Be a Better Man in 30 Days

I've just started a new job and as such I feel it's time for a bit of a routine shake up. Alex, Adam and I are starting to form a lifestyle mastermind group based around our pre-existing wiki and a Facebook group.

As a part of the "shake up" process we're going to try to start following a series of posts run on the Art of Manliness website titles "Be a Better Man in 30 Days". Seeing as I'm just relocating for and starting this job I feel it would be the perfect time for me too embark on something like this. What I plan to do is post some updates on here along with on our improvement wiki.

Admittedly the last 30 day challenge I tried didn't go as planned, University and other commitments meant that it became difficult to blog everyday, for me there's no need to dwell on this though, I'm confident that this process will run a lot better and prove to be a lot more useful.

E&E - Clients

We've started being approached by people who have heard of SWS through word of mouth (the internal emails/facebook group/twitter presence must have helped!) and we need to start drumming up some prices. I think the plan will be to charge differently depending on what media you need hosted or we could start off with just a flat rate to begin with.

These choices need to be made fast because we're generating more and more interest!

E&E - SWS Logo

Check it out!

After speaking with Alex he drummed us up a nice little logo for SWS, it was only a quick thing for the time being, I'm sure there is a lot more branding that would need to be done on top of this but it gives us something to start with.

As for the plans now, I think that we have reahced the stage that we wanted to be at by this time. I'll speak with George and Dave through this week and we can start talking with some designers about templates. After this is we can then pull in some buisness and start trading!

Oh and we musn't forget to start organising a presentation for the final hand-in. So still some bits and bobs to do!

F-Sim Space Shuttle

Over the course of this lazy weekend I've found myself in possession of another addictive iPod game. It's called  F-Sim Space Shuttle, the idea is that you are the pilot of the Orbiter Space Shuttle during its final approach and landing into either the Edwards Airforce Base or the Kennedy Space Centre. 

Although it's an incredibly simple idea, the game is really well executed and is actually quite difficult. It's tied into Game Centre as well, which means that if I can persuade some of the others at college to get it then we can find out who the best Space Shuttle pilot is. I'll probably leave it a few weeks before I tell them, just so I can get a head-start! 

Anyway, download the game out here. Hopefully you'll end up getting as addicted as I'm becoming!

A Love Story . . . In Milk

Written by Stephen Follows and directed by Danann Breathnach, "A Love Story... In Milk" tells the story of two milk jugs who fell in love. He was 2 percent from Happy Farm, she was whole milk from Valley Dairy - still, they found happiness together. But it couldn't last forever.

As featured on Neatorama and The Daily What, this adorable video turns heartbreaking when one empty milk container is put in the recycling bin and the other is thrown in the trash. The unhappy ending is a strong message from Friends of the Earth, a UK organisation promoting recycling.

It's an incredibly clever video that not only anthropomorphises the two milk jugs, but successfully tells the story of their love through the use of clever visuals and sounds.

A Love Story… In Milk from Catsnake on Vimeo.

Reblogged via Syracuse's Viral Video of the Day

E&E - The Limitations Of Vimeo

Having attended yesterdays E&E lecture on freelancing I was drawn in by a couple of poignant points. One of the presenters detailed how many freelancers were beginning to post their showreels online and how employers now simply expected a link to content.

This struck a chord because although we are not yet focussing our attention on the freelance industry, the fact remains that many students will want to be moving their content onto a online platform for their job search. As a result our target market is starting to appear a lot more tangible. 

Many people are using Vimeo for their hosting, and the many reasons for using this service over YouTube can be found in a quick search of the web, the main points are that:

• Personal video usage - no inane comments
• High Quality video by default
• Adaptable video players
• Only recommendations to view your other videos at the end of a clip, rather than a selection of related videos from other users

Although these may appear as mundane reasons for the time being, the fact remains that many professionals are maiming Vimeo their platform of choice. The question that now is needs to be asked now is how are we going to incorporate this into our business. 

There is no way that we could set out to compete with any of these well established market players, and one of my pet hates is having very little interoperability between platforms (not being able to repost a blog on blogger/twitter for example). So we must be willing to help users embed their videos into their webpages or even look into developing a temporary video holding and hosting service for when they cannot upload to Vimeo but need to quickly make a showreel available (Basic package users are only allow 1 HD upload a week, on top of this they are only allowed 500MB of storage space a week).

