Sitting on the plane on the way back from IT Forum having attended a few sessions on security, I was reflecting on the changed priorities when looking at security for PC systems. Nowadays the main concern is protecting the systems from ‘virtual attack’ - viruses, Trojans, hacking etc. followed by physical security
Back in the dim and distant past when setting up one of the first PC based computer clusters at Birmingham University our main concern was physical security. A concern over systems being stolen was first in our thoughts, so a case hardened steel chain was run the length of the benches and the systems were padlocked to it – this was before the days of off the shelf security devices remember.

The machines were diskless workstations so for a few years we had little concern about the newly emerging phenomenon of viruses and the internet was a gleam in a few people’s eyes.
But… we had reckoned without the security risk known as ‘the uninitiated’. At that time the labs were largely unused during the summer vacation so they all got a ‘spring clean’, floors were polished and so were bench work surfaces. That summer the cleaners had discovered a wonderful new silicone based spray polish which, when sprayed from a great height over the bench tops, gave them a superb shine.

The first indication of trouble that we had was when we started the first lab of the new academic year and there were complaints about the keyboards being ‘stuck’. Yep, they were actually glued to the bench tops by the polish – and when finally removed by BFI (brute force and ignorance) the potential damage was plain to see. There on the bench top was a lovely rectangular unpolished space - they hadn’t moved the keyboards when applying the polish…

So, over the next few weeks the polish crept into the innards of the keyboards and insulated the contacts on the keys. These days we would have cursed a little and then bought in a batch of new keyboards – but this was the mid-eighties – replacement keyboards were, if I remember correctly, about £120 + VAT each. Plan B was needed as we could not afford to replace 32 keyboards at that price. Talk is cheap and so was technician labour (I was the technician…). We convinced Zenith to send us a shipment of keyboards that had failed electronically and been returned. We then proceeded to unsolder the key-switches (yes, discrete switches) on all the failed keyboards, put them in an ultrasonic bath (the benefit of having an Acoustic and Sonar Research Group in-house) to clean them, test and then replace any that failed to respond with the ones from the ones supplied by Zenith. Was it worth it, well yes, if nothing else it taught a valuable lesson – anyone going into a computer lab for any reason had to have a total ‘hands-off’ approach or be instructed in what they could and couldn’t do – and that applies today, it’s just a lot more complicated these days – the price of power, flexibility and freedom…

And just for info, in case anyone was wondering, the PCs we installed in that lab were:
Zenith Z-151 systems, CPU 8088, 320K ram, mono ‘green’ screens – see here (one more example of how marvellous the WWW is…) http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v11n9/50_Zenith_Z151_choice_of_U.php
– the servers, 4 of them, were similar systems but had massive 10Mb Winchester hard drives… giving each student a massive 200K of online storage, and the network itself was a 3Com Etherseries v1.0 based on 10Base2 thin ethernet.

Well, life is full of good intentions and my good intention was to blog from IT Forum. So, as usual I didn’t. And I have all sorts of excuses – not least of which was the stellar rate at which the wireless networking kept failing – Andrew Cheesman get your Tu-Tu out. That and total information overload of my brain.

We started the week with a pre-conference session on “What’s new in Server 2003 R2” – I didn’t think there would be enough to occupy the full six hours scheduled – oh boy was I wrong! OK we had coffee breaks but even so… Lots of new stuff including Active Directory Federation, Remote Differential Compression – only saving the changes in a file during replication, quotas including document size and type screening, print management, control, and quotas, the ability to monitor hardware whilst the OS is running and during pre-boot and post-crash (it does this by talking to the BMC - Baseboard Management Controller)… Lots, lots more…

The Keynote on Tuesday was based very much around Server 2003 R2, Virtual Server 2005 (including clustering) and Office 12.

I then went to a session on Office 12 Servers (or SharePoint as we know it…) Now I knew that MS were putting a lot of effort into SP but I hadn’t realised quite how much. So, it’s been enhanced to provide intranet, extranet and internet sites. I hope I’m getting all this right as I was typing at a rate of knots – support built in for blogs and wikis out of the box, archive site for email, server based InfoPath forms, CMS and scaleable content store, major/minor versioning is back, Excel services – share a spreadsheet via a zero-footprint browser display, a 2-stage recycle bin for administrators, document and list trimming based on security access controls, enforceable document checkout – the list goes on, and on.

