Steve Jobs has resigned. I'll miss him... and why.

Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO of Apple Inc.

The official statement: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/08/24Steve-Jobs-Resigns-as-CEO-of-Apple.html

While, as most of you know, I have never been the biggest fan of the iOS (on iPhones and iPads) what you may not know is that I have always admired his tenacity and belief in his company and product. There is a very good reason Simon Sinek [TEDtalk | Start With Why ] spoke about Apple in his Golden Circles talk – Steve was a believer in pushing the boundaries of IT use and his desire for IT to not only be useful, but easy to use and good looking, has quite obviously come through in their products.

There are many, many lessons we can learn about innovation in education from the way he has lead innovation in the IT industry. I aspire to have the same belief in and dedication to my products, young, Christian leaders who will influence their community for God and good, so that they may achieve their potential. Anyone who has seen Steve talk, either via vodcast or in real life, will know that he has always meant what he said.

Steve, you’ve done a great job and you will be missed.

Garage Sale - Sat 17 April

We're holding a garage sale this Saturday, 17th April, from 7:30am to 3:00pm at 26 Hinchliffe Dr, Kearney's Spring.

Stuff being sold includes:

• Baby clothes
• Baby items (toys, bath etc)
• N64 and a couple of N64 games
• A wooden TV unit
• Lots of books (and I mean lots)
• A treadmill
• plus more!

So, if you've got some spare time on Saturday, pop on over and take a browse. We're more than happy for you to buy some of our things.

Enjoy!

Page 1 of Google Search Results (YAY!)

Yay - I've made page 1 of Google's search results page - twice! How cool is that. I'm number 8 and 10... see image below (not edited, just cropped):

Finally after all these years, I've made it. Aaaaaaah. Now if only I can be number 1 (like my wife). Sigh.

Chirp...

Finally making use of my Twitter account (http://twitter.com/richardschwarz). Don't know that it'll be all that useful, but hey... Gen WhoCares person here.

One day I'll find a way to make it useful.

Listed on the front page of Google - kind of

Hi all,

I wrote a long time ago about being on the 6th page of google's search results when searching for myself. Now, I can proudly state that I feature on the first (yes, friends and countrymen people - the FIRST) page of google's results.

I need to state, to remain at least partly honest, that it is not my content, nor my luminary intellectual wit and writings which has brought about this phenomenon, rather it is the fantastic profile picture which one of my fantastic students put together, featured on the Joomla! extension K2 community page. That was quite a ramble.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so:

Take a look for yourself... that's me!

enjoy my goatee!

Not blogging for a while.... AGAIN!!!!

Struggling to make stuff work at the moment. Stupid internets [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internets]. What a silly bunch of tubes![http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes]

Anyway, lots of plans to update this again - and more often... YAY!

But not right now.

Human fail of the Turing Test

Perfect proof that the Turing test doesn't really test machine intelligence... it simply tests the ability to hold a decent conversation. This means that some humans will fail. Epically.

I'm not usually one to hold Dilbert (http://www.dilbert.com) up as a noteworthy soothsayer of Artificial Intelligence, however, Scott Adams summed up my bemusement (there are plenty of other less savoury words which could be used instead... but I won't use them here - it'll hurt the Nets) at what some people will say.

(http://dilbert.com/fast/2009-03-16/)

Chickens.

More User Interface Issues... when affordance goes wrong...

One of my fellow teachers reminded me of this pearler of a video... tracked it down on youtube...

Interesting take on help desk support and affordance. Sometimes, while your user isn't you, they're just plain stupid.

Medieval Help Desk:

The Turing Test - Whaaaat???

For all you AI peeps out there.

Taken from: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/turing_test.png

Sometimes I wonder...

New profile picture

Thanks Ben!!!

Your sneaky snapping of snaps has netted me a great new profile picture. Now, not only do I look cool, I also look more than a little deranged... Hmmm.

But, as Ben said, the old one (red and yellow life jacket) was getting... well, old.

Nuff said.

Back to the real world. Oh. Snap.

