A logo update

This is part of my personal history with only a small connection to the Cloud, but readers might find some interest if only to parallel their own experiences of logo creation.

In the early 90s I created a personal logo with a drawing program whose name is lost to me. I subsequently named it Dotdolfin as it was intended to be my rendering of indigenous dot art. The dolphin foundation was suggested as we had just named an innovative system of networked workstations from DEC as Kowande. This is the name of the dolphin spirit of Kowande an elder of the local Kombumerri tribe who reside here on the Gold Coast. A colleague, Renato Iannella, had just created a dolphin logo for our Kowande system and I rendered a dot art version of it. At the time I was proud I did not use circles for the dots but rather drew out a an irregular outline to simulate the end of a real stick used by the genuine dot artists. I remember the Mac struggled to refresh the display qjuickly after I had placed the first hundred of the dot shapes! Designing after that was difficult.

I even had a WordPress web site based on the logo called dotdolfin.com which is no more, but the out of date contents live on at dotdolfin.wordpress.com. As is the way of software the drawing program and its format are long gone and all I have are .jpg and .gif versions of my dotdolfin logo. A few weeks ago I was taken with a post entitled 'How to Create Illustrated Characters in PowerPoint' and eventually tried the technique myself. The smooth curve tool in PowerPoint turned out to be so simple and productive it has become my creative medium of choice. In less than an hour I have created my new logo suitably named Cloud Dolfin. You can see the new and the old:

Cloud dolfin

Dotdolfin

I am hoping the PowerPoint format will survive much longer into the future so that I don't have to worry about updating again now that I am retired.

Vitam in nubem

For many computer users living in the cloud has been possible for some time. Academic Jeff Jervis is a regular on one of my favourite podcasts, This Week in Google. In a recent post La Vita Cloudy on his Buzzmachine blog Jeff proudly announces he has moved entirely into the cloud. As a fellow academic now retired, but from the computer science discipline, I commend his move and predict the cloud will meet all his computing needs.

What I find puzzling are the doubts expressed by Jeff's podcast colleagues (Leo and the talented Gina). As a computer scientist I deemed it very clear that the cloud would become the obvious work environment for the big majority of computer users. More than 5 years ago in 2006 at a local Barcamp (Working in the Cloud Update) I was voicing this view. When the Chromebook was announced in May 2011 it was clear to me that I could recommend it as the all-purpose machine for most people wanting a computer keyboard. At that time I predicted Chromebooks Take Us Closest So Far to a Post-PC Era. I couldn't buy a Chromebook in Australia until early 2013 but in July 2011 I was very annoyed at the many blinkered reviews, Many Chromebook Reviews So Short-Sighted. At the time I listed the Chromebook shortcomings as:

• No Bluetooth
• Difficult printing
• No Skype

Even then the positives far outweighed this list. As of today only the last remains and Google+ Hangouts is a good substitute.

I do have to admit to Jeff that I am yet to go the whole hog myself. In hindsight I could have published my first Kindle book The Cloud and You entirely on my Chromebook but chickened out as I explained in Publishing in the Cloud. At this point too I have to agree with Leo that creating and editing the videos for my first MOOC also called The Cloud and You can not currently be done productively in the cloud. Even allowing for Internet bandwidth limitations I strongly believe such a task will be possible in the cloud very soon as video cloud editing apps do already exist.

With a Chromebook Jeff believes he is free of Microsoft and Apple. I think he will find this will not be such a clean break. Microsoft Office Online for example runs just great on a Chromebook and will likely handle a publisher's weird Word book template much better than Google Docs. An Office 365 subscription might still brings benefits and, who knows, Office might even become available as a set of dedicated Chrome apps!

So good luck Jeff. I am close behind you but not an absolutely pure cloudy just yet.

Sad tale of a promising City of Gold Coast mobile app

Looks like the app I need to report trees obstructing view of road crossing from a footpath.

Pretty app and a simple big button to submit a report.

Take a photo, type a simple description and touch submit. The app adds the detailed location and sends it to the council. Great!

Next day the council replies - impressive response.

The bad news is this app doesn't cover this very common issue.

The good news is they have passed on the issue to the 'relevant area'.

