that much by the telephone line (not yet) and I decided to wait until someone contacted me with news.

Five days after that: my broadband stops working. I reset the HUB and nothing happens. Then I get a call from BT: "we are sorry to inform you that your broadband hasn't been fixed yet. We found a problem in the exchange and we had to disconnect your telephone line too. We will be able to fix everything in 20 working days." (that is a month!!!!). I tell them, hey it's the other way around, my broadband was working and the telephone line wasn't. You disconnected my broadband! They just listened and said in any case we have disconnected both your services and we will repair them in 20 working days.
AHHHHHHH

I thought on possible solutions. I couldn't think on going back to the coffee shop/library routine again. Too slow connections and too uncomfortable. I went to THREE and bought a Mobile Broadband USB Modem. A pay-as-you-go one. Not contract one. I did want to use BT broand still because I though it was more reliable. A pay-as-you-go broadband thing would enable me to work from home at a relatively low price. £50 for the USB modem and £15 for a top-up 3GB for one month. Which I could use during these 20 working days. I have to say that that was a temporary solution only. The 3 broadband network isn't good at all. I got disconnected all the time. And it was slow.... but at least I could do my job.

Ok, what happens next? BT ring me days after and tell me that my telephone line will be fixed in a weeks time and the broadband in 2. So I say thanks. The lady, tells me her name, Patty and gives me her direct telephone and asks me to ring her if I had any questions or problems. Nice.

So, I forget about BT and continue normal life. One day I get a call from BT, someone new. He tells me that I have to approve a disconnection otherwise the next disconnection period will be in more than 1 month time. :s I ignore the call and ring Patty and tell her the story. She said it was a mistake. She was dealing with my case and that my lines will be repaired in 1 and 2 weeks.

On the specified date my telephone line starts to work. Yahoo! Good. Then I just need to wait another week for broadband. I think I was too optimistic. I get another call from BT. Someone told me that my line will take a few weeks to be repaired. And I say thank you for the information. I ring Patty (and use the line that apparently wasn't working!) and she says, see these people are in call centres in India. They don't read all the information. I am dealing with your case don't worry. And I ask, so then why do these people keep on calling me, giving me the wrong information??? Misleading me!!! She just says, do not trust them. Just talk to me :s
Waiting, waiting, a week after that I didn't have broadband. So I ring Patty and asked her what was happening. She says she just placed an order for my broadband, that it will take another week. (too late!!!) Ok I say.

The day after that: my telephone line stops working, again! I ring Patty and she says there isn't a problem. She asks me to check my plug, cable, handset. I do everything plus bringing another handset and nothing worked. I ring again and say, it isn't working. They say they will send a technician, but if the problem was on my side, that is, I did something wrong, used the wrong equipment they will charge me £160!!!! At that point I got a text from BT saying:

Fault investigation underway on ***mynumber***. We will update you when we have more information. If internet access is possible go to www.bt.com/fault.

I was sure it wasn't my problem. So I say send the technician. They book one for me to come in 2 days. Next day, I get this text:

BT Fault Update for ***mynumber***. We are aware of your fault and aim to address in by (date:tomorrow 17:00). We will advise if we need to visit your premises.

and the technician comes after lunch time (this is weird, he comes earlier than specified!) he checks everything again. And yes, there was no problem in the inside. He goes outside to check the cables and comes 3o mins after. He says, it's fixed. I tried to use the telephone and it worked! :) and then he says, try your broadband, and yes IT WORKED it F**** WORKED!!!!! :)

And of course I got another text:

BT Update ***mynumber*** Your Fault has been fixed, sorry for any inconvenience. Please contact us within 48 hours. If you need further assistance.

And now I am just sitting here, using BT broadband to write this post and wondering what will be the next episode in this saga.
Should I ring Patty and tell her that my broadband is working 4 days before the date she told me?
Should I go for another broadband provider?

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If you are wondering. For all calls I made to BT I used my mobile phone. BT's number I called were 0800 numbers which are supposed to be free if you are calling from a landline but they charge you if you are using a mobile!!! For each call I was left on hold many times, I think the longest call was 30 mins. So now I am not looking forward to receiving my mobile bill.