What I'm getting at is, as resellers we need to have a basic awareness of the constraints and needs of our clients and be ready to adapt to and incorporate their problems into our core business and technical models. In the instance of video showreels this means knowing how to quickly embed and upload content on Vimeo, or maybe even have a premium account for the company ($59.95 a year) that we can then move the customers videos into while they either create their own account or merely as a one off solution. 

The added details on the added functionality of using VimeoPlus can be found here.

30 Day Routine Change

This was posted ages ago on Lifehacker and I finally got around to watching it last night. The main focus is on the short talk by Matt Cutts at a recent Google I/O event.

He details how having a daily routine is great for staying productive, organised and keeping the stress levels to a minimum, but it can also start to feel tiresome and repetitive after a while. The suggestion is to make a small change and try something new for 30 days, this helps you to refresh a dull routine and help you expand your routine in positive way.

Even small changes such as riding a bike to work or writing a page of a novel every day can provide a level of inspiration and excitement, without completely disrupting your daily routine.. The added benefit of making it a small activity is that it will be easily sustainable, however it can also be used to really help you discover a little bit more about yourself and improve upon your weaknesses in a steady, manageable way.

While having a daily routine will help you stay organized and productive, it can also start to feel tiresome after awhile, and it's easy to stop trying new things. Googler Matt Cutts says you can escape that by trying something new—even something small—for 30 days. Cutts explains how by adding or subtracting something simple from his daily routine, like riding his bike to work, or taking a photo every day, helped him expand his routine in positive ways without throwing a wrench into his daily organisation. It doesn't need to be anything huge, either. Something small is easily sustainable, and can still help make your time more memorable, and even help you learn a thing or two about yourself.

E&E - CSS Templates

I was just casually browsing earlier and looking for some inspiration when I came across this site which hosts and provides access to a large number of free CSS templates.

CSS is basically used to style webpages, what we could think of doing is maybe having a page like their one, where the templates are presented to the consumer and they can browse through the examples and test the functionality. SWS could then go further and maybe make it possible for the customer to select a template and then upload their photos and choose a simple colour scheme, almost in a Wordpress Theme kind of way. The customer is then provided with an output link which they can use to direct people to their portfolio. 

Of course this will require a lot more work and investment because it will need a login and online payment system along-side the templates page, but it would be well worth investigating this possibility for the future. Ease of use is a key factor in the marketability of our product.

E&E - Hosting Information

Here's a really interesting website listing most (if not all) of the UK's major hosting companies.

As the site explains it's already a fairly established market so we are going to have to work quite hard to come up with a really good USP. Will selling entirely to students be enough?

E&E - Online Presence

So we have begun to culture an online presence for Student Web Services. This began by firstly purchasing the domain name www.studentws.co.uk (this doesn't lead to a homepage at the moment). In that same vein we've also purchased some hosting so that we can start to offer our services out.

In terms of the more social media related side of things, there are new Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts for Student Web Services (usually appearing under the guise of StudentWS). Although it seems a little naive to say, these platforms really will help us to promote StudentWS amoungst our target market. 

I say it could be a little naive because I am well aware that simply moving an advertising/marketing strategy onto a social media platforms is never sufficient, these strategies have to change and interact cleverly in order to really make an impact. These initial steps will help us to keep people update and create an initial awareness during the first few weeks of our campaign.

E&E - cPanel

Here's a link to cPanel's website, initially we are thinking of using this CMS (Content Management System) for our customers because of it's ease of use for both the user and the administrator. 

Will the licensing costs be too much to warrant using this solution though? The next best step is probably to research what other solutions (if any!) are out there. 

E&E - Presentation Tomorrow

We've just received the timings for our formative presentations tomorrow. We are due to meet at 11:45 so as a group we have decided to come in at 10:00 to prepare. 

At the moment our plan is to talk through our general idea, then begin to explain some of the progress that we have made (researching hosting, cPanel and any possible market), after this we'll explain what the future holds for our enterprise. 

I think what we are going to find most interesting and useful will be the feedback that we get from the tutor, although our plans are making decent progress at the moment (I know from the look of this blog it doesn't look like we have been making progress!) but we've really made a start at this and it'll be great to take away any feedback we get and act upon it. I'll post up any results that we come up with!

