Text Books – Management

• Fundamentals of Management (Pacific Rim Edition) by Danny Samson and Richard L. Daft
• International Business: Managing in the Asia-Pacific (3rd Edition) by Greg Fisher et. al.
• Strategic Management: Competitiveness & Globalisation (Asia Pacific Third Edition) by Hanson et. al.
• Cold Steel: Lakshmi Mittal and the Multi-Billion-Dollar Battle for a Global Empire by Tim Bouquet and Byron Ousey
• Managers and the Law: A Guide for Business Decision Makers by Lynden Griggs, Eugene Clark and Ian Iredale
• Essential Foundations of Economics (4th Edition) by Robin Bade and Michael Parkin
• Accounting 4: An Introduction by Atrill et. al.
• Principles of Managerial Finance by Gitman, Juchau and Flanagan
• Organisational Behaviour on the Pacific Rim (2nd Edition) by Steven McShane and Tony Travaglione
• Organisational Behaviour (5th Edition) by Robbins et. al.
• Marketing Principles & Best Practices 3e (International Student Edition) by Hoffman et. al.
• Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice by Dave Chaffey et. al.
• Human Resource Management: Strategies and Processes (5th Edition) by Alan Nankervis, Robert Compton and Marian Baird
• Writing for Journalists (2nd Edition) by Wynford Hicks et. al.
• Editing Made Easy by Bruce Kaplan

Text Books – Computing

• Artificial Intelligence: Structures and Strategies for Complex Problem Solving by George F. Fluger
• Operating System Concepts (7th Edition) by Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
• Your UNIX: The Ultimate Guide (2nd Edition) by Sumitabha Das
• Data Communications and Networking (4th Edition) by Behrouz A. Forouzan
• PHP and MySQL Web Development (2nd Edition) by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson
• Java Software Solutions: Foundations of Program Design (3rd Edition) by Lewis & Loftus
• Data Abstraction and Problem Solving with JAVA: Walls and Mirrors (International Edition) by Frank M. Carrano and Janet J. Prichard
• Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in C (2nd Edition) by Mark Allen Weiss
• Object-Oriented Software Engineering: Using UML, Patterns and Java (2nd Edition) by Bernd Bruegge and Allen H. Dutoit
• The C Programming Language (2nd Edition) by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie
• Computer Confluence: Exploring Tomorrow’s Technology (IT Edition) by George Beekman and Eugene J. Rathswohl

Text Books – Not Mine (But Read)

• Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm (International Edition) by Kenneth C. Laudon and Jane P. Laudon
• Electronic Commerce: A Managerial Perspective 2006 by Efraim Turban et. al.

Non-Fiction Purchases (Web Development)

• Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman
• The Zen of CSS Design by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag
• Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design by Andy Clarke
• Bulletproof Ajax by Jeremy Keith
• DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model by Jeremy Keith
• DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using JavaScript and DOM by Stuart Langridge
• The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks by Davey Shafik et. al.
• Core MySQL: The Serious Developer’s Guide by Leon Atkinson

Non-Fiction Purchases (Other)

• Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design by Bill Buxton
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations by Clay Shirky
• Monkeyluv: And Other Stories on our Lives as Animals by Robert M. Sapolsky
• Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff by Fred Pearce
• What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell
• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism by Andrew J. Bacevich
• The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One by David Kilcullen
• No Standing Only Dancing: Photographs by Rennie Ellis, National Gallery of Victoria
• Impossible Nature: The Art of Jon McCormack by Jon McCormack et. al.
• The Fabulist: The Incredible Story of Louis De Rougemont by Rod Howard

Electronic

• Blue Planet Run: The Race to Provide Safe Drinking Water to the World by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt
• The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind by James Boyle
• Remix by Lawrence Lessig
• The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig
• Code: version 2.0 by Lawrence Lessig
• Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks by Luke Wroblewski
• Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behaviour by Indi Young
• Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications by Patrick Lenz
• The Art and Science of CSS by Cameron Adams et. al.
• The Principles of Successful Freelancing by Miles Burke
• How to Make a Book by the Blurberati
• Street Photography for the Purist by Chris Weeks
• The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks and Techniques by Corrie Haffly
• Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin
• The Dip by Seth Godin
• 99 Cows by Seth Godin
• Bootstrapper’s Bible by Seth Godin
• Unleashing the Idea Virus by Seth Godin

Fiction

• The Collectors by David Baldacci
• Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris
• A Most Wanted Man by John LeCarre
• All the Colours of Darkness by Peter Robinson
• Red Rabbit by Tom Clancy
• The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown
• Velocity by Dean Koontz
• The Darkest Evening of the Year by Dean Koontz

But, as Ignite’s Molly Wise points out, the good Senator was just a man behind his own times… we really did use miles and miles of tubes post-industrial revolution and into the 1950’s and further.