I am reviewing my "To Do" list. I have some interesting things to do. Apart from developing this virtual community for PhDs I have to write some papers. This is what I got in my list:

1. A Chapter in a book titled: Systems Thinking and E-Participation: ICT in the Governance of Society -- the chapter will go in the "Current Trends on e-government and social networking based on ICT" section of the book. Actually I have to write an abstract to be accepted first! I know very little about e-goverment, I know about software, social software and software development! But this book could be perfect for me. The editors of the book want to focus on the both sides of the e-goverment coin: the goverment and the citizens (i.e. the people). So here is where I come, I am going to write a chapter on virtual communities, how they are created, how they evolve, what happens there, etc. Hopefully my experience at participating in several online forums, weblogs, etc will help. Also, although not directly relevant, I could draw on my experience in the project I am working in at the moment: designing a virtual community for educational purposes.

2. This is a paper I am going to write with my boss. It will draw on our experience and the data we got from our last project: E-learning and E-Mentoring to improve skills of Unemployed Women. It's going to be something like: Adding a Structuration Dimension to e-learning and e-mentoring. I used Structuration Theory in my PhD thesis, and my boss is doing the same. So we thought that using it to explain some of the issues in that project could be a good idea. We actually would like to see if e-mentoring really exists. Most of the mentoring activities that our project participants performed were done through other media, so there is was no e in mentoring. The question I am thinking at the moment would be something like Can Social Software (or Virtual Communities) be used for mentoring purposes? We'll have to investigate the mentoring process in detail ... We are still brainstorming....

3. A Project Report to be published in the Research Memorandum Series of the School. Of course it will be based on my experiences at designing and implementing the Virtual Graduate School. Perhaps I could adapt some of my posts in this blog .....

hmmm What else could I write about?
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The other day I asked a friend of mine to draw a picture representing research experiments with students. This is what she gave me. I have posted it in a blog article next to a video about a marketing experiment.

As I've mentioned a couple of times before, I am working on this project that involves the creation of an online environment for PhD students and young researchers. The purpose of the online environment would be to help them learn how to do research by looking at what other people are doing and going through and by making them share their own experiences as well.

I have recorded a good number of video clips and collected other kind of material as well. Now I am uploading that material in the blogger tool in Sakai. I have an idea about what I would like this site to look like, but I am having some problems at achieving that.

Idea: create articles or posts containing video clips or PPT, etc. (I wrote about this idea in another post, now I am actually doing it!) Each article will address a particular issue related to research in general or the PhD degree in particular. I have organised all the videos, etc I have got under general topics (as I mentionend in my previous post) I have drawn links between general topics so I have got a kind of network of topics. Starting from one topic the idea is to create an article for that topic and embed the video, audio, or PPT and write an introductory text. In addition to this I will add a section called Related Articles where I am going to list three or four other articles with related topics (as shown in my network of topics). Finally I would like to upload all that information on behalf of the person who did the video, or wrote the PPT, etc.

The final result, I hope, will be a network of articles addressing research issues, interconnected between them by simple links to other articles. As each article will be own by different people this will help the site to create a sense of community where more than one person (i.e. me) is working on uploading material. Hopefully in the future, after I open the site to everyone in the school, other people will like to comment on the articles and perhaps write their own articles.

Reality: I have managed to work around some problems but I have three new problems now. First some old problems. I filmed the video clips using a mini DV camera. I moved the DV content into the computer and created WMV files. I learned how to embed these files into posts in the blogger tool. But I kept on having problems with the security of the site. Videos will not show if I set up the settings of the WMV to private within the sites. I reported the problem to our Sakai team and after a few weeks they re-installed? an editor that included the option to upload Flash videos. So I bought a Flash video maker.... I bought Adobe Flash C3 Professional. I learned how to convert the WMV into Flash files, add a skin and upload the files into Sakai. Then I had also problems with relative URLs so I had to set all the Flash files to search for their skin within a specific URL in Sakai. Now all flash videos work. (unless someone changes the location of the skin!!!)
Problems I have now are:

1. Posts in the blogger tool in Sakai do not have permalinks, and that drives me crazy!!! Because of this I've been unable to include links to other posts in a post. I had designed a sort of box in every post called "Related articles" and in there I have written a list of articles we suggest the student or researcher can read. I just need to add links to that list but I have no individual links for the posts, actually all the URLs I get for every post in the blog and for the list of articles are the same! I have sent a request to fix this, lets see what happens.
2. I asked the Sakai people to give me grants to upload information on behalf of other members of the site and they said No :( buuaaaaa I will have to think on what I can do to sort this out. Help!!!
3. There is no option for moderating comments. If someone posts a comment I cannot remove it or move it to another post. Also all comments are ordered in the order they were posted, so the first comment goes on top and the last one is at the end. The user has to scroll down to see the last comment. I was thinking that it could be a better idea to have them the other way around, so the last comment will always come on top. I think that would be more useful because people will always see new things in the top of the screen and they will not need to scroll down to see "if" someone has added something to the discussion.