Anyway – suffice to say that I’ve come back buzzing with all sorts of ideas for the server farm I’m going to set up, with duplicate blade-server systems running multiple Virtual Server Clusters with automatic failover, storage on iSCSI devices and all fronted by an ISA server…

Now all I need is the national budget of a small country…

Now, the strangest thing – whoever put the following two facilities close together obviously had a sense of humour…

The only way to stay alert and on-top of things was lots of caffeine and the occasional sugar rush – this was provided for me on Wednesday by freshly made waffles smothered in chocolate sauce – these had the calorific value of a small planet…

Many thanks to Clara, the Australian waitress in the Irish Bar, for keeping us under control despite everything… OK – we weren’t that bad…

The UK Academic event on Wednesday evening was good – held in a tapas restaurant, my favourite sort of eating – bits of everything, I even managed to get back to my hotel in the same day as I left it!

Took a few hours out of the last afternoon to go and visit Parc Guell as the last twice I’ve been to Barcelona I’ve not managed to get there. I took a few pictures some of which are below. Parc Guell was built in the early part of the 20th Century, it was planned to be a garden city, but only two house were ever built.

It was a long way up, thank goodness they provided travelators...

But the view was well worth it, the Torre Agbar is to the left with the Sagrada Familia to the right.

And you can't get away without a picture of the 'signature' Gaudi lizard.

All in all a fantastic week – all I have to do now is write a report up…

Well, what can I say? After over 26 years at The University of Birmingham I've decided that it's time for a change...
On 3rd October I start in a new role at The University of Nottingham as Learning Research Systems Manager at the LSRI (Learning Sciences Research Institute) so I'm going to be involved in "advancing the science, technology and practice of learning and teaching to benefit everyday life."

I'll be working with Mike Sharples to create resources for the Institute including a new Flexible Learning Room and a Usability Lab, taking what we've learned at CETADL and building on that using new and emerging technologies. It was an easy decision to accept the job at Nottingham but a really difficult one to decide to leave Birmingham. We shan't be moving house yet as my daughter has just started her GCSE options. On that note we're really proud of her as she has just obtained a double award GCSE in Applied ICT, taking it two years early and completing the coursework and taking the exam in just over a term! Doesn't take after me then!!

I'm really looking forward to working at Nottingham alongside my new colleagues - Caroline Windrum, Research Development Director and Heidi Mather, Institute Administrator are two people I've met already, and if everyone is as welcoming and helpful then it will be an easy transition. The LSRI is to be based in The Exchange on the Jubilee Campus the Exchange is the building to the side of the Djanogly  Learning Resource Center (the inverted cone shaped building) in the pictures below.

Well, it’s all over. So now it starts…

OK – so the heat is getting to me. The UK Final of the Imagine Cup was held on Tuesday 21st June in the BT Tower, 8 teams of students representing the best of the best.

Monday 20th June 2005:
My excursion to the final (as a judge) started on Monday with a hot and sticky train journey from Birmingham to London, the air-conditioning had failed. Then, my faith in human nature was restored – got into a cab to take me to the hotel, only to find that he was taking me to the wrong St. Giles Hotel, so he reset the meter and headed off to the correct hotel, and then refused to accept the amount on the meter as it was ‘too much’. Wow!

Anyway, a brief trip through the hotel room for a shower and off to Planet Hollywood to meet up with the students and the Microsoft team. That was a nice move, remove the students from their laptops long enough to force food down them, not that it took much forcing.

22:30 back to the Hotel. At which point the St. Giles Hotel turned into something resembling a high tech car boot sale with students spread to the 4 corners of the hotel, unloading laptops, PDAs, Tablet PCs, Wireless Routers and goodness knows what else. I’m not sure what the other residents made of this, remember that this was the start of Wimbledon and all the hotels were full. Oh, did I mention the crates of Red Bull…

Tuesday 21st June 2005:
Next morning dawned bright and sunny with stories of who went to bed last, stories of 3 a.m., 4 a.m. and “Bed? What bed?”

