Yay! Just Dance by Lady Gaga is finally No 1 in the US. Great song, but I’d thought the US would not notice a pop song, and as the song had not charted initially I had all but given up. ……but slowly and surely Just Dance climbed to No 1 over a 22 week period, totally powered the by reflections from all the disco balls in the video. I can’t be happier for Lady Gaga to crack both the US and UK markets. Just Dance is tipped to be No 1 in the UK this week. The US and UK are behind - Australia having already embraced "The Fame" for most of 2008.

… And Lady Gaga celebrated the No 1 single by singing with a live band on the Tonight show (Jay Leno) with an electronic glove thingy and skin colored pantyhose. Oh wait, was that origami she was wearing????

I got a chance over the Xmas break to pack and throw out a lot of outdated computing magazines. Deciding which magazine to keep and which to throw out, was easy. I kept anything of algorithmic importance. Essentially this means that I kept just about every copy of Dr Dobb’s Journal that I had ever purchased. I was quite sad, to read today that Dr Dobb’s Journal is no longer a publication of its own - it will now be a section in InformationWeek.

…… I am going to build the converter with a genetic algorithm, sit back and watch it evolve! This idea is inspired by Genetic Algorithm in Python to Generate File Converters.

Interesting and accurate post’s from both Coding Horror and Kathy Sierra on Micromanagement. It is true that micromanagement creates staff that are neither able to creatively problem solve. The other end of the spectrum is intelligent staff slowly being drained of brain cells due to continuous micromanagement. My advise to anybody being micromanaged to to move on as quickly as possible!

A Sakai roadmap leading up to Version 3 (via mfeldstein.com), due in 2013. More specific V3 details are also available. A few questions come to mind. Can we wait till 2013? Will that be what we really need by 2013?

As a Ed Technology staff member, I thought the points covered in this EDUCAUSE presentation entitled "How to Attract, Retain, and Develop Higher Ed Technology Staff" were perfectly valid. Worth a read…

Need a YouTube clone, installed and only accessible within your own organization/educational institution or you may just be after creating your own genre specific social media site on the internet???? Look no further than PHPmotion. Story Circles from the Center of Digital Story Telling uses PHPmotion. The content on Story Circles is quite interesting too.

Totally hilarious YouTube vid illustrating common Powerpoint mistakes.

With rumors of layoffs at even Microsoft, I guess the Wired Tech Layoff Tracker is the Mashup that best defines these early days of 2009.

Mozilla Ubiquity is described as "an experiment into connecting the Web with language". The aim is to use sentences to control a browser eg "Book a flight to Chicago next Monday to Thursday, no red-eyes, the cheapest. Then email my Chicago friends the itinerary, and add it to my calendar. It is not quite there yet, but does support more simpler commands such as "email it to Celine", "translate this to English" and "weather brisbane". In its simplicity to does get more useful eg retrieve everything tagged with css by user aneesha -  "get-delicious aneesha tag css" and update my facebook status -  "facebook-status is exploring Ubiquity". There is a library of commands available and a command authoring guide. Ubiquity provides a great interface for non-programmers to create mashups and accomplish tasks from a central interface.

Taking ideas for e-learning Ubiquity commands now….