E&E - Internet Access

Here's a link to the 2010 UK Internet Access survey which details households and individuals home access to the Internet and individuals’ use of the Internet across the UK.

These statistics show an increasing trend, with more and more people having access to and using the World Wide Web. This is vitally important for our proposed business venture which will rely on this continuing use to drive it's appeal and take-up.

E&E - Project Plan

Below is a copy of the Project Plan that we handed in for our E&E module this year. Our group (George Alton, Dave Christmas and myself) are planning on starting up a web hosting service designed specifically for the student market.

PROJECT PLAN

Name of enterprise:
No definite name yet, will probably develop into something along the lines of “Student Web Services”
Student name(s):
Craig Gardner
David Christmas
George Alton
Job roles to be decided

Summary of enterprise:
The business is to be based around providing online services to students. The prime focus would be those who need temporary hosting and design services during their time at University/College. This could be for a range of things from actual term-time projects (something like Rave Live) through to online portfolio hosting.

The primary focus at the beginning is students who need temporary online services at some point. To that end our major USP would be that we would not attempt to lock the customer down into lengthy contracts but simply provide the service on a month by month basis.

To supplement this we would look firstly into providing basic template solutions that require the minimal amount of effort from the client in order for them to have a functional website, this would mostly be used for basic portfolio presentation during the job application process. Taking this further we could offer more complex and involved hosting/design/technical support services to student start-ups and larger projects.

Finally we would develop an “after University” support section for  graduated students who wish to keep their services. This would be a major development once the original start-up was functioning and profitable.

Our mission statement would involve something along the lines of “we see ourselves providing personal, affordable and no ties web services to the student community. These can be tailored as little or as much as the clients require to help them achieve the best in their endeavours”

Measurable aim(s) of enterprise:

 The feeling at the moment is that there is still a vast amount of market research to be done around this endeavour, which could result in it changing form or direction. The next steps while this is taking place would be to find out the technical infrastructure requirements and begin promoting (at the very least) web design and consultancy services to student projects.

The monetary gains would be small at first, but by making our services highly attractive and affordable the natural flow of the student communications channels should do a lot for our promotion.

Using the fact that many E&E projects will also require websites we could promote the services in this community and hopefully gain some contacts/short term customers there. There is also the up -coming Penrose Media which will require a website etc, these are two examples within Ravensbourne, this idea could easily be pushed further a-field due to the geographically untied nature of the Internet.

A good figure would be 2 – 5 paying customers by the end of the project, spread over various services and at different levels of involvement (short term customers vs long term customers etc)

A starting point would be a website, moving through small-scale social media promotions (a Facebook group etc). The major driving force would be contacting people and making use of already established contacts to bring business and inherrently spread the word through their day-to-day conversations

Action Plan:
Basic Schedule (note this is to be drastically revisited once the final direction of the enterprise has been settled upon)
Weeks 1&2 – Market research, infrastructure research
Weeks 3&4 – Set up own website and hosting, (obtaining/investing in static IP etc) begin to refine portfolio design templates
Weeks 3 – 6 – Promote via word of mouth/online presence and begin arranging client meetings and working to provide the first stages of solutions
Weeks 6+ – Continue with progress, re-asses and re-evaluate enterprise direction and adjust project goals/progress plans accordingly

Budget:
Far to early to say at this stage. Dependant upon initial infrastructure outgoings vs client take-up. A more detailed budget will be drawn out once market research has been done and the project goals have been adjusted accordingly.

Exit Strategy/ Risk management:
Two weeks of market research and technical research will give us a better idea of what we would stand to lose. However as is usually the case with Web infrastructure, the entire thing can be built on older systems and then migrated over to newer systems once investment and uptake have reached appropriate levels. This should minimize the lost investment if the project were to fail during the first 6 weeks.

After this point, the focus should be on continuing student uptake (helped by the fact that every year there are more students entering education) and retaining graduates (this part of the enterprise can be worked on at around a 6month point of the first year, once the original project is seen to be effective).

Blog:
At Ravensbourne we have been required to keep several blogs for several different subjects. Along with my personal blog I have culminated them all at the following URL, this is where my E&E updates will go as well.

http://3rdyearengineering.blogspot.com

See You in Court - BBC

I've just finished watching an episode of BBC1's "See You in Court" which this week covered a couple of libel cases. The programme is actually really interesting, providing a good insight into the way that different parts of the UK's court system works. 