The judges had a lazy lie in – we didn’t have to be there until just after 8:00…. This is my third year of involvement with the Imagine Cup, as a judge at the previous two world finals and as a team mentor in the UK final in 2004, so I’m getting used to the pattern for these events, early mornings and late nights.

08:05 Arrived at the BT Tower to find it a hive of activity – the car boot sale had transferred itself here – but with a lot more organisation I have to say. We were searched, scanned and allowed through to be escorted to our ‘deliberation room’. Otherwise known as a fridge – the air-conditioning was obviously working here! It was at this point that I was glad I had my suit on. The judges trickled in over the next 30 minutes or so, introductions all round. Mark Johnstone was to be the judge’s guide and mentor through the day – Nice suit Mark – and just in case some don’t believe it…

OK – on to the competition. The judges had already been impressed with the datasheet outlines that we had been sent covering the team’s entries so we knew we had a hard task ahead of us.

9:30 and Team DeLorean are first up. We were seeing two teams present back to back followed by a short break and then the next two. All the teams did a fantastic job in an extremely pressurised environment; this was going to be a tough one…

15:15 and the presentations are over, now comes the even harder part – reviewing your scoring to ensure you’ve been consistent and taking into account that some teams had obviously not prayed hard enough to the Demo Gods… Discussions were held about presentations, technology, business cases – and then… we had the results, we had a team to go to Yokohama to represent the UK in the World Final!

The presentations were made in typical fashion, the 5 runners up announced in alphabetical order followed by the top 3 in reverse order.

In 3rd place  - Team mSpace from Southampton University

In 2nd place – Team Genesys Innovations from Sheffield University

And the team going to the world final was … The Bit Shifters! Believe me you have to be careful how you say that… Adrian Collier from Bournemouth University, Andrew Webber from City University in London and Joseph Wardell from Aberystwyth University.

Another fantastic competition, my congratulations go to all teams involved, you did a fantastic job, seeing the dedication, enthusiasm and passion made it all worth while. It was good to see that the sponsors, Microsoft, BT, CapGemini and 3i were all making the most of the recruitment opportunity too.

Well done to the Bit Shifters – today the UK – next month, the world!

19:00 – Off to the South Bank for the Imagine Cup party. For the life of me I can’t remember what it was called (Edit:Namco Station), but it’s on the Thames on the right just before you get to the London Eye(mainly because if it was on the left we would have gotten slightly damp…) An Aladdin’s Cave of multi-player video games, pool tables, 10 pin bowling… and a bar. Well, what can I say; Andy Sithers and I were beaten 2-1 at pool by Emily and Kevin. Emily then proceeded to thrash me on the Dance machine, the motor racing, the horse racing, that game is soooo undignified it’s not true – ok I won’t go on. Except to say that in round two of the Dance Mat Challenge I managed a surprising come-back!

And finally; many, many thanks to Caroline Phillips and to the whole Microsoft team for organising this event. Also thanks to the sponsors, BT, CapGemini and 3i for their support and helping to make it happen. It was great to see that people understood the reason for doing this, for encouraging talent, for pushing students onwards, to help them realise their dreams and potential.

Now, I’m afraid that my camera work was a little shoddy this year and most of the pics are blurred so I’m only posting a few.

Oh - and the air-conditioning was broken on my return train too...


View from the 34th floor of the BT Tower


The 34th Floor demo area


Happy Bunnies - 2/3rds of The Bit Shifters


On the way to Namco Station - would you buy a car off this man? Sorry Chris :)


Andy really should have picked a different partner.


Like Emily - pro stance there...


Dan and Paul grooving to.... (snigger) Steps...


Caroline and Nikki

Thought I'd better do something and, with the Gen'05 tour about to land at Birmingham on February 10th, now seems like a good time.

Looks like this is going to be a great day - all sorts of pods and talks - Imagine Cup, Hurricane, theSpoke, MSP Programme, MSDNAA, Student Options, XBox, Media Centre and even better there'll be Microsoft people here to talk to about your career, internships with Microsoft and how to get free or cheap Microsoft software. Oh, and of course the obligatory giveaways - there's an XBox and a Media Centre up for grabs.