Conclusion: I need a beer!









Footnote: "You never know how important something (or someone) is until you lose it" ... Everyone has a life lesson to learn

El día empieza iremos hacia el sur
qué caro está el peaje, qué caro está
el Perú

My mind is not working today. Actually it has been on a strike for a few days now. It must be the easter holidays. :)

I am trying to take a step forward in the project I am working in. So far I have recorded a few video clips from staff and students in the school. Yeah I think I have a good number now. I have done some myself. The videos are short, an average of 5 minutes each. I am also getting other kind of material, like for example a PowerPoint presentation an ex-PhD student sent me, or an essay a second year student is writing. I have also been working on Sakai. I focused my exploration on the blogger feature, but also on the wiki, forum, podcast and resources tools. As I think those will hold the core of the material I am collecting. Of course I will also use the schedule, annoucements and messaging tools, but I think those will form part of the peripheral of the site.

I feel like stuck now. I sort of guess what I should do next but do not know how to do it. I think my next step should be organising all the material I've got so far and try to build a map of themes. This map would help me to:

1. Know the gaps I need to fill regarding areas of research in the school I need to cover
2. Create sort of groups of themes to which the video clips and other material can be classified
3. Then I can use these groups to create a series of blog posts within one or more sites in Sakai.
(I am not sure yet if I will need more than one site in Sakai. I can probably have 2 sites, for example, and name these sites as my two highest level groups of themes. If I have more groups at the highest level I will need more sites).
4. Relate or draw links between groups of material. I could then use these links to connect material between them. For example I can say "If you want to know more see this other podcast ....".
There might be other benefits of drawing a map but at the moment my brain is just starting to warm up. Maybe 20% functional. I have written a list of themes on my whiteboard (see picture) and I hope I can get ideas about how to organise them soon. Sometimes staring at the whiteboard helps, so that is what I've been doing this morning, before I decided to write this post :)

The blogger feature in Sakai, allows each member of the site (that will be staff and students in the school) to create their own "blog". So a site can have as many blogs as there are members in the site. Each "blog" will hold a list of posts. A post is basically an article containing text, pictures, embeded files, like videos or PDFs, etc. When a member access the blogger tool s/he sees a list of all the posts uploaded by everyone in the site. There are ways of filtering this buy author though.( Each site member could have their own PhD/Research diary in their blog as someone proposed in a comment in my previous post.)

Because I am the only one working on this project everything I will upload will come under my name. I have filmed the videos, edited them, I am editing PowerPoints, etc. I will write and upload instructions and introductory texts to each material. Will organise them and make connections between them. But in reality the owner of the "message" withing each material is every single person who has volunteered to help me. So I think I should publish their material under their names. What do you think? I am not sure though about how to do that. Would I require access to everyone's Sakai account?

Having each material under different names will help the site to build a sense of community. New comers will see that other people have posted things and would think about uploading more material themselves (hopefully!). Some members could ask questions in their blogs or in the forums (as someone else commented in my previous post) and other members could create posts to answer those questions.

What I am doing now is just building the foundations of a site that should start feeding itself with the material that staff and students will upload in the future.

hmmm I think this site will need one or more moderators in the future, just to keep it organised.

I am also thinking on a couple of suggestions that a friend of mine made. He said it could be useful to use the google search engine within the site. That can help students to find the material they are looking for. I am not sure about using the actual "google" search engine. Sakai is a password protected environment and all its content should be kept confidential. (or could I embed a google search engine in Sakai?) The blogger in Sakai comes with a very basic search option which searches within all posts in all blogs in the site. I hope that should be enough. Only problem I find is that there will be other material posted in the forums for example and that search engine woudln't find them. One would have to go to the forum search engine to look for things in the forums... and so on.

My friend also suggested using tags in "del.icio.us" or "technorati" but again I am not sure because of the confidenciality and security issues. The blogger in Sakai allows the creation of "keywords" for each post, so I guess I can use them. I could use the theme groups' names as keywords for example. Finally my friend suggested RSS feeds. Some students could use RSS feeds to keep them updated on new posts or comments on posts within the VGS site. I use RSS feeds in my cellphone to read the news sometimes. I use the RSS option in google sidebar to keep me updated with posts in some blogs, on Hi5 and on Facebook. I like them. Some people may not.

Now I will go back to staring at my whiteboard.

I've been relearning a lot of stuff these days. In the project I am working now I need to collect a lot of information from researchers working in the University. I've been filming some of them. Video clips of no more than 5 minutes which I save as WMV files. I have also got PowerPoint and Word files. All that information will be uploaded in a virtual research/learning community I am designing in Sakai.

