Gareth Jones

We have has successfully made it through to the next round and has been short-listed as a potential supplier of materials for Round II of Bowland’s Maths resources. This is fantastic news as we are competing against some of the country’s best known, international elearning providers.

For this next stage we’ll be fleshing out some of our ideas and developing them into full, costed proposals. They’ll be submitted at the end of September and then it’s a month or two until we find out if our proposals are to be put into production, with roll-out across Britain’s schools after next summer. Fingers crossed!

In the early hours of this morning I got an email from Quak Multimedia’s GameWrapper alerting me to the fact that someone from Uruguay had become the first person to try to steal some software from me. They tried to steal Quak Wordsearch. They downloaded the wrapper and then ran it on their local machine. In fact, they ran it twice.

Thanks to GameWrapper, they were presented with a message that told them that the request was unauthorised and they were prevented from playing.

GameWrapper not only allows for you to specify who can play your content and who can’t, but it also tracks and records usage around the world and alerts you to any unauthorised attempts to run your content.

GameWrapper isn’t listed on the Quak website as it’s not so much a product but more of a tool that I developed to serve its games, but if you’d like the technology to help protect your content then get in touch.

I can only assume that zombies are cute and fluffy up in Lancashire, as this was Nicola’s reaction to a trailer for Colin, the zombie movie that cost £45 to make:

Gareth says:
£45 zombie movie – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkJZ3FlOWeM

Nicola says:
eewww! should have warned me it was unpleasant!

Internet Explorer 6 was released back in 2001 and is therefore 8 year old technology. There are two newer versions of the browser available and of course there’s Firefox which is better than both of those, and yet many people are still using this ancient browser.

Explorer 6 provides web developers with a host of problems because of its non-compliance with various standards; it’s not secure; it’s slow; it’s feature-poor.

Some people feel so strongly about getting everyone to upgrade to a newer, less-broken version of Internet Explorer that websites have been set up specifically to promote this goal. The guys over at http://ie6update.com have even created plugins that can be installed on websites that will prompt its users to update their browser if they’re using IE6, and in support of this I have installed the WordPress version of the plugin on all of my websites.

If you get a message informing you that your browser is out of date and needs to be updated, do not be alarmed! Instead, please follow the link to Microsoft’s website to download the latest version of Internet Explorer.

I went on holiday to Cornwall last week for a few days. Upon arriving in Looe after a 5 hour drive down, the weather was nice and I was looking forward to checking out some of the places I remembered from when I was 13.

That was Wednesday. On Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, it rained. On some days it rained the whole time, while on others there were intermittent periods of sunshine.

It was still a nice break nonetheless, and in total I either visited or stayed in Looe (nice), Fowey (nice but wet), Newquay (turned out to be Blackpool of the south – avoid), Bude (nice), Chard (dump), Yeovil (nice) and Bath (nice).

I’ve uploaded photos to Flickr and they’re available to view in the My Flickr section.

I’ve tried about six or seven different Flickr plugins for WordPress over the last week only to be disappointed to find that they’re either clunky, only work inside the side-bar or don’t work at all. Today I finally found one that I could use as a foundation to build on.

Flickr Photo Album seems to be a fairly popular plugin that, from what I read on the forums, has sadly had many of its features break with the release of WordPress 2.8. The fact that it was so close to what I wanted though (a clean, minimal photo viewer that works in the main content area and not just in the side-bar, though side-bar support is also available) meant that it was worth trying to find out what exactly was broken and how to fix it.

After editing some code and tweaking the layout a bit, I’ve got the plugin working the way I want it to and it’s now displaying my Flickr photos in the My Flickr section.

Name that Note is spin-off that focuses on improving people’s pitch-recognition over the treble clef. This time around, the note in question is played rather than shown, and you must guess the correct note simply from what you hear. You can replay the note as many times as you like, though of course the clock is always ticking so best not hang around hitting the Replay button for too long!

Once you’ve made a guess – whether you’re right or wrong – you’ll get to see the note in question on the stave for a couple of seconds before the game moves onto the next note.

For more information and screen-shots or to buy the game, please visit Quak Multimedia.