In this week's episode there were particular reference to the Libel Reform Campaign, which is a movement to oppose the silencing of journalists and science writers through libel litigation - a good thing in my view!

I thought that I'd post a couple of links up here just to raise some awareness and promote some interest. 

The Libel Reform Campaign  
See You in Court's programme page

Just as one final point, I'm trying to blog using BlogPress on my iPod, it seems to have worked out alright so far! Hopefully it'll mean I can blog a little bit more. 




 - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Amazon API

A really quick post because it's the end of the evening now. 


I've basically been trying to get some book/music links working on the Top Gun Interactive website so that we can have everything link through to Google or Amazon. I really tried for ages to get the google API working but it doesn't seem to like the more niche books (I appreciate that Google are having to deal with rights issues etc). So I looked at Amazon to see what they could provide.


It turns out that Amazon have an entire monetary system in place in terms of linking to their website. Amazon provide customisable widgets which for the moment I've managed to get working for both the "currently reading" and "currently listening" lists. It basically works as a way for Amazon to link back to their products and then you get a cut of the fees if you provided that link. I've signed up because at the moment all I wanted was to see how Amazons web solutions work (below) and then we can begin to build it and style it into the website.

 There is still a lot of work to be done to the main website (this is literally down to Alex and I finding the time) but I think that as long as we continue experimenting with different solutions/APIs all over the web then we could actually end up with a really nice webpage.

Packet Switched Easter

I'm heading away this weekend to spend some time at the seaside, got to take advantage of this Britishly summer weather before it disappears! However today I spent some time looking into my Telecommunications and Transmissions article that needs doing for next week.


For this unit I have chosen to write on a topic that I would deem to be a relevant topic in todays evolving telecommunications landscape - Traffic Shaping. At the moment my submission breaks down under the following categories.


Topic - ISP Traffic Shaping and Deep Packet Inspection. 
What it is
How it affects us
Why it's being done
The benefits and drawbacks


Today I have been mostly focussed on the first point, what traffic shaping is, and as a result I have been looking into what packet switched networks actually are. I haven't got much time before I leave but this link will lead you to an interesting history behind the development of this new type of networking, focussing on the work of Paul Baran (essentially the father of packet switched networks) and his work at RAND during the 1950s.


Enjoy! and have a great Easter.

Quicksilver Lives!

I havn't had a chance to get this downloaded yet, but I've just read my daily blog feeds and Lifehacker has informed me that Quicksilver is availible for download again.

Quicksilver is literally a keyboard shortcut lovers dream for OSX, I use it constantly everyday (it's completely replaced the command + spacebar spotlight search) but unforutunately soon after I picked it up it was discontinued. Now it's back! It's apparently got a slew of new features and loads of bug-fixes which I'll check out when I get home. 

If you havn't used Quicklsilver before I really recommend it, it takes a bit of getting used to and there are so many features that I never use, that is I guess why it works though because each user can tailor it to their needs! You can find the new release here.

Javascript (window.onload events)

For my engineering project I've had to use various different languages (C++, HTML, PHP, Javascript to name a few), I thought that if I occasionally blogged about different things that I'm learning, not in any particular order but just interesting points of reference (like my post on HTTPS) then I could assist my learning and hopefully help any others who are browsing the Internet looking for some reference material.

Window Onload Events In Javascript

One very common approach to having a script method run when a page loads is to attach a method to the window.onload event. However before I started investigating this, I found it very useful to remind myself what objects and methods actually are in Javascript.

Objects and Methods

A method in javascript is a special kind of function that comes with using an object orientated language. They are functions that belong to objects which means that they are sometimes called "member functions" and they are designed to reduce the amount of repeat programming that is required by not applying themselves to a specifically named object (Object1, object2, object3 etc..) but they can operate directly on the properties of the object that they belong to.
For example.

watch.minutes

The property 'minutes' is attached to the object 'watch' using a concatenation, what we then do is increase it's value by 5 each time the object is called.

if (watch.minutes > 59) { watch.minutes -= 60; watch.hours += 1; }

Now what happens is; IF the watch.minutes property exceeds 59, then we subtract 60 from watch.minutes and increase the watch.hours property by 1.

