Inside View from Ireland

Gaming for college credit

WIRED -- Just like the staff at Tipperary Institute, the curriculum committee at the University of Southern California are studying ways to bring computer gaming into the realm of college credit. It takes a real creative to produce a compelling computer game. And as students in Tipperary have discovered, you have to know how to code as well. Fact is, the most successful games developers are broad thinkers.

To reward some of the most creative games developers in Ireland, point to the Ngage Challenge and vote for Fishtank Fire.

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Katie Dean -- "Academics can be fun and games"
Philip Bourke -- "Notes on Fishtank Fire"
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Imagining the flowers

CLONMEL HOTSPOT -- On the day that all the leaves have been blown off by gale force winds comes word from Tampa that moderate sea breezes are tickling the hibiscus blooms around the city. The worst part about this news is that my stateside travel plans do not include warm climes.

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Shutterblog -- "Here comes the sun"
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Open Source Curriculum

WIRED -- I grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where the Open Source movement dotted the landscape in the form of Amish barn-raising. I work in Tipperary Institute where Open Source appears in the form of Java, Perl, Apache, Linux and Moodle. I would like to donate my course notes to an Open Source initiative, like the Open Textbook Project (OTP). The OTP is building free textbooks in a range of subjects, using the principles of distributed collaboration and open access. The result will be low-cost, high-quality texts. Both our use of Moodle and our integration of Open Courseware puts us on a collision course with business sponsors. In the short-term, we will need the comforting hand of our host Institute to wade through some higher cost factors that inevitably occur when educational media companies reduce their sponsorship of large events. As we move forward, we need to appreciate the direct cost of our implementations. On our present course, some training exhibitions will cost more in the future as textbook companies and software vendors reduce their sponsorship.

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Thomas Goetz -- "Open Source Everywhere" in Wired, November 2003
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Christmas gadgets

THE BIG MANUFACTURERS are pushing a range of tech gadgets for Christmas shoppers. If I had an unlimited budget, I would explore these things.

• Gateway is selling a 42" ED Plasma TV ($2799).
• HP's DV Movie Writer ($399) and PhotoSmart 245 portable printer ($199) would be instantly viable in my home.
• Dell's 17" LCD television/monitor is $699.
• I lust for Sony's Vaio All-in-one-PC/TV and it's well-priced at $1599.
• Archos Gemini 120 MP3 Jukebox is media player for someone who dares to be different. It is an ideal digital portable player and costs €350.
• There is no phone smarter than the Sony Ericsson P900. It's high resolution colour screen kicks the pants off anything else on the market. You need €380 plus an airtime contract when buying it in Ireland.
• USB key by Memorex. It's the coolest USB key on the market.
• SanDisk 1GB microdrive Compact Flash card. Because my Fuji S602Z camera eats memory when I use its video mode.

So, what did I get?

Evil PowerPoint

KILKENNY -- I have spent nearly two hours paging through 37MB of PowerPoint presentations and feel qualified to detonate a controlled explosion under the CD containing those files. So many instances of unwelcome window dressing adorned many of the files, making them weighty to store and cumbersome to index. As Thorir Bjornsson observes, "Anyone who wants to experience firsthand the nature and limitations of PowerPoint should try the following two-step exercise. First, pick any recent PowerPoint presentation you have mad. Second, turn this presentation into an article for publication. I believe most of you will be shocked at how difficult you'll find this seemingly simple task."

If the presentation does not convert easily, it does not index easily either. That's the nub of my complaint. I often cannot find information stored on PowerPoint files because the culprits lack a textual identity. That flaw undermines their usefulness in a corporate environment.

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Sending mail when blocked at desktop

CRYSTAL TECH -- It's a bit irritating when I discover my ISP or office sysadmin has blocked SMTP from being used with my network connection. I discovered a work-around with Crystal Tech where I can use an alternate SMTP port (8889) for use with CrystalTech SmarterMail services. It permits me to send mail from blocked domains even when ther default SMTP port is blocked.

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Crystal Tech Knowledge Base -- Using alternate SMTP port with Outlook/Outlook Express users (article 612) or Eudora users (article 613)
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Irish Internet Awards

IIA -- The Irish Internet Association has more street credibility than most awards programmes in Ireland. The 2003 IIA award winners will be announced in several categories on 26 November 2003. There are several high-quality names among the nominees.

RFID fulfills e-commerce promise

THURLES -- If you subscribe to Google News Alerts, you will have noticed several items that point to RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags being the major technological innovation of 2003. As explained during the “Excellence in IT” Conference at Tipperary Institute last week, the technology is making its way into the mass market.

Using eighty gigs

CLONMEL -- While explaining to a multimedia student why she would easily use most of an 80GB hard drive during video capture, I also thought about how the drive could become full of class notes written with the bIOnic pen. This sleek pen houses a precise optical sensor and tiny memory chip which enables it to record everything you write and store it among the eighty gigs of space for safekeeping. I think journalist John Kennedy uses it on the road. It writes as well as any ballpoint, but also permanently records all your ideas, sketches, and notes in digital form on your PC. The pen would make it easy for a student who can draw to quickly sync their work to an online collaborative zone.

As a piece of assistive technology, the bionic pen works with MyScript® Notes. This software was designed for the io Pen by Vision Objects. It converts handwriting captured by the io digital pen into digital text. It works with doodling and with printed text. The software can convert shapes, tables, and charts while maintaining the layout of an existing page. The result is a document that has been written with pen and paper, but appears to have been typed by a keyboard.

Once installed, this user-friendly software works seamlessly with Logitech´s io Software version 2.0. Click “Convert to Text” from the main toolbar or action menu and the handwriting conversion is launched automatically as the document is imported into the MyScript® Notes application.

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sighting

Media, culture and local economy

KILKENNY -- It's easy for me to see a direct relationship between media development and local development. I think county enterprise boards should ensure their embracing of "culture" includes the sophistication to encourage the development of cultural industries. It's a sure-fire way to move up the table of quality tourist destinations.

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Gill Branston -- "Media Industries" in The Media Student's Handbook
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