Inside View

#edchatie Helpful sites teachers find useful

Screenshot by @topgold.

I LISTEN TO Monday night chats on Twitter and learn a lot of things. There's a List.ly compilation that answers the recurring question, "What sites do you use in your classrooms?"

I have a personal shortlist, one that mirrors the time-motion movements I make during most days. In my case, I have a GTD logic behind selecting Evernote, Dropbox, Audioboo, Pinboard, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, Google Plus, SproutSocial, Facebook and basic email-to-blog as my preferred watering holes for the work I do at third level in Ireland. Dale Borgeson has made an excellent List.ly List below that hundreds of teachers have reviewed and curated. Their sharing gives helpful clues about simple web services that can help in many classroom settings.

Hammering Away State Secrets

Photo snapped by @topgold of Kitty hammering away on the Berlin Wall.

YEARS AGO, WE used to pulverise components to ensure they were never read or used again--just like I watched happen when the Berlin Wall came down and Stasi agents destroyed dossiers rather than risk their exposure.

When I worked with classified government material, I followed protocols with all electronic material, printer ribbons, and carbon paper. The only way I could satisfy all the operation security monitors was through the total destruction of the storage or printing apparatus. I remembered those days when reading about "one of the most bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history" that happened when two GCHQ security experts viewed "the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents," wrote Alan Rusbridger. [1]

Destroying physical storage devices might seem merely symbolic today, but the fact UK intelligence officers still follow that protocol means they might not have moved beyond the basics of our digital age. Even though the Guardian's raw material (and the items subject to discovery in a court case) were destroyed in London, copies of those documents are also in locations far removed from the reach of British or American intelligence services.

Following @MagicRecs to see Social Graph

Screenshot of Realtime Recs by @topgold.

I OFTEN GET INTERESTING direct messages from Twitter when people I follow start doing the same thing. The information trickles in at regular intervals when Europe is awake, mirroring the demographic of those I follow.

Thinking REST

Screenshot from hessian.caucho.com by @topgold while thumbing through revision topics.

One of the most common revision topics I encounter concerns representational state transfer (REST), a style of software architecture for distributed systems. In our creative multimedia degree, we use REST as the predominant web API design model.

I first read about REST in a W3C proposal back in 2001. It has become a web standard now.

Without realising it, a lot of us use REST-style architectures as web apps. The phones are the clients and the servers do the heavy lifting in a remote space. By tapping a screen, an app (a client, to use the terminology) initiates a requests. The server processes requests and returns appropriate responses. Requests and responses are built around the transfer of representations of resources. Handsets can do a lot of clever things when they get the data sets from servers.

By definition, "a representation of a resource is typically a document that captures the current or intended state of a resource."

I've told several students to remember these three things.

1. Clients begin the process by sending requests when they are ready to transition to a new state.

2. While one or more requests are outstanding, the client is considered to be in transition.

3. The representation of each application state contains links that may be used the next time the client chooses to initiate a new state-transition.

Related articles

Why REST is so important

RESTful Web Services

Versioning a REST API

REST Vs SOAP

Keeping Up with Bad Kitty

Eyenimal on a tuxedo cat like @topgold had.

WE USED TO HAVE a house-trained cat, like the one in the photo, who took adventures inside neighbours' homes. Although he didn't take photos with an Eyenimal video collar, he returned with stories to share.

Many of the stories started with someone up the street asking, "Do you have a black and white cat?" Then they would tell a funny story about finding Jack in a box or hearing him politely call for food while sitting under a table. With an Eyenimal camera, we would have enjoyed more context to the stories.

The 100 euro Eyenimal petcam is a micro camera that easily mounts on a collar. It has an integrated microphone, battery life of 2 1/2 hours, weighs 35g and measures 6cm by 1.5 cm by 4.5 cm. On board is 4GB in Flash memory. You transfer content via USB and charge it that way as well.

It's easy finding Eyenimal fans on YouTube, on Flickr and the #eyenimal collection on Instagram often entertains me. I'm looking for people who have playlists of Eyenimal live feeds because deep down inside, I believe the world is better when we acclaim the joy of unscripted cat videos.

Erasing Yourself from History

Photo inside Sligo Abbey snapped with Nokia Lumia 925 by @topgold.

EVERY WEEK, I READ about someone who wants to erase themselves from the history written about them. It used to be easier back in the days when the most indelible records were granite.