So now that we've had a brief overview of objects and methods (there are always a few other ways of writing all of these, many can be found online) it's time to move onto the window.onload event.

window.onload
Some scripts require that you run something immediately after the web page finishes loading. The normal way to do this is to add an onload attribute to the body tag. You don't have to do it that way though, you can set up a global event handler to do it instead.

This is done for two reasons, with a global event handler it is easier to add the code to webpages, rather than having to edit the body tag. Secondly if the event handler is added to an external Javascript file attached to the page, then you may not need to edit the page at all.

However, global event handlers do require that you use them to call a function, and not have them execute code directly. This is done because we probably want to refer to the page content itself and we can't do that until that content exists on the client-side to be referenced.

An example of how this event can be triggered is below:

function init(){ ...code... } window.onload=init;

Here the function init() is defined first, then it is called and executed using the window.onload event handler. Instead of assigning a predefined function you can also assign a 'nameless' function to the event handler:

window.onload=function(){ ...code... }

Or use a function() constructor:

window.onload=new Function("...code...");

Despite it's apparent usefulness there are actually many situations in which using the window.onload event is not the best method, from what I have briefly read Modern Ajax frameworks have now introduced the idea of a 'document ready' event. This is an event that will fire when the document is ready to have DOM (I'll do an article about the DOM at a later date) manipulations performed on it. The "onload" event fires only after EVERYTHING on the page has loaded. The jQuery framework is a good place to start with document.ready functions because it doesn't change any of Javascript's core functionality, and will generally stay out of your way and let you do things as you like when you want to.


I find this little investigation to be really useful in helping me clarify a few things, it's presented me with a load more questions to investigate, but that's the process of learning! More information on Javascript basics and the window.onload event handler can be found across the web.

IPP Learning Blog

So it's come to that time, one of the reasons that I started this blog was because our IPP (Industry and Professional Practice) unit at Ravensbourne requires that we write a learning blog.

In terms of actual assessment criteria for the blog there aren't really that many, the ones that are listed on the Project Brief are covered in the accompanying 800 word written summary so there is a little more free reign in the learning blog.

Initially I wasn't enthused about writing a blog, I couldn't see what relevance it would have too me, however I'm really enjoying it now. It allows me to put down my thoughts and gives me a little project to do every week. I'll try and continue with it, documenting my side projects, at the moment I'm playing around with SSH and local web-hosting which is actually teaching me a lot about Linux systems and web coding, I'm also starting a project that is Flash based to help me develop some skills in that area as well.

I hope that it can be seen from the blog that I've actually got quite a lot of things going on around me and in my head! I'm always looking to learn new things and I'm always willing to push myself into different projects and life experiences to broaden my horizons and develop my life skills.

On a final note, I know that I have a term left in Ravensbourne but I've actually really enjoyed my time there, I've learnt a lot and I know that I've developed as a person. I've met some great friends along the way, which does remind me of something that one of the lecturers said in the first term about how you would find you're good friends during your time at University. I'm looking forward to leaving though and heading out into the world and hopefully doing and experiencing some amazing things.

TED - Mick Ebeling: The invention that unlocked a locked-in artist

I love TED talks, in-case you are't aware of what it is, TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design)is a U.S private non-profit foundation best known for its conferences held all over the world devoted to what it calls "ideas worth spreading".

I blogged recently how I have BBC news open up every morning through an AppleScript, I've done the same thing with TED podcasts, effectively making them my alarm. I download the latest one a night before and stick it on my "alarmPlaylist" on iTunes. This way it gently wakes me up every morning, giving me something to think about every day.

Last week I woke up to what has to have been one of the most inspirational talks that I have seen in a long time, I had forgotten to delete it off the playlist so it played again this morning and just reminded me how fantastic it was.

It is a talk by Mick Ebeling who founded the Not Impossible Foundation and he tells the story of how he and a team of collaborators built an open source invention that gave the graffiti artist TEMPT (who suffers from the nerve disease ALS, leaving him completely paralysed) the means to make art and communicate again.

More information can be found about TED and here is the full link to the talk.

Local Webserver

Again I find myself in the situation of not having blogged at all last week, trying to find the time to do this is proving quite difficult, never-the-less I shall carry on. It's actually becoming quite enjoyable!

I'm midway through the first week of my Easter break and it's actually really nice to take some time out (it's a hard life I know!). What I really wanted to do with this post was briefly talk about a little side project that I've had going on for the past few days

Since Alex and I have started doing a bit of web development we've been approached by a housing company to create a website for them, they wanted to do it using a Wordpress template but neither of us has really used it before. The initial idea seems simple enough, just a tiny bit of CSS and PHP work with the job becoming more complex later on. Perfect!