The name of this community is Virtual Graduate School and its purpose is to help PhD students and young researchers learn how to do research. We will populate the site with information about research in general and about the research that the staff and students of the school are doing. We want to do this by adding a human/personal touch to the site. The site won't replace books and journal articles. Those are available in libraries and on the web for researchers to be read. What is not there, or at least is not that visible, is information about the process of research. How people come up with ideas, how they make their choices, mistakes, rights and wrongs, etc. I call these aspects the human side of research. When you go to a seminar, or read an article, you are told all the good stuff, the final research questions/hypotheses, the methodology and the results. Then don't tell you why and how they came up with those ideas, and what problems they found on the way. This is the gap that the Virtual Graduate School is trying to fill. Of course it will also cover all the formal aspects of research.

The question I've been working in the last month is on how I can do this. First thing that came to my mind was to show "real, life cases". And it occurred to me that video taping people talking about different aspects of their research was a good idea. Some other people are writing short essays or creating PowerPoint presentations for the project. The next step was to think on how I could show or display that information in a site like Sakai (which is the site that this university uses as a virtual learning environment). I decided to try the blogger tool to create Posts containing the videos, PowerPoint, etc. and a short description of the topic presented plus an invitation for discussion. What I want is to make the site (visually) attractive so people will come and visit it, and also thought provoking so people can start a discussion. Discussion helps people learn, so that would be one of the objectives of this project as well.


Now on to the technical side (Sakai is still being tested by the University's computer centre and I am still learning how to use it.)

As I previously said, I am creating sort of articles (posts) contaning text and other "objects". The blogger in Sakai accepts html code so I am using the "object" and "embed" commands to embed videos. See first picture, it is an article with 3 video clips. This is just an example, the videos are real, but the text has been copied from a random website. My idea is to make members of the site watch the video and read the related written content which provides contextual information like, introduction of the presenter, a bit of background of topic discussed and then a set of questions which I hope will encourage people to participate with their comments. This is the code I am using:

<object width="320" height="285" align="right" type="application/x-oleobject" standby="Loading Microsoft Windows Media Player components..." codebase="https://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/mplayer/en/nsmp2inf.cab#Version=5,1,52,701" classid="CLSID:22d6f312-b0f6-11d0-94ab-0080c74c7e95" id="mediaPlayer">
<param value="https://video.wmv" name="fileName" />
<param value="true" name="animationatStart" />
<param value="true" name="transparentatStart" />
<param value="0" name="autoStart" />
<param value="true" name="showControls" />
<param value="true" name="loop" />
<embed width="320" height="285" loop="true" designtimesp="5311" autostart="0" src="https://video.wmv" videoborder3d="-1" showstatusbar="-1" showdisplay="0" showtracker="-1" showcontrols="true" bgcolor="darkblue" autosize="-1" displaysize="4" name="mediaPlayer" id="mediaPlayer" pluginspage="http://microsoft.com/windows/mediaplayer/en/download/" type="application/x-mplayer2" />
</object>


For PowerPoint and Word documents I thought on converting them to PDF and then embed the PDF into the blog. See second picture. This is the code I am using:

<embed width="576" height="443" src="https://file.pdf" type="application/pdf" />

The menu and toolbars are hidden within the original PDF file. (Go to File-Document Properties and click on the "Initial View" tab)

The advantage is that the presentation comes in a small portion of the site, allowing for an introduction and some other descriptions to be put beside it. However, the presentation is not that small that it cannot be read. The scroll bar remains so the reader con change "slide/page" easily. Also, the reader can have the chance to review some of the comments already made below the article without having to scroll down so much.


Another advantage is that I can do this without any other tool than the standard set I get in a University's machine. I was thinking on converting videos and files to flash format but I don't have flash converter/creator. I will have to buy one. And also I am not sure about how much time it would take and how beneficial it would be.

I got a Nikon D40 with standard 18-55 f3.5-5.6 lens from work and I am supposed to take "good"pictures with it. This is my first experience with a DSLR camera. I have had cameras before but all of them have been point-and-shot. That is: I never bothered about the settings!

Now I have to learn.

So I've been trying to take some pictures, with different settings of aperture, exposure compensation and shutter speed. Here you have some of them.

Playing with the aperture size (the f-number):








Changing the exposure compensation feature from positive to negative,





Using slow shutter speed, moving camera to follow object and keeping camera still while object moves.





I clearly need to practice. If the weather improves this weekend I will try to take some shots outdoor. Any particular tips you would like to share with me?

Help!