I walked on the historical record of James, located deep within Sligo Abbey. His surname and several particulars were carved away from his headstone, meaning his memory and his legacy lasted only in spoken word of mouth. Perhaps he was illegitimate or maybe his remains were moved to a family site somewhere else. More alarmingly, James' mother might have offended community sensitivities, causing the church to erase reference details about her son from his headstone.

Today, it is much more difficult erasing the electronic reference to a person when they do something they regret. It is so easy for damning information to trickle into easily-discovered corners of the internet where it oozes out to soil a CV or credit check years later.

And when that happens, it is often easier to discard your online nickname or to adopt a new surname. That is one reason why some employers demand to know all your identities during the hiring process and why those same employers will terminate you for cause if you are not forthcoming.

If only things were as simple as scraping off a surname on a granite stone.

[Bernie Goldbach discusses the indelible nature of online behaviour as part of the creative multimedia degree in the Limerick School of Art & Design.]

Grew Up with Super Snoops

Photo by @topgold from the back seat of a Huey.

I REMEMBER WHEN I first appreciated the term "signals" in a job title. That was in the 70s when my first cousin told me he was wiring the Oval Office.

One result of the wiring job was a conversation recorded in the Oval Office of staffers and Nixon talking about how to unravel the Watergate scandal. I attached that seven minute conversation to this blog post.

A decade after Nixon, one of my offices inside the beltway of the District of Columbia had to operate its word processor and printer inside a perspex bubble because a white van was often parked outside. The not-so-anonymous van was configured with an antenna array that the office signals technician knew could read print jobs over the air. Around the same time, a college friend started working with signals inside a formidable organisation I would later know was the National Security Agency. This was a break-through in the guy's career because he trained as a computer scientist and not as an electronics engineer. Today it makes sense because of how the NSA has leveraged Big Data.

Smoking Gun from Nixon Tapes

Selfies But Not the Way Most Do Them

Snapped my foot after reading pediatrician Valeria Gribben.

I WILL PROBABLY lose readers for posting this item but it comes on the foot of a Wall Street Journal item about documenting your personal maladies so that empowers me to step up smartly and explain.

I have a variety of ailments that never get noticed by health care practitioners because like my mother the nurse, I think pain is part of real life. Besides, when I explain what's wrong with me (back, knee, foot, hand, elbow, and stomach), I get confused by all the remedies I have to purchase. So I keep things to myself.

But now, I realise there's no reason I shouldn't start documenting my horrid physical condition. If a dermatologist saw the images I can store on my phone's camera roll, I could develop a whole new vocabulary with terms such as macule, papule, patch, plaque, wheal and vesicle. I could learn about the true depth of my problem, whether I have erythematous, blanching, targetoid, confluent, or punctate problems. The diagnosis is much simpler if I make selfie shots of my ailments.

Bayou Combat Naps

With Audioboo by @topgold.

I USED TO WALK through marshes in South Carolina and Georgia, thinking about life in Lousiana's bayou. As time passed, those thoughts often involved my own personal experience as expressed in the lyrics of "Born in the Bayou" by Credence Clearwater Revival.

Friends from the Deep South will object to me claiming to have a bayou experience way north in the Carolinas because bayous actually come hand-in-glove with Louisiana back-waters--at swamp's edge. You go to Louisiana to get gators for dinner. And you enjoy bayou culture while swatting mosquitos off your neck. I've been there and done that.

Bayou and Combat Naps

In "Born on the Bayou", John Fogerty takes me into a Cajun Country Childhood, even though he never visited the swamps before he wrote the lyrics to the song. His lyrics imagine the bayou with supernatural forces and a revolutionary undertone (“My Poppa said son don't let the man get you, do what he done to me”). When I first heard CCR, the US was in the throes of counter-establishmentism and Deliverance was just one cinema visit away.

Then I felt the force straight-up when in Alabama. "You ain’t from aroun’ heeyah, are ya, Boy?”

Evernote and My Internet of Things

Evernote is my most essential app.

I HAVE INVESTED time, money and faith in Evernote as my digital stash, trusting it to be equivalent to my grandfather's foot locker that once housed objects of his life.

I have such a locker too but suspect it has been broken up and its contents sold at a boot sale. Several high-end aviation components, part of my life story, were in boxes of mine that never followed me when I settled in Ireland. When I packed those boxes, I should have indexed them in Evernote instead of merely writing down contents on a page.

During the past year, I have tried to make electronic records of my physical assets so that things like IMEI digits, VIN numbers, keycodes and windscreen dongles all fall into an Evernote record repository. I'm getting better at the process and the orderliness that follows frees my mind for other things.

But there is a bigger harvest ahead of Evernote functionality comes embedded in more things.