However one thing that we are going to need is a way to test out our work, and that will require having a web server with Wordpress installed . . . enter old and unused computer. I'd been mucking around with this old Dell PC ages ago and had wanted a Windows and Linux box to muck around on so that I can become proficient cross-platform, I'd basically just wiped the hard-drives and then completely reinstalled XP and Ubuntu to start with, what I now wanted to do was set this box up permanently and have it a webserver on our local network.

This was actually a really simple task to accomplish, the web resources for installing a web server on Ubuntu are numerous and clear, so it was a case of downloading the LAMP stack as suggested by the Ubuntu help forum and after a bit of PHPMyadmin configuration I was ready to go. I never thought it could be that easy if I'm honest!

Installing Wordpress was then just as easy by following the instructions on the Wordpress help wiki, again some minor PHPMyadmin work and that was it we were up and running! What I've also done is made the www root folder a shared folder on the local network so that it is easy to change around the files from either of our computers which should make things much easier.

I know I haven’t actually written much on the process but I thought it would be best to share a general overview as there's really no point in repeating what is on the help pages because it really is that simple. This is going to be a great help though, both in terms of helping me learn a little bit about server administration and as a real testing ground for any development work that we do. The next step is to investigate accessing the PC via SSH, not because it's essential but because this could prove to be another technology and method that I may need to use in the future, there would be no better place to learn it than in a closed environment where nothing can (hopefully) go wrong!

Using the Pomodoro Technique

My last post on HTTPS last week turned out to be a lot more work than I thought it would be! Although I learned quite a bit, it was tough doing it throughout the day. I'm not going to shy away from large research based posts, but at least I'm now aware of the amount of work that it takes to concisely write about something like that!
Anyway onto this post, I have been heavily involved in finishing my dissertation for the past week, hence I haven’t had much time to write anything on here! Taking some of the things that I've learned I want to mention the study technique that I've used

I base my study technique on the fundamental principles of the Pomodoro Technique. In this method you divide your time up into 25 minute work slots which are then followed by a 5 minute rest period. For me this works perfectly, I find that 25 minutes is just the right amount of time to seriously hold my concentration and stay focussed on the task at hand. I stop myself from using any distractions like Facebook, emails or Blog reading during this time and have found it to be a highly effective method for getting work done.

During the rest periods I'll read my emails, fill up my water bottle (a vital study companion) or simply get up and away from my desk to stretch my legs. Once this is over I then return and continue to study for another 25 minutes.

My day is then spilt up into further 30 minute periods (25 + 5 minutes = 30 minutes) and I'll try and do say an hour and a half of my dissertation, break for some food, another hour and a half, break to do something different and then return to the work etc.

What I've found to be highly effective is if I actually plot this out on my Google Calendar with pop-up reminders:

I think that this helps keep me to time because it's almost like I have someone else telling me what to do and when, it's a psychological thing that gives me some abstraction between the timetable and myself

Of course this can br a fairly flimsy method if I'm having a day where I lack the will to really get into the work, this hasn’t happened yet nand I think this is because; I could technically break this routine at any point but I've developed my concentration and mental drive enough to prevent any procrastination. I just plug into my music and have my short, sharp bursts of concentration.

Obviously I wouldn't expect this routine to work for everyone, when my housemates tried it along with me they didn't enjoy it at all. The main reason was that they felt that it didn't give them enough time to "get into" a project. The breaks came to often and actually made thme lose focus.

For me the 30 minute sessions that the technique provides form the backbone of my routine. I then combine it with several other elements to help me stay focussed and productive during my days (I'll cover these in another post!).

It's important to remember that this is still very much a work in progress, although Pomodoro works as the backbone I am happy to continue refining my routine until I have something that suits me. This may never happen but I'm fine with this, my routines will have to change and adapt as my situation changes, by using and trialling different methods I can find what works and what doesn't work for me.
More information on the Pomodoro Technique can be found here.A great timing extension for chrome that I use is available here.

Facebook HTTPS - What is it?

I recently changed my Facebook Account Security settings and switched on secure browsing (I know it's taken me a while). Facebook initially provided the option in January 2011 expanding its HTTPS usage from password transfer to entire site data transfer.