#partialfail

I have used this SnapSendSolve app all over Australia to report issues to councils, even a few times here on the Gold Coast. The app creates the report email and knows where to send it by the current location.

A couple of times I have used this app to report overhanging trees on footpaths/cycle paths to the GCCC and they have responded well every time.

Come on GCCC, surely your own app can come to the party!

Unwanted NineMSN Logo intrudes on OneDrive in Australia

I have been frequent user and supporter of OneDrive in Australia. A practical workshop appears in my first online course (MOOC) called The Cloud and You on Udemy.com. I had thought to create a more in-depth coverage of OneDrive in my second online course currently in planning.

Today I started experimenting with Camtasia screencasts of OneDrive to discover to my absolute dismay that the NineMSN logo/links appear at the top of the OneDrive, Outlook, People and Calendar components - definitely not something my international online students will want to see.

My first thought was that surely this display was optional but a short period of research showed these unwanted links are permanent when accessing OneDrive in Australia in any browser. This appears to be confirmed in the Microsoft community forum in the post 'Remove NineMSN Logo - Australia'. So disappointing. I have to hand it to Microsoft in the subtle positioning as it has taken me many months to spot it!

While the NineMSN logo is mercifully absent in the online apps for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote I won't be rushing to create my online course about OneDrive. So Google Apps/Drive here I come.

Unnecessary user pain on sites that fail to strip spaces

I just have to vent my intense anger with sites that fail to strip spaces when entering simple information like email addresses, user ids and similar. Surely it is universally accepted that spaces cannot be part of login names, email addresses, web page links and such. Indeed this is used by the vast majority of auto-completion tools on smartphone, tablet/laptop to terminate the insert action. You start typing an oft-entered text sequence and the platform prompts with the suggested complete text, and you accept by typing a space. Any other character kills the autocomplete action.

Annoyingly I am seeing more and more sites returning the unhelpful message

Not a valid email address/login name/...

when a trailing space appears after the text entry. Every person who claims to be a web developer should know the scripting/coding language they use to accept the user's input has a built-in library function akin to trim() which stips spaces and other invalid characters. Every site should do this.

This exasperated post was triggered by trying my hand at the tempting article entitled 'Could You Win the National Spelling Bee? - Test Yourself With These Winning Words'. I accidentally (yeah!) typed an answer ending with a space and was incensed at receiving an 'incorrect' answer. Of course it was my trusty Swiftkey keyboard app on the Nexus 7 that actually entered the correct answer but added a space.

Please, all sites accepting atomic text input should be stripping leading and trailing spaces. It shows sloppy coding otherwise and lowers the trustworthiness of the site.

Padlet walls URLs improve

It is good to see Padlet (once Wallwisher) continuing to add features. Padlet converts web pages into 'walls' where you can create and share information snippets such as links, files and photos. Today we see the ability to adopt a suitable user name and have that appear in the URL used to share your walls in your social media. So my small collection of cloud information gems can be found at:

http://padlet.com/MichaelRees/cloudgallimaufry

Padlet can generate your wall in a number of formats like PDf, Excel and CSV. Another generated format is a snapshot image:

Buffer overflows and collapses

As a keen social media citizen I have been using social sharing Buffer service free account quite happily for many months. I routed information gems to Buffer mainly from my preferred Feedly RSS aggregator and news reading service. At convenient scheduled times Buffer releases these updates to my Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ CloudScholar page. My tweets are automatically repeated on my Facebook news stream for my diminishing friends list on that service.

Suddenly last week Buffer started sending unsubtle messages:

You've completely filled the buffer for the individual plan, nice work! Upgrading to Awesome gets you more space...

So no more buffering for me as I can't possibly justify paying US$102/year for their 'awesome' service. I realise they operate a freemium business model but just terminating the free service after a fixed number of updates seems severe. I won't have started using Buffer had I known this limitation at the start.

Fortunately the currently free IFTTT service glues together much of the world's social media services. As it has done for several of my acquaintances IFTTT has provided a reasonably smooth equivalent to my lost Buffer service. Using an IFTTT recipe that repeats any of my tweets with a chosen hashtag, #cast in my case, to LinkedIn. I now have Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook covered. Feedly provides the same quick link to generate tweets as it did for Buffer so convenience is not sacrificed.