GodTube is dead: Long live Tangle!!!

You may have noticed recently (particularly if you're a subscriber) that the Christian Video streaming place GodTube (http://www.godtube.com) is gone. Like the mythical phoenix, it has been reborn (perhaps I should use a more christian analogy along the lines of 'like Lazarus from the dead', but it's not quite the same image, really) and recast as Tangle (www.tangle.com).

Underneath all the new jazz, it is still essentially the same video sharing site (like youTube - www.youtube.com) as it was, with the same underlying technologies (as far as I can tell). It has simply been rebadged and a new domain was registered.

What does this mean to all of us? Well, the word of tangle:

Our goal is to touch more people than ever, to provide them with not just the place but also the means to connect with others online, to share their faith and lives, and to ultimately portray a Christian angle in everything they do.

(http://www.tangle.com/promo/godtubeisnowtangle)

If you haven't checked it out yet, you will want to. There's a fantastic plethora of Christian goodies, and the first email themed message I've got is all about valentines:

http://info.tangle.com/loveandsex

Back to work

Well, I'm back from Couran Point Island Beach Resort (South Stradbroke Island) after a delightful 5 days of not thinking or doing anything with regards to work. I have a bit of a tan and a bit of a gut and am looking forward to going back to work on Monday (read that with a level of forced happiness).

My plans for this year are to be a bit more organised (am going to spend up to 3 hours today cleaning my desk so that this has even a remote possibility of happening) and to go further to fulfilling my vision of 'creating leaders of character'. This last might be a bit more difficult now that I will only be looking after Year 12, rather than all of 10 -12 as per the last three years. Maybe I'll have a bit more success with that year level after all. Yes Amanda, that includes you.

Oh well. 2009 - I hope you're ready

My Jesus - Todd Agnew

Hey all - On Sunday I had the pleasure of listening to Peter Sondergeld deliver the message at ChristLife - West Toowoomba Presbyterian Church. At the end of the message, he played the video below. It made me want to post the blog I've been thinking about (read: still has a lot of work to do) regarding our perceptions of Jesus. For a while I've struggled with the view of Jesus that contemporary church puts forward. It seems to clash with what I see as the Biblical perspective. Hmmm. I will need to put that up at some time.

Watch the video below. It will change your perception of WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) at the very least... maybe even some personal change.

They've gone!

Year 12s from all over Queensland graduated today, and my school was no different. We had a fantastic ceremony and it was poignant and beautiful. I loved every minute of it - except for the bits where I had to talk (I MCed the event).

I wish all the Graduates of 2008 well - especially those of Christian Outreach College Toowoomba. You've done well to get where you have and I pray that you'll all follow God's will and your heart, because then you'll be a success, regardless of what life throws at you.

All the best and God's blessings. We'll miss you here.

Prince Caspian

I went and saw Prince Caspian (part 2 of the Chronicles of Narnia) last night and I have to say that I was impressed. Beautiful scenery, the acting had improved and the emotive impact was greater. I really do think the four kids did a great job.

I'll try to come back to this, and do a bit of a review, in a bit.

Wow - it HAS been a long time

Somebody just recently asked me if I'd posted on my blog recently... and as you can see from the dates, my answer was no.
So why do people start up blogs and then not keep going? It's a bit reminiscent of those personal web pages on 'free' hosting sites which were set up once, maybe tended for a short while and then just forgotten - left to be sucked up by the sands of time (and the creditors when the hosting company collapsed).
I can't really answer for anyone else, but for me I have to admit that it's partly because I don't feel any real emotional attachment to my blog space. It's google's, not mine. The URL tries to make it feel personal, heck - google really does try to give you some sense of web 'backyard' to work within (and major kudos to them - privacy issues set aside), but it's just not the same as having a site which you've built up from the ground.
Those people who have known me for some time, know that I began working with HTML back in it's infancy (at least in Australia), way back in the early to mid 90's. I can't really remember when I first started, but it was early. I remember the joy of being able to use the img tag for the first time (note: not xHTML compliant - no / in those days!). I remember animated gifs and the free for all that web enthusiasts had for setting them as background images, regardless of how tacky it made the site, or how hard to read. I remember feeling like a legend, because my good old Netscape managed to get my page up and going and looking kind of like I'd intended in under 10 seconds (remember 9600 baud?). I remember using notepad and Netscape Composer to set it all up. Those were the days where I had some sense of personal belonging - where I knew that all that was there was because I could.
These days you select a template, give it a title and away you go...
It seems to me that the most used blogs (and this is from pro's as well) are ones where some personalisation has occured, they're not just plain vanilla anymore.

