Did you know that if you authorise your BT Home Hub as a BT FON server, you get 500 BT Openzone minutes/month and the hub will throttle any external users if you need the bandwidth yourself. 500 minutes is more than I buy for my phone, and my phone can connect to it using WiFi, to extend my internet minutes. That’s a piece of good news, although it was harder than I’d want to find it out. …
Good British Universities
Why is the LSE not one of the top Universities in the world according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities? I scattered some thoughts on the UK Higher Education system in an article on my blog the other month and promised to look and see what Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s methodology thought of, what I thought to be three highly competitive British Universities, i.e. LSE, Sussex and Warwick, which had failed to make the top 100 of their 2007 ranking. I have come to the conclusion that what seems to me an anomaly, illustrates either a flaw in the methodology, or a misuse by me as the ranking’s design goal does not meet my needs. …
Does knowing stuff help?
How important are Universities to the software industry productivity. One would hope fairly high. For various reasons, I have been considering this question and some collaborators pointed me at the Academic Ranking of World Universities which is referenced at Wikipedia as well and I first referred to in this blog last November. This is produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in China. I know that a discussion on ranking methodology may not be very helpful when considering economic growth issues, but there are some quite interesting and surprising results. …
And then it snowed, a lot!
On Monday, I woke up to the heaviest snow fall I’d seen in years. I live in the south of the country and we don’t often see snow at all, and even less frequently in the cities. …
Sailing
Down to Poole in Dorset very early this morning. I have finally got my act together to take the RYA Day Skipper course and spent the day learning to navigate using charts, pencil and paper. The maths reminds me of the boys’ A-Level homework and although despite being geeky enough to look up the cosine rule, drawing scale models of the “triangles of velocity” is probably quicker . 😉 …
About ITV
I have been catching up on my reading over the last few days and was browsing the March copy of Management Today, in which Chris Allen, the CEO of ITV was interviewed. In the interview he boasted that ITV2 is now the most watched digital channel in the UK, eclipsing Sky One. Its an illustration that something other than channel is important. …
Friends rewarded for innovating
Fantastic News! Company-I, one of Sun’s long term partner organisations has just won the CBI’s “Innovator of the Year” award. So congratulations to Mark Pennycook & all his team that have built the company to the point it can win this major prize. The prize for the Innovator is given for, going to extreme lengths to create a “buzz” in the workplace, radically reconfiguring their internal processes, having a track record of improvement and innovation and embracing modern practices. …
The best in the country
On my sun/oracle blog, I reflect on the 2005 BCS Infrastructure Developer of the Year competition; I was one of the judges. …
More soon to be ex-colleagues
Dave Jones ,one of Sun’s Client Solutions CTOs and occasional blogger, was over last week and we hooked up and went to a works party. It was thrown by a bunch of the volunteers for our UK redundancy programme which you may have read about in “The Register”, here… . It was surprisingly enjoyable. The company i.e. at the party just shows that sometimes management lose track of what they’re trying to do …