December 10th, 2008
… And destined never to be a human being, on delicious anyway. I failed delicious’s CAPTCHA test twice this morning! (The term stands for Completely Automated Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart – so where does does the P come in? Wikipedia, as at 10 December 2008, is more enlightening on this than the Carnegie Mellon official page – the term, apparently, stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. But I digress.)
According to the people who invented the CAPTCHA, “A CAPTCHA is a program that can generate and grade tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. For example, humans can read distorted text… current computer programs can’t”. So, not only am I a human being posing as spam, I am also a current computer program. It reminds me of the man who thought he was a stamp…
Posted in trifles, 3 Comments
September 6th, 2008
I have a good visual memory, which has recently been triggered by looking over my colleague’s shoulder as he does computer geewhizzery using Gvim (‘an extended version of the Unix VI text editor with syntax highlighting’). It is the differently coloured text that swims against the black background that’s done it.
I learnt to read at primary school from wall charts that were just like this: black with lots of groupings of letters in a rainbow of colours. Tonight I asked my mother if she knew anything about them (she was herself a primary school teacher contemporaneous with my primary school education) but she knew nothing.
Googled ‘learning phonetics chart black color colour’ and brought up some US patent information – nothing that looked right. But mention of something called a Fidel wall chart looked promising. A Google image search reveals it to be the chart of my memory.
And a fascinating thing it is. Developed by Caleb Gattegno, the charts are part of the so called ‘Silent Way’ of education, silent ‘because the teacher remains mainly silent, to give students the space they need to learn to talk’ (so that’s where I get my ability to talk, talk, talk from). Gattegno also popularised Cuisenaire rods, which perhaps come more easily to mind for most people my age. I don’t recall being taught in the Silent Way (and we were being taught our mother tongue, not a foreign language, as it appears to have been designed for), I just remember the fabulous colours and the contrast. Perhaps that also explains my love of colour, in particular those of the French artists known as the fauves.
It’s no wonder I love words. I think I would like a set of these charts for Iris.
References:
The Silent Way, Wikipedia
Silent Way Charts
Image source: Silent Way Charts
Posted in memory, 4 Comments
July 11th, 2008
Images, history and invention – that’s the title of an event coming up on Monday 14 July at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, and I have been invited to speak at it in my capacity as a Flickr photographer, archivist and contributor to Picture Australia.
“Join image makers and picture curators in conversation on their passion for image collections. View a DVD of works produced by creative Australians and from the collections of museums, galleries, libraries and archives across the country. Find out about the collective image network that makes up Picture Australia and the opportunities for you to contribute.”
6.30 pm, Monday 14 July 2008
National Library of Australia
Screening: LG1 Theatre
Parkes Place, Canberra
Free entry
Bookings essential: 02 6262 1271
The event is part of the Vivid National Photography Festival. Once I’ve given the talk I hope to reflect on things in writing here (reader, live in hope).
Posted in flickr, photography, web, No Comments
July 8th, 2008
The Evangelists of Empire online journal, part of the History Conference and Seminar series from the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne (deep breath, still with me?) was launched today. I worked on it with my colleagues at the eScholarship Research Centre, James Williams and Eve Young, and the lovely editors from History, Amanda Barry and Joanna Cruickshank.
All that wonderful research, freely available to the public and much more easily accessible (through Google) than it would have been pre-Web. Not to mention a print version of the entire journal finished and available at the same time.
We used Open Journal Systems for the content management system, and are pretty pleased with the results – although I tore my hair out at times working with it (and I really did tear my hair out – a bad habit developed since having a baby). Deferring to the blurb, “Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research.”
Making the journal look different to so many of the other journals using OJS involved much tinkering with the css and the templates (and unfortunately having to resort to hard coding content into the about template :( – ah well) – that’s the good thing about open source. But I really should give some feed back to the developers about what improvements would have made my life easier – that’s the other thing about open source – finding the time to contribute when the next project beckons…
Posted in web, work, No Comments
