Even if you are over the whole edu patent thing, you must read about this new edu patent lawsuit in which 5 profit making universities are being sued. Whatever is the world coming to?

I am even more speechless than I was before!

The tale of a programmer who used reflector to view the code of a gmail account achiever tool and discovered that it was programmed to harvest your username and password. I guess I will think twice before I enter my login details again.

…via Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror Fame.

I am aneesha on Del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/aneesha

Yesterday I did something strange! I tagged 2 items with the tag ‘electronics’! Jeez something even got tagged with the cryptic ‘fpga’ - ie Field Programmable Gate Arrays.

So what does this all mean?

Is a return to my undergrad electronics roots eminent?

I am not sure but I think its prompted by the lack of a "Business Layer" in my applications. I am sick of the CRUD - no pun intended.

Anyway I am looking to do a refresher course relating to that cryptic ‘fpga’ tag. Wish me luck on finding something in Brisbane…

Firstly Grainne Conole’s blog, e4Innovation, is turning out to be a great source for information relating to new developments in the Learning Design space. Well worth adding to you feed reader.

Two LD planning tools are featured on the e4Innovation blog this week:

• London Pedagogy Planner
  Diana Laurillard is the Principal Investigator on the project.
• Phoebe Planner Tool

I’ve not had time to truly explore each tool but hope to soon.

It’s fantastic to see a company (37signals) take a step in ‘work less but achieve more and be happy’ space. Happier, stress free employees not only achieve more but are more creative and competitive. These are are characteristics that will make your startup, government department or business a success and ensure that it remains successful for many years to come. 

37signals has various ‘Workplace Experiments’ in place this year:

• Work 4 day weeks - have 3 day week ends
• Hobbies are funded
  Learn to fly, etc
• Resources (books, software, etc) are funded
  Each employee gets a credit card

I wrote a Rails tutorial. It was meant to be the first of many. I still have plans to complete the series but I’ve had to reacquaint myself with .NET and learn Dynamics CRM. I however got a renewed sense of inspiration to actually do more tutorial writing from a reader that had lot the link to the tutorial and happy to find it again. Something so simple, means so much to me as a writer even though I have already written a couple of books.

More tutorials of all sorts will definitely be on the way and maybe even another book or two…

Read "Anatomy of a Bogus Patent" and then feel sick with disbelief if you actually build applications to help people "learn". C’mon this is EDUCATION!

Feel sick??? OK now read "Desire2Infringe" and I guarantee, you’ll be even more disillusioned!!!

Another book on Collective Intelligence that I must have. Seems to cover a lot of ground and is supported by useful Java code examples. Looking thru the TOC, I don’t think this is as advanced algorithmically as Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran (ie no Support Vector Machines).

No - Eclipse is not shaking up my world! I’m just impressed by the Eclipse extensions made by Kelman Technologies. They have developed seismic processing tools. I used to love geography/earth science at high school, hence my fascination and a thought that keeps going thru my head more regularly - "Return to science, maths or electronic engineering, you need to be challenged, you need a job that makes you think"!

Another good list to follow if you are hiring programmers!