New Skills

Liked this quote from an InfoWorld article on the forthcoming BlackBerry PlayBook:

According to RIM's website, Tablet OS developers are currently slated to build apps in HTML5/CSS/JavaScript bundles or in Flash. "Add a new dimension to your BlackBerry development skills and create compelling applications for a new mobile form factor that complements your existing application" appears to be the euphemism that Marketing cooked up for "you're going to have to learn a whole new set of development tools".

Security & Social Networks

Talk about security in the context of social networks and many people will think first of privacy - perhaps citing Facebook's convoluted and controversial approach to this important issue as an example. But the risks run deeper than that. Security firm AVG reports that it has identified 11,701 compromised Facebook pages and 7,163 compromised YouTube pages.

AVG note that students between 18 and 25 years old are most at risk of having their Facebook status 'jacked'; this particular age group is the biggest user of Facebook whilst at the same time being significantly less concerned about Internet security and privacy than the average member of the population.

Something to think about the next time you log on?

Train Fail

After  booking a train ticket for the HEA-ICS annual conference in Durham, this is the response I got:

Don't you just love inadequately-tested websites?

Live train and tube maps

One of the nicest mashups I've seen shows approximately live maps for UK mainline trains and the London Underground.

I was particularly taken by a view of trains to and from Leeds (especially after checking the box to move trains at 10x normal speed).

Django 1.2 E-commerce

Packt Publishing have sent me a copy of Django 1.2 E-commerce to review. Looks interesting. I've got a number of Packt books and some of them (Learning JQuery, for example) have been really good. Hopefully this will be up to the same standard.

Chapter 2 is available as a free download, if you want to check it out for yourselves...

Dear None...

Got this via email after having registered for one of those discount cards.

It is interesting to speculate on the cause. If I had to put money on it, I'd bet that YouGov send these emails via a 'mail merge' application of some kind that merges on a name field in the customer database given to them by Costa. Perhaps this name field is blank in some cases, and the mail merge app fails to check this. (If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that the 'None' suggests an app written in Python :)

Regardless of the precise reasons for this error, we can say with certainty that it points to inadequate testing of the application. The developers have made assumptions about data completeness/validity that are not justified in reality. Testing with realistic data would have exposed those assumptions, prompting a simple modification to the code that substitutes a suitable default ('Valued Customer', for example) if no name is available.

Twittering

I've succumbed and created a Twitter account for myself - not really out of a burning desire to start using it, but rather because last week I gave a lecture to my students on how Python could be used for Internet programming at the application level. I already had examples of how to access Flickr and Google services, but Twitter seemed like another good example to use because students are familiar with it as a 'Web 2.0' service and because there is a nice, easy-to-use library available for its API: python-twitter.

I showed the students a simple program to post a status update. I ran it using my newly-created Twitter account (python33r) and then showed them the tweet appearing on my Twitter page.

I didn't think I'd want to continue using the service, but I happened to start following a few people/organisations of interest to me and it has provided a couple of useful notifications already.

System usage monitoring with Django

I haven't blogged about Django in a long while - partly because I've been too busy doing other things, such as using it to create a real web application (as opposed to the personal web apps and teaching apps that I'd previously written).

The real web application in question is a system to analyse usage of a commercial virtual learning environment (VLE) deployed at a higher education institution.  This VLE is large and heavily used, as the following stats from the 2008-9 academic year indicate:

  30,000+ users
  258 million hits against web server
  1.9 million logins from students
  Average of 6,200 logins per day, (peaking at 20,000)

Our system is able to determine the type of student that has logged into the VLE.  It also uses built-in knowledge of the local network plus GeoIP data to identify where logins are coming from.  Information on the time and location of login and type of student are stored in a database, and Django is used to provide a web-based interface to this database.  The results of queries are presented to the user in various forms - typically as tabular data (paginated if necessary) plus a chart of some sort if appropriate.  We use matplotlib to generate pie charts, bar charts and time series charts, plus the Google Chart API to produce maps showing the countries from which students are accessing the VLE when they are away from university.

In future blog posts, I'll go into more detail about how it all works...