IIS4/IIS5 were aimed at classic ASP, which used CDONTS to send emails. CDONTS wasn’t aware of external mail servers, it assumed you’d run a single-box environment, so is hardcoded to use localhost and the cutdown SMTP service bundled with IIS: http://classicasp.aspfaq.com/email/can-i-use-a-remote-smtp-server-with-cdonts-newmail.html

IIS6 and above use the replacement, CDOSYS, which is aware of remote servers, so you don’t necessarily need your web server to run a local SMTP service: http://www.asp101.com/articles/john/cdosmtprelay/default.asp

IIS can still run a local/cutdown SMTP server, and this can still be managed via IIS.

IIS7 seems to further this concept and do away with local/cutdown SMTP service under IIS altogether. Although SMTP server can be installed on Windows2008, it’s considered a separate product (and not manageable from IIS7, IIS6 is used with it’s compatibilty mode); Instead, IIS has the option to use an external SMTP server.

http://weblogs.asp.net/steveschofield/archive/2006/12/19/iis7-post-23-vista-and-smtp-server-where-is-it.aspx (Note: Vista runs same ‘core’ as Windows 2008)

Just to give a recap on what I’ve been upto:

• I am now 29.
• I now know a little bit more about SQL Server and Windows Server, and a fair bit more about IIS6.
• I went to Bovington Tank Museum
• I had a drive about in a  Rally Car at Silverstone.
• I saw Blur play in Hyde Park

This struck me as odd.

Anyone born between those years would now be between 21 and 31, in five year’s time they’ll be between 26 and 36. So, by the point that our ‘five year plan’ has been realised, the student’s we’re aiming the strategy at will have graduated. Ok, there’s still the 30% of students who are postgraduates, plus those who are mature students (and hence over 21, and old enough to know better). But still, I can’t help but thinking we’ve already missed the boat.

The group we actually need to be focussing on are our digital natives, those born between 1988 and 1998 (and beyond). Looking at our plan, they’re now between 11 and 21, but in five year’s time that’d be 16 and 25. 16 is the age at which you start planning your future education, first with GCSE’s, and then with A-Levels two years later.

On top of this, you have to consider what it means to be a digital native. I was born firmly within the Generation Y era, and my wife is only just outside of it, but we are still left behind in some of today’s digital world (bebo anyone?). We can both remember getting on the internet in the early 90′s, but more importantly the ‘dark ages’ before that, when the idea of a schoolkid having the internet and a mobile phone was up there with moon bases and flying cars.
Someone now born in the era of the digital native, even at it’s lowest ebb of 1988, would have experienced the internet in some form or another by the time they started secondary school in 1999 (gonna party like it’s). And now we’re seeing that over 50% of 10 year olds have a mobile phone, rising to 95% of 16 year olds.

The landscape of the digital native is very different to that of Generation Y, and we should recognise that. We should start to plan for Gernation N.

Anyway, the aforementioned teahouse can be found in this view. You’ll want to stand at this point, to catch geisha entering/exiting the teahouse, geisha coming from the alleyway, and geisha coming from behind.

Check it out.

Geiko (Geisha)

Originally uploaded by mindfieldz

I was recently looking over my most popular Flickr photographs, and I came accross this one, shown to the right.

I visited Japan in May 2008, and one of the biggest highlights was seeing a real geisha in Kyoto (not to be confused with normal Japanese women in nice kimono’s). Lonely Planet, and Rough Guide don’t really give you an indication of where to find geisha, only that they’re “in Gion”.

After some frantic goggling, in a ryokan in Kyoto, I eventually found hints tucked away in a photography blog. Matching against a Japanese google maps, I convinced my wife to follow me to a side street in Gion.

Success! I’d managed to find the Ichiriki-tei Teahouse, the most prestigious teahouse in Gion.

[flickr style="border: 1px solid #5A5A5A"]set:72157615254849529[/flickr]

So, if you want to get awesome photos of geisha, follow the instructions below.

1. Get yourself to Gion, in Kyoto.
2. Locate the Ichiriki-tei Teahouse, this can be found just off the main street in Gion. On google maps, it’s the C-shaped grey building.
3. Wait until about 5:30pm-7:30pm local time. Don’t get too close to the entrance of the teahouse, else someone will come out and ask you to move away from the entrance. Taxi’s and other vehicles pull up to the etrance, so be careful if you are attached to a camera lens.
4. You will know if you are in the right place at the right time, as a fairly large crowd will gather.
5. Best place to position yourself is at the corner of the teahouse, looking down the alleyway behind the building. Geisha will come from all directions!

That’s it. In about an hour I saw 7 geisha, which is not bad considering it was a random tip-off from another blog (whose address I’ve long forgotten).

[Edit: Just realised that latest WordPress upgrade managed to remove the photos I'd posted.]