Ignite talks are 20 slides that auto-advance after 15 seconds… so this isn’t a big time chewer to watch. But it’s an interesting look at the mailing tube system and it’s growth in Paris to become over 450 kilometres (1945) of pneumatic tubes. Error correction was firing a pistol into the tube to locate the blockage via accoustic measurement. Way cool. Way way cool.

Am I the only person to think this is way cooler and more amazing than the Internet? Had I been a little boy faced with the Internet or a series of tubes my heart would have probably followed the tactile embrace of physical gazzumption rather than digital ubiquity. What little boy never imaged driving one of those 1900’s steam engines littering our town parks (back in the days we didn’t overly coddle children onto child-safe apparatus approved by the committee of cotton-wool jumpsuits).

It would be so cool to sit in my office and receive these physical documents and send them off again. Cooler than email. Cooler by far than SMS (Simple Message Service). We should go back to a cool society and ditch this obsession with efficiency and hyper-availability… we should all be like Cuba, the only country that actually meets the international criteria set for carbon footprint / emissions. Now there’s an idea.

Anyone up for becoming an inefficient communist dictator to save the planet?

The Web, we should all understand, is not going to be a city of silo websites that operate like empty boutique stores. These segregated silos will no doubt exist but they will pale into insignificance against the backdrop of the Web of Things, or the One Web (One Machine) in which the world’s largest distributed network achieves it’s potential. We’ll make more and more things that use the Web for communication, information sharing and to enhance our everyday experiences in the context of who we are, where we are and what we happen to be out to achieve. The Web of Things that intercommunicate and share their lesser abilities to mutual software and hardware benefit.

It might be easy even at this point to brush aside the idea of a world full of invisible computers humming away in the background. News flash, we’re already there. Our modern cars have about 40 computers and we hardly notice them. What about moving that into a clock that automatically knows your birthday, has facial recognition software and provides personalised greetings dependant on age, your mood, or in light of recent events. You don’t want a clock wishing you a cheerful Happy Birthday after you went to a family funeral. But you’re right, such a clock is a gimmick, a mere toy. A triviality.

Can you think of a thousand things that might be contextually useful on a mobile phone? Easy. How about context aware marketing where posters display information or advertising relevant to you and your choices and what you are likely to be interested in reading. Not because it was programmed to think for you, but because it is just smart enough to pull some information here and a snippet of an application there and come up with useful stuff. We’re looking at a world where the distributed environment is going to also challenge our security and privacy. Applications will interact with other applications and with our actual real world environments. An exciting prospect and a dangerous one.

We’re about to stop going to the Internet (or the Web) to do things. We’re migrating to a world where we look into the One Web, along with our Things. It’s going to lose place, and be everywhere. Your software agents will find out what you need and your hardware agents will provide you with the services in your home, worklife and anywhere else.

If you’re interested in web technologies – don’t blinker yourself to the possibilities by imagining the Web as that city of silos. It’s indeed an exciting time in history. And a very dangerous one. Even more dangerous because to most of us this will be an almost invisible computing environment, on purpose. Don’t think keyboard and mouse; do think gestures and intentions. And think business opportunities…

Validation, in particular, is a murky grey issue. There are a lot of reasons why more websites carry Doctypes, for one most templates for Content Management Systems (CMS) now include Doctypes by default. Which is a good and a bad thing. If authors aren’t aware of Doctypes or simply don’t care then Doctypes don’t mean a lot by themselves. However, it’s interesting to see statistics on the percentage of documents which pass validation when authoring in Typo, WordPress, Joomla and Blogger. Or the percentage passing validation when the document is identified as being authored in specific editors. For some reason documents authored in Apple iWeb attained a level of 81.9% still being valid, with the next closest being Adobe Dreamweaver at a low 3.4%. It might say a lot about the demographic using Apple iWeb and their world view.

You may also be interested in how Opera decides which 3.5 million websites out of the trillion out there gets trawled and analysed – MAMA: The URL Set – as well as their methodology and what has come before MAMA. Interesting to read.

The background story is that our modem died a few weeks ago and we purchased a D-Link Wireless 4 Port Router and a NetComm ADSL modem. Yep I know that I could have got all that in one bundle for under a hundred bucks but it was Sunday and an emergency. We picked up what was on the shelf at the time. Easy enough and the office turned into a 802.11b wireless network of 2 PCs running Windows XP and a laptop running Vista. So what’s the problem?

The problem was that we couldn’t log onto MSN Live Messenger on one of the computers. And we couldn’t upload images to WordPress websites from that computer. Several other sites failed to work as well. Error codes #80048820 and #80048439 were the only clue.