I have admit that so far IFTTT has not been able to send a tweet to my Google+ Cloudscholar page. If anyone knows how to achieve this please comment below.

Overall I am quite happy with my switch to IFTTT.

Telstra to crowdsource Wi-Fi across Australia

In a game-changer for users of the Cloud in Australia we see plans from Telstra for a nationwide and international Wi-Fi network. While not a free service, users are charged on their own broadband plan provided they opt to share part of their own Wi-Fi service in a secure way.

The Telstra service incorporates technology from Spain's Fon who offer a global Wi-Fi sharing network. It appears that Telstra will add about 8,000 new Wi-Fi hotspots in high usage locations across the country.
For Cloud users this is very good news as in principle it frees users from relying solely on mobile phone networks hotspots to access the Internet while away from home or work. Read more details in the post from GigaOM. Because of the lack of copper in the ground for my landline service I am forced to use the Telstra cable internet service. I can't wait to sign up.

Publishing in the Cloud

In October 2013 I created a short MOOC called The Cloud and You on Udemy.com. I scripted the dozen or so 3-4 minute video lectures and there are a couple of Cloud workshops in downloadable text documents. It seemed a good idea to turn these texts into my first venture into a Kindle book - another Cloud-based format. This finally came to fruition a week ago.

Those who have self-published on Amazon will know they recommend you create the text in Word and save in filtered HTML format before uploading to Amazon. Sadly initial experiments showed the filtering still left huge quantities of extraneous Word HTML and lists and images weren't treated well. I soon turned to editing in pure HTML to achieve a clean layout on Kindle.

When I therefore needed an HTML editor at this point my thoughts naturally turned to a Cloud-based text solution. The editor obviously needed to be aware of HTML and CSS syntax highlighted sensibly and provide some auto-completion to avoid mismatched tags. An HTML pretty printer would also be useful.

Having some small experience with the Cloud9 IDE I turned to it, and since it supports Github repositories this again was a natural choice. And so it was these two free Cloud services allowed me to create my first Kindle book. The HTML pretty print feature of Cloud9, triggered with a single key combination, was particularly useful in spotting tag start/end errors and keeping the whole text easy to manage as shown to the right where the generated overall structure is shown rather than the detail of the text itself.

There was a lot of fiddly but simple copy and pasting of the script text out of PowerPoint presentations into the book text then adding some HTML tags. Little of the text changed as I adopted the more casual style of the online course lecture scripts for the book itself. The versioning of every text file on Cloud9 came into its own when I suddenly noticed half the text was missing due to an Internet connection interruption. Reverting to a version of a few minutes before was very easy. However it forced me to increase the frequency of Git syncs to my Github repo which of course acts as the backup.

Even the final proof reading and the actual layout of the book the Kindle can be done from the Kindle Direct Publishing web site via a Kindle emulator running in a browser window.

It was my hope that I could actually create and publish my ebook just using my Chromebook, ie completely within a browser. As it turned out I did cheat in this regard doing most of the authoring in Cloud9 using Chrome on a Windows 8 machine to exploit the excellent text expansion capabilities of the much praised AutoHotKey app - it's so much easier to type cay[ instead of The Cloud and You! I wish we had an workable equivalent of AutoHotKey on Chrome OS. As well there is a much more comprehensive Kindle converter and emulator on Windows which allows you to see how the book will look on a wide range of Kindle devices and apps.

One downside of editing your Kindle book text directly in HTML is you miss out on the automated Table of Contents (TOC) features of Word. You need to insert <a name="..."> tags on the headings and build the TOC entries with <a href="..."> tags. In my short how-to book of only about 70 pages and a couple of dozen TOC entries the extra work is small. However in a longer volume that also requires an index this would soon become tedious.

I enjoyed putting together my first simple Kindle book and found the self-publishing learning curve relatively short and painless. Being able to do it with Cloud apps was even more satisfying.

Bond uses my Cloud and You MOOC again

For the second semester running business students at Bond taking the Information Systems in Business subject INFT11-120 have been given free access to my Cloud and You MOOC offered on the Udemy platform.

This MOOC is available to all at:
  https://www.udemy.com/the-cloud-and-you/