In terms of the kit used to get the shots above:

Canon EOS 400D
18-55mm f3.6-5.0 Tamron lens.
55-200mm f3.6-5.0 Tamron lens.
Mostly 1/60 to 1/200 shots, handheld.

Be prepared to do a lot of running with a camera.

It’s an event I knew about, it’s an event I’d planned for, it’s an event that I’d added to my calendar. It’s an event I completely forgot about because:

1. I added it to my, and my colleagues’, calendars a day late. Call this a moment of insanity if you will.
2. I forgot to set a reminder.

Anyway, at quarter-past-four, a rather anxious member of a department’s admin staff comes into the office, asking where I’ve been for the past fifteen minutes. Cue a hurried rush downstairs, to see the academic who fired off the original enquiry coming to the end of her introductory slides, and a room full of student’s at computers.

A silence descends on the room. Everyone in the room turns to look at me. No idea why. I’m here purely to see what’s going on. Perhaps I should explain.

We use a fairly well known online assessment package. We’ve been using it for nearly eight years now, and I’m fairly adept with the in’s and out’s of it, having spent my first 12 months of employment developing against it’s API. One of the things we use it for is online examinations, it’s excellent for large multiple choice papers, and its more eco-friendly than the old Optical Mark Reader (OMR) that is still in widespread use. The main bonus of this product over it’s competitors, is that it can lockdown the computer during the assessment; no Wikipedia in the background, no MSN, no email. Although the software has its problems, it’s actually rather good on the whole, and I just managed to talk the establishment round to going site-wide with it’s installation (this will come back to haunt me, you heard it here first).

So, the department in question, boosted by our general murmurings that this was a ‘supported system’, decided to approach a 3rd party company which resold the same online assessment system. There is a method to this madness, the company owned the intellectual property rights to a fairly clever assessment and its questions; so unless we forked out several thousand pounds for use of the IPR, it was vastly cheaper to use their service direct. So, department buys rights to use this software on 100 or so students, and a week before it’s due to happen, the staff member responsible for coordinating it all goes off on long-term sick.

Enter our team, stage left, pursued by bear.

The end result being that I left work about 25 minutes later than usual, and spent just over an hour helping a traumatised department with it’s first forays into the world of online assessment. Overall we did good, although there were one or two moments where my colleague and I exchanged thousand-yard-stares across the melee.

Hopefully the department will send a thankful email tomorrow, they’ll realise the benefits of online assessment, and we’ll have another one on the e-learning bandwagon. On our side of the fence, it was a reassurance that the quality assurance steps we had in place weren’t a simple folly, and actually do help in these situations.Which brings me to the meat in this sandwich. Top-tips for online assessments. In no particular order:

1. Test, test, and test again.
   Academics make mistakes, we (as admins of the system) make mistakes, computers (without question) always make mistakes , everyone makes mistakes.
   1. Give the academics ample time to test, and explain the consequences if they get it wrong.
      In our case, once a mistake has gone ‘live’, we say that it cannot be corrected (for QA reasons), and that the academic has to make any marking corrections themselves. Only make changes on the day of the exam if you are sure its the right thing to do, or there has been a monumental cock-up; always seek a colleague’s advice on this (preferably a sane one).
   2. Ask a colleague when you want to cowboy something, or something simply doesn’t appear to be ‘right’.
      Maybe it’s because it’s a Monday, maybe it’s down to the lack of caffine, maybe it’s the academic whose made a mistake. However it’s always good to get a sane voice on any matter which needs thinking about.
   3. Test the system, test it again, go back and test it a third time to catch it by surprise.
      Computers are evil. We’ve had a situation where a completely unrelated routine update installed over the weekend, has wrecked the way that online assessments handle mathematical equations. We now spot-check six computers in the week leading upto the online exams, and ask the rest of our section to politely not touch anything.
2. Simple is good.
   Despite the option to ‘make it better’, don’t. Do the simplest thing possible and stick to it. See pretty much every other item on this list for an explanation why.
3. Don’t underestimate the onion of stupidity.
   Despite whatever attempts you make to ensure the system is foolproof, people will find imaginative ways to break it all. The best example I can give is a student who managed to “kick the plug out of the wall socket”, thus powering down his computer. Words fail me.
4. Give them a dry run.
   If students have not used the system before, give them the opportunity to try it out. Even if it’s a simple assessment containing questions like “What colour is the sky?”.
   We normally couple this with point 5 and 7 below, and it helps overcome some of the consequences of point 3 above.
5. Write it down for them. With pictures.
   There’s a lot of reasons why students may not follow the instructions you give them, many are valid but some fall under the umbrella of the ‘onion of stupidity’ mentioned above. Writing the instructions down helps everyone:
   1. It helps stagger the start of your assessment, meaning that individual problems don’t all happen at once, and the system gets a bit of a rest. Explain to students that they all have individual timers, so nobody is disadvantaged.
   2. English isn’t everybodies first language, and some students struggle with reading. Simple instructions and diagrams help. Get them down to a single sheet of A4, picture heavy.
   3. If it all goes wrong, you can point to a piece of paper, and walk away.
6. Let everyone know what their role is.
   Myself and my colleagues are not invigilators, we don’t want to be. Equally, most invigilators aren’t technically trained, and don’t really want to explain to a student why their user account has expired (see point 7 below). I’ve even been kicked out of an online examination I was assisting with, as an invigilator mistook me for a student.
   Make sure everyone knows their role prior to the start of the online examination.
7. Make sure you hammer home the rules, and don’t be soft over the exceptions – they have been warned.
   Rules exist for a reason, make sure you have rules and you follow them, else people will loose faith in both you and the system.
   1. Staff need to know the basics of the system. What it does, how it works, where it’s most likely to fail, where students are most likely to have problems (or create them). You’ll find that non-technical staff are happy to deal with the little things if they know about them in advance, and this is invaluable during the first 15 mintues of an online examination.
   2. Students need to know what’s expected of them, and the consequences if they get it wrong.
      Not only are students told that this is like any other examination (eg. mobile phone = evicted from exam), but we tell them three-fold that online examinations are slightly different to the norm. Students are informed verbally by their lecturer, they are informed by email, and they are informed during their dry run (point 4 above). We tell them:
      • It’s the student’s responsibility to be familiar with the system. We’ve given them a dry run which is as close to the real thing as possible, and they have unlimited attempts.
      • It’s the student’s responsibility to make sure their computing account is in order. No changing password 10 minutes before the exam, no turning up and claiming that you’ve ‘forgotten’ your password. No account, no exam.
      • This is an exam, no really it is. Although myself and my colleagues aren’t invigilators, we’ll still give you a hard stare for talking, and we’ll still point you out to someone who has the authority to do something about you.
      • Follow the instructions provided (point 5), to the letter. You should log in, visit the webpage provided, take the online examination, and log out. Visiting Facebook isn’t mentioned on those instructions, we’ve checked. Twice.
8. Always have a ‘Plan B’, even if ‘Plan B’ is ‘run away’.
   There are always going to be situations beyond your control. Power cuts do happen, people do set of fire alarms, workmen to drill through gas pipes in the adjacent room (ok, I made that last one up). Despite all the planning and preparation, you should always have a contingency slot. You’re not going to make any friends if you’re forced to use it, but it’s the elephant in the room should anything go wrong. Saying that, we’ve gone four years now without need of this contingency slot.
9. It will be hectic in the first 15 minutes.
   Ok, not a rule exactly, but a piece of advice. The first 15 minutes will go something like your worst ‘disaster recovery’ scenarios. You’ll get used to it. Honest.

So, yeah. That’s about 1,500 words on why online examinations need a level of quality assurance. It’s also my first work related post on my blog. So once I’m comfortable with this new format, expect some more offerings. I’m off now, as Cat #3 is mewing desperately and looking for a cuddle.

There’s a good reason, seriously…

Anyway, I have made some tweaks to the site.

• The site now defaults to 75% width, up from 70%. I had aimed/hoped for 80-85%, but my header images aren’t wide enough, expect that to change at some point.
• My code boxes now word wrap, so you’ll be able to see my code in all it’s glory.

Not much, but a start. And some content.

Although SparkFun says that they’re out of stock, it seems to be more of an ‘order on demand’ type of thing. I purchased a Rootooth on backorder, and had one posted to me within two weeks. For reference I chose the cheapskate AirMail option with no tracking, and the item turned up within about 3 weeks from my original order date. Although SparkFun had marked the box belot its actual cost, Customs had decided to open and hold it for a few days anyway.

The Rootooth itself. Don’t be disheartened if it doesn’t work out of the box. I discovered three things with mine:

1. You need a Bluetooth dongle that works on Widcomm or the Windows Bluetooth Stack (preferred). I initially tried it with a cheap Bluesoleil Bluetooth dongle, and it failed miserably – Vista refused to connect to the virtual serial port on the Rootooth, and XP would consistently drop the connection every few minutes.
   I eventually bought a Belkin Bluetooth dongle for £10, the F8T013UK. Although it has Widcomm drivers, you can get it running under the Windows stack by following some simple instructions.
2. The Rootooth has been upgraded to use a Firefly Bluetooth module. This version is rumoured to set an incorrect baud rate for the 5xx series of Roombas, despite using the SU,115K instruction. To fix, send the following commands to your Rootooth:
   $$$
   U,115K,N
   Your Rootooth should return back to normal mode (not command mode), and you’re ready to go.
3. There are few websites/forum posts giving information relating to the Roomba 5xx series, even fewer bits of code/software which work with them, and even fewer that work with both.
   I discovered that the 5xx series uses a different set of codes, and that one person had coded for the latest Rootooth/Roomba combination.

So, my Roomba now goes backwards and forwards, and I can monitor the sensors. Next stop, Roomba/Twitter and Roomba/Wiimote.