While doing this I thought that it would be worth having a quick look into HTTPS and seeing what changes it was actually bringing to the way that I access Facebook.

What is HTTPS?

HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is a combination of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (the method by which hypertext requests and information between servers and browsers are transferred across the Internet) and the SSL/TLS protocol which is used to provide encrypted communication and secure identification of network web servers.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is the most widely used security protocol on the Internet, it was originally developed by Netscape and aspects of the latest enhancement of SSL 3.0 has been incorporated into the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol.

SSL

SSL is based on the premise that when I browse to a trusted site, I want to know that I am talking only to the person that I want to talk too and that my data is not being seen by anybody else.

This trust is achieved by using Certification Authorities and Public Key Infrastructure, the basic idea is that if you have a public key in your possession and you use it to encrypt data, the only system that can decrypt that message is a system that possesses the private key (and vice-versa). PKI is used for authentication.

A part of this process is to set up the encryption. This is negotiated during the SSL protocol's initial handshake - at the same time as calculating authentication. Once this has reached completion, a tunnel is created using a less computationally hungry process known as symmetric key cryptography. At this point the traffic can be deemed as being encrypted.

The System Architecture

The following diagram and paragraph sum up the authentication process perfectly [via SecurityWorkshop]

• When any modern browser is installed, it is sent with several CA issuer certificates. These issuer certificates contain a public key for the issuer, among other information.
• When a web designer decides to use SSL he needs to purchase a certificate that is signed using the CA's private key.
• The web browser starts a connection to an HTTPS site. Along with this request the client sends all supported encryption schemes.
• As a response to the browser's connection request, the Server sends a copy of the certificate from step 2. Along with this transmission is the server's answer to the encryption negotiation.
• Once a certificate is downloaded, the signature of the certificate (that was signed using the CA's private key) is checked using the CA's public key (installed in the browser in step 1 - note that there is no need to use the network for this). No error is thrown if this verification checks out.
• The connection succeeds, the client can now download and upload to the web site with the security of encryption.

Things to Note

You can tell when you are using a secure protocol because:

• The http:// part of URL is replaced by https://
• A padlock will appear in the status bar of the browser.

Modern browsers also give the functionality of inspecting the security certificate to verify the status of the connection

To summarise; the idea behind HTTPS is to create a secure channel over an inherently insecure network. It protects on two levels; certification/verification stops anyone from creating fake websites designed to steal information. On-top of this the encryption means that although outsiders may be able to see that information is being passed between the client and the server, they will not be able to access the contents of the IP packets.

So what changes is this actually bringing to my browsing experience?

It now means that my private information that I'm inputting into Facebook is now protected as it travels across the Internet. It's basically making the process much more secure and my information is less susceptible to attacks by readily available bits of software such as Firesheep. Ultimately it is helping to prevent me from being susceptible to all kinds of data theft.

So why not just use HTTPS when accessing every website?

Having had a look at various blog posts I can gather that while HTTPS is great for secure transactions and dealing with sensitive information across the Internet, it does make website loading slower. This is because everything on the webpage must be encrypted and then decrypted (in the case of Facebook this would be all of the images, adverts etc).

The HTTPS transfer process also means that encryption and decryption must be done on both the client and server sides of the channel, this can be quite CPU intensive.

When it comes down to it, there is really just no need to encrypt the majority of web traffic, because there is no need to waste the extra over-head using HTTPS channels all of the time. However it is important to understand why it is used and when it needs to be implemented.

I'm not aiming to cover HTTPS in it's entirety but merely get a grasp of what it is about and why use it. There is a lot of detail to be found on encryption and HTTPS along with plenty more information across the Web. Gizmodo posted an excellent article on this subject as well and I must finally mention Security Workshop again because of the excellent explanation.

What's this all about?

I was beginning to think about what I'm going to use this blog for. Originally I was using it as my Rave Live Blog and then I was going to move it onto my Third Year Engineering project.

However I feel that I will post a lot more if I use it as some kind of dumping ground for ideas that pop into my head (I thought about this post while waking up this morning) or maybe even use it to re-blog certain articles that I find interesting or want to comment on.

That's what I'm going to use this post for, I want to re-blog something that I spotted about a year ago. It popped back into my head because during my dissertation tutorial we began talking about Ph.D's and Masters degrees and the methods of thinking that they encourage. I feel presentation below sums this up perfectly.

