So today I upgraded Wordpress to its latest security release. I would have liked to use the automatic tool but somehow it forces me to use FTP for some reason unknown to me. So I did it the hard way and unlike Joomla! it asks you to delete files, copy things, make sure you don’t accidentally delete something and check that you included everything right. I always find it annoying how Wordpress works however that’s the price that I pay for trying out something interesting. In other news my iBook G4 is in piece on my kitchen table whilst I try to work out how to fix it again.

My birthday’s gift from my girlfriend created using Mac Mosaic application

More and more I see articles about how the internet is becoming more and more disjunct: firewalled and limited by sovereign nation states to prevent the flow of information. Today I saw an article on Slashdot commenting about Russia’s interest in creating their own internet similar to that of China’s (perhaps complete with firewall as well) and other parts of the world have had similar stories where the government is attempting to limit or reduce the availability of information made available from the internet.

The fact is that it reminds of something that scares me more than I realise: the Internet in is segmentation is similar to the ‘Internex’ of the Seaquest DSV world, a sci-fi tv show from 1993-1996. The Internex had some cross over into different countries (e.g. sovereign nations were still connected) however each nation was heavily gaurded from the next one, I assume to protect from cyberterrorism. The cyberterrorism threat in itself reminds me of the claimed issues of Chinese attacks with in the USA government departments. It is always interesting to see where fiction leads us to reality (or reality becomes like fiction) with so many parts of sci-fi becoming more and more a reality. But the question is, does the rest of the world predicted in these visions of the future also come with it? Or is the restriction of this information again the start of more borders as governments realise what the Internet is really capable of delivering to its users?

It makes me wonder. Where is the world headed?

So today I gave a business student a hard drive, a business IT student. He looked at me, he looked at the hard drive and then said “What is this?”

Some days I wonder about Business IT students, I wonder what they’re actually learning.

Obviously not what a hard drive looks like.

I’m sitting in my Oracle prac at the moment and I’ve had two shocks: Vista actually fixed a problem with XP and my Business faculty based lecturer is heavily bagging out WebCT and hoping for Moodle to come in. I’m not quite sure where all of this support for Moodle came from in the University but it is exciting…shame it may not happen in my time. The ITS people have been suspicious of the software over WebCT and one of the reasons why WebCT is being scrapped is that it costs money for the Uni and the Uni is running out of money. Interesting times ahead, shame I probably won’t see it come to fruition.

So this is my new blog. Its a Wordpress site as you can probably gather. I haven’t done much to customize it though I must admit I’m a fan of the default template anyway.

Stay tuned to read some of my experiences with technology and the world.

Sam