So if you’ve visited Fanatic Live and other threads on this you will soon notice not everyone has the same cure. I re-synchronised the time, ran .dll files that were important, deleted a Messenger folder from windows directory, changed the MTU (Maximum Transfer Unit) setting on the modem from 1500 down to 1400 then up to 1436, disabled all firewalls, changed security settings in Internet Explorer and removed any proxy settings, adventured around in the modem and router settings until I was just about done with it for the day. I absolutely felt like giving in.

Now go back a step. Why? Because all of these steps may have cured the issue. What was missing in that list that I rushed through? The answer is that I only changed the MTU to 1436 on the modem. The moment it was changed to match it on the router the problem was solved. So if you’re stuck on this issue I’d suggest following the Fanatic Live thread and following suggestions there. Or, if you’re smarter than me, you’ll catch that second MTU value if you’ve got a separate modem and router. Now the real question is why the MTU made a difference and why was it only on one PC? But its cured.

Let’s backtrack a little and look at the form element’s method attribute…

form method="get" action=""

There are other methods but for the most part GET and POST are your two basic alternatives. This is the method that the form will use to send the information to the server. Note the form data will be sent in plain text regardless of whether GET or POST is used.

First let’s look at GET. The simple thing to note about GET is that when you use GET the content of your form will become url encoded into a query string. That means in the address bar of your browser where you type in URLs the content of your form will become a query string appended after a ? as name=value pairs. For example if your form took your name and your age the corresponding query string attached to the URL would be…

?name=steven&age=43

As you can imagine this can be read by anyone looking over your shoulder. In a generalised sense, GET is meant for when you get from the server rather than POST being meant to post to the server.

One useful thing to note about query strings appended to your URL and the GET method is that search terms used with GET can be bookmarked as a result set. Its worth keeping in mind. Its perhaps worth noting that GET data is sent in the header part of a request to the server. Also, if no method attribute is put forward then the default method is GET. And a limitation of GET, to be aware of, is that its size is limited to the buffer input size of the server so you might send too much data in your request.

So what is URL encoding? Well, URL encoding is an important function that makes the query string valid. If I entered my full name in the previous example the space between steven and clark would be URL encoded to a + sign.

?name=steven+clark&age=43

To see this url encoded output make a small form with two or three fields and send it to your email account using an action of mailto.

A handy little form you might try is available at berghel.net where you can easily see the GET data turned into a query string in the browser address bar whereas the POST data is not turned into a query string in the browser address bar.

POST, on the other hand, is sent in the body of the request after the headers and is not visible to the user as a query string. The content is sent as name=value pairs but not made visible in the address bar of the browser. In that way, although its still only text, it can be a little bit more secure (from the person reading your age over your shoulder) than GET. The main thing to put in your head about using method=post is that you use it to POST data to the server for processing – for example entry into a database or contact form details.

There are a lot of complex side issues I can’t run into on this short post about the differences between GET and POST. And yes this is a short dirty answer to a simple enough question. I got flamed once in comments on GET vs POST because I mentioned security – note server side gurus that someone looking over my shoulder reading my form entry details is actually a low level of security. Security is not the complete domain of the server side environment. Not sharing my password is security. But that’s splitting hairs. In the end GET and POST are both sent as plain text and a smart person positioned between your computer and the server can retrieve the data if they are so inclined. Its enough for the beginner to understand query strings and how they relate to the form element’s method attribute.

A further note, if you’re looking at CGI programming, GET and POST are treated differently. GET is available as an environment variable whereas POST is available through the standard input stream (stdin). Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

A good basic rule is when you’re sending off form data you should be using POST. If you are just running search queries then GET might be appropriate. I’m sure if you Google you’ll get a far more accurate and technical answer.

The problem I encountered is actually quite common so its worth writing about. Common and yet the cure to it doesn’t seem to get a mention on any of the hundred posts I must have read looking for the answer (rule one: don’t look on forums when you’re stuck until you’re out of ideas and have checked the HARDWARE).

If you’re restarting your computer and want to install from the Windows XP installation disk you’ll have to use the keyboard at one point in startup to press ‘any key’. Similarly if you’ve got dual booting on your computer you’ll need to use the up / down arrow keys to select which version to boot into every other day of your life. But what if your keyboard doesn’t work at that stage? You’re just plugging away and have no options accessible to boot into that installation disk? And your options of dual booting are severely limited without the ability to select which operating system to boot into if that’s where your issues are happening.

Don’t laugh. I’d take a punt you might be using a Universal Serial Bus (USB) keyboard rather than an older PS2 keyboard.