Maybe that's what I've got to do. That and get some darn visitors!!! Come on, leave a comment just so I know that there's someone out there...

Rescuing big ships - really big ships

This month in Wired there's an article, High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace [link], describing the heroic efforts to salvage a very big ship. It's excellent reading and I was captivated. One member of the team died, but there could have been more. Reading the description of their entry into the cargo hold brought images of entering a tomb into my mind.

Take a read. It's worth it.

Get those add-ons working with Firefox 3 beta 3

As I've stated in the previous posts, getting those add-ons to work in the betas isn't as simple as clicking on the beautiful install button.

The problem we now have is that the vast majority of add-ons have been built for Firefox 1 & 2, and because FF3 is still in beta, not many of the developers have updated their add-ons.

Thankfully, unless the add-on deals with some of the core which has changed (e.g. bookmarks), it is quite simple to update them yourself. It requires little knowledge of anything other than how to use a good compression program (i.e. 7zip) and read files in notepad (although I like using notepad2). NOTE: both of those programs are Open Source and GPL'ed, so no philosophical issues here.

To start off, I'm going to install one of my favourite add-ons: Firebug. This is a nifty little tool, which is very useful for developers - unlike myself.

So let's get started.

1. Get the add-on. This is as simple as going to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843 and clicking on the green 'Install Now' button.

2. The add-on install will go as per normal, but will pop up an 'Incompatible Extension' error box - just as you thought all was hunky-dory.

3. Hmm... we now have a problem - but it can be fixed!

4. Go back to the add-on's page (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843) and right-click on the link.
Select 'Save Link As...' and choose great little folder/directory in which to save the .xpi file.

5. This is now where 7Zip comes in handy. Go to the directory in which the .xpi is saved and open the file in your compression program of choice (if you haven't guessed, I choose 7Zip).

NOTE: The reason we can do this is that the .xpi file is actually an archive containing all the files needed for the add-on. We're going to change one - that's right, just one - file in that archive.

The steps I'm about to use are for 7Zip, so if you don't have it - get it. Really, it is the best compression program out there anyway.

6. Look for the file 'install.rdf', right-click on it and select 'Edit'. This is the main configuration file for the add-on.

7. We're going to change one - that's right, one - line in the file. Look for the code section:

<Description>
<em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}</em:id>
<em:maxVersion>2.0.0.*</em:maxVersion>
<em:minVersion>1.5</em:minVersion>
</Description>

We're going to change the value in <em:maxVersion> from 2.0.0.* to 3.0.*

8. Make the change and save the file. Exit your editor (again, mine was notepad2) and, if you're using 7zip, it will ask if you want to update the archive with the new file - select 'Yes'. If you're using some other program and it doesn't ask you, save your install.rdf file elsewhere and add it back in to the archive, making sure to overwrite the old one.

9. Close the archive and drag the .xpi file onto firefox. The install Add-On dialogue should come up and away you go.

The obligitory 'Welcome' post...

Sorry to do this to everyone, but here it is...

Welcome to richardschwarz.blogger.com: where software and thought combine.

This blog will contain my thoughts about software and even 'thinking type stuff'. If you want to know a user's perspective on software (which you should) then keep looking here.

I am an English and IT teacher to upper High School students (14 - 17 y.o.'s generally), and like to think that the two are actually complementary, rather than diametrically opposed.

Anyway, have a read. First cab off the rank will be my take on Firefox 3 beta 2. Preview: it rocks!