It comes from a presentation by Matt Might, professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah, entitled "What Exactly Is a Doctorate?"

Every fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. students what a Ph.D. is.

It's hard to describe it in words. So, I use pictures. Read below for the illustrated guide to a Ph.D.
Imagine a circle that contains all of human knowledge:

By the time you finish elementary school, you know a little:

By the time you finish high school, you know a bit more:

With a bachelor's degree, you gain a specialty:

A master's degree deepens that specialty:

Reading research papers takes you to the edge of human knowledge:

Once you're at the boundary, you focus:

You push at the boundary for a few years:

Until one day, the boundary gives way:

And, that dent you've made is called a Ph.D.:

Of course, the world looks different to you now:

So, don't forget the bigger picture:

Keep pushing.

I think this is a great way to sum up what getting a doctorate really means and a stark reminder that no matter what you're speciality is, there is so much more out there to be found out.

Matt Might is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah. He Tweets from @mattmight and blogs at blog.might.net

Original article taken from Gizmodo.

Automating BBC News Every Morning

One of my morning routines is to watch the news every morning as I'm having a coffee and getting ready. Usually I'll watch the previous nights 10 o'clock news on iPlayer, this requires me to open up the iPlayer website every morning, scroll down to "BBC News At 10", open this on either the same page or a new page and then play the content

Although this isn't the most labour intensive thing that I've ever had to do, it's just become a bit of a pain to have to do it every morning. So I was wondering if there was a way that I could automate the process.

So there were a couple of things to achieve:

• Have an automated action to open the iPlayer website at the correct 10 o'clock news site (which will probably change every day as the next day's video is uploaded)
  
• Have this action performed at a certain time every day
  

I first looked at how to set up repeating events. Using iCal seemed to be one option as it can have it's reminders execute scripts - however I have moved away from iCal for a while (in favour of plain old GCal) so i didn't really want to use it.

Instead I found out that Mac OS actually has some form of event timing system built in (as I'm sure every other OS does) called Cron. More information can be found here and I have decided to use this as my scheduling tool. Using the CronniX application to provide a workable GUI for the Cron daemon (I usually like doing this manipulation stuff in Terminal but I wanted to get it done before a meeting so didn't have much time) I then scheduled an event to go off at 8:10 every morning, using the simple schedule tab I could paste the destination of my script file into the "Command" box, in order to execute the script I just needed to tick the "Prepend /usr/bin/open" box (I'm guessing this runs the process that opens files and applications - I look into the inner workings of CronniX later).

Now that I had the ability to schedule my event I just needed to make it. Although at the beginning I said that I wanted to have an AppleScript because I feel that it would have been great to practice my coding, time constraints again dictated that I find a simper solution. So I turned to Automator and built up the simple workflow below that would open the correct webpage.

The workflow works as follows

1. Obtaining and navigating to the BBC iPlayer homepage in the default browser (chrome)
   
2. Displaying the homepage
   
3. Searching the homepage for URLs
   
4. Filtering these URLs and only keeping the ones that contain the string BBC_News_at_Ten (this is the standard naming convention that is used)
   
5. Displaying this webpage
   

All I then had to do was to save this as an application, point the Cron daemon towards it and let it do its thing!

I understand that I'll obviously have to watch out in terms of this will open every-day, and I'm not sure how it will react to weekends because there is no "News at 10" it's only the "Weekend News". I think the workflow will simply fail and nothing much will happen but I can always schedule this not to happen on a weekend

When I get time I'll change a couple of things, notably I want the whole thing to be run as a script so that I can get some experience in using AppleScript. Also it would be good to close the original iPlayer homepage after opening the news tab and of course I want to look more into the Cron daemon, /usr/bin/open function and other lower level OS stuff. Mostly because I enjoy getting to grips with this stuff but also because there could be certain other things that I could begin to automate!

Top Gun Interactive

Alex and I were browsing this morning and accidently bought a domain name, topguninteractive.co.uk. Being the productivity kings that we are at the moment we have begun to turn it into an up and coming website, with a little help from our friends (thanks Jon!). 

I'll keep posting any developments - I'm trying to turn over a new leaf and actually post regularly, even if it's just to myself! Until then enjoy the welcome slate (Top Gun Interactive)