I’m not sure all USB keyboards are giving this issue. It could be that PS2 is a legacy bus architecture as opposed to the USB requiring some level of driver support. Or it could be a specific keyboard quirk. I could still access the BIOS with the delete key right at the beginning though. I can’t explain that anomoly.

But if you’re having trouble with keying up / down or hitting any key at startup then give it a go. Try using the old PS2 keyboard from your garage.

Step 2: Double click the WAMP 5 file and step through the easy and quick install procedure. NOTE: the box to automatically start when Windows loads each time is a good one to select.

Step 3: Now you should have a white fan icon in your bottom right menu bar near the time. Click it and open (if no fan icon then go to programs/Wampserver/start WampServer and the icon will appear. Hover over the icon and select PHPMyAdmin from the list and when it opens type wordpress into the create new database field and click create. THIS creates your wordpress database which will hold your content.

Step 4: Go to your Zip file for WordPress. Inside you will find a folder called wordpress, copy or unzip this directly into your WAMP 5 folder named www meaning go to your C drive in Windows Explorer, open Wamp/www and put the wordpress file in there).

Step 5: Now go to your Wamp icon again and this time select localhost off the top of that list. It is your local WAMP server address and you should see your available website files, in this case wordpress.

Step 6: Open the wordpress folder and it will tell you no wp-config.php file was found. Don’t panic this is entirely the process.

Step 7: With your HTML editor (DreamWeaver perhaps) go to the WAMP/www folder and open the wordpress folder. You will see a file named wp-config-sample.php. This needs to be changed.

Step 8: The first three lines need their values altered so database name now points to wordpress (your database you created), the user needs to be root and the password field is left empty.

define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'root'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', ''); // ...and password

Step 9: Do a Save As for this file to wp-config.php (just cut out the sample part). And you’re away.

Step 10: When you refresh localhost there should be a couple of form fields asking for a blog name and email address (you need a real email address but I believe on localhost this really isn’t that important). Both of these can be changed after the install. Press create new blog or install or whatever the screen says and you’re away.

Step 11: NOTE: the next screen will give you a password. By default the user is named admin but you need to remember the password as if you lose it I’m not sure how to retrieve it from the database seeing as it is encrypted.

Step 12: Now open localhost and under Your Projects click into WordPress and you will see your new blog. Access to the administration section can be either via the admin link under meta or simply by typing http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin

[sorry this presentation has been removed]

The idea of this presentation is to simply walk the students through the process of finding where their localhost version of WordPress is and to understand the basic file structure within its installation folder. It doesn’t walk through a solid tutorial on the WordPress admin interface as I can do that pretty well in person. This, however, introduces themes and the theme folder and has a couple of very basic tips on the need to understand the loop, a couple of crucial templates – index.php, header.php and sidebar.php. If you’re new to WordPress then good luck and I hope this resource helps you along the path.

I may leave this up for a while or not depending on how much its grabbed and the bandwidth but if you find it useful then feel free to use it (without renaming it as your own of course). Information sharing is the key to a healthy vibrant industry.

As a student I’m completing my Java 2 Micro Edition multiplayer game using the high level interface (so its nothing major to look at) and datagrams for communication plus a tome of documentation about design justification, how the code works and the ever inspiring testing regime. Seriously, if you develop multiplayer applications in mobile emulators for a living you are my true god and inspiration of patience! If you don’t give it a try – seriously its slow. Also I have to produce a 6000 word project report for my corporate internship which accounts for 35% of my academic mark for the internship (so its rather important) and provide my sponsor organisation with their polished research report at a small presentation next week. My research was into the cost benefit to government of providing subsidised jobs for the long term unemployed and disadvantaged job seekers.

As a teacher I’m installing WordPress on Localhost for my students and they make the step into more sophisticated development using templates. To me this will be an exciting move as they’ve spent the last two weeks discussing usability and user centred design, accessibility in the context of the large public service website, and touching on the basic methodologies of research and documentation when scoping the problem space (competition sites, internal policies, etc) while working on mockups for a large information driven site with a broad user base.

The simplest version of how to install WordPress on your local machine for our purposes has to be the short and sharp version at the WordPress Blog Customisation site (not sure if its affiliated with the software or a private support site). While it apparently has some Extensible Markup Language (XML) issues this version is simple and fast to achieve – seeing as I’m the Santa doing all that geekery while the class sleeps in the morning – and it offers the ability to effectively edit their templates without having to traverse the whole File Transfer Protocol (FTP) scene during development.

So that’s why I’ve been a bit quieter this week. My brain actually feels like its tingling inside my head from over activation or something and I’m looking forward to a beer in about 10 days just to enjoy a weekend for a change with the family.