Cleveratom

Cleveratom move is on!

Hal

This time next week we should be in Chelmsford, running the business from very near the town centre! The countdown is ON!

The new address is:

Cleveratom Limited
Fenchurch House
93 Springfield Road
CHELMSFORD
Essex CM2 6JL

BT are fitting the phone today – new number to be announced soon, but the current 0845 number stays with us too (0845 868 9020)

And we have lots of work to do as well – still looking for employees and especially PHP coders who know their stuff and want to be part of a growing organisation.

Jaws Content Management System, Jaws CMS

Hal

jaws.pngLately, we have been looking at different types of CMS available and trying to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each. It’s a tough task as you can imagine. However, for one reason or another Jaws has risen to the surface as a strong leader. It is still relatively new, of course and as such may not yet have the refinements of systems like Drupal, but it does have a relatively simple user interface which counts for a lot in my book. Sadly, the immaturity of the platform and the relative recency of its appearance means that there isn’t a great deal of useful information for those wishing to develop for it. As an example, try finding any information of any great depth about building a ‘gadget’. Sure, there is the meagre documentation and yes, there are plenty of gadgets which you could deconstruct, but what is needed is a reasonably detailed description of how these puppies hang together in the first place! Damian (Cleveratom employee no.4) has been looking into all this but it is tough one to crack. Using IRC he managed to chat to one of the core developers for a little bit of info, but not enough to get him really underway. So – does anyone have a good understanding of how gadgets are made for Jaws, and would you be willing to share it?

Horbury School, BSF, Learning Platforms, virtual learning environments

Hal

Horbury school is located in Wakefield and is undergoing a BSF process. They are also in the process of becoming a trust school, with languages as their specialism. Following on from the work we did in Yorkshire, reviewing learning platform implementation, we were asked to work with them as consultants to advise on their plans for the future.

As part of our visit we attended a presentation by RM on the next version of Kaleidos (v3). Whilst it was a Flash based presentation, I have to say that the feature set planned is awesome! Unfortunately, when we tried to log in to it to see for ourselves the whole internet service was deadly slow and so we didn’t really manage to get to see/do what we wanted. Partly down to RM? We don’t know.

However, Horbury are a long way down the road to implementing a learning platform and they are looking at using Moodle alongside a number of different pieces of software. The RM solution is still being trialled and tested, however, adn it should be interesting to see how this school develops. We were impressed with the determination and general understanding of the power of online learning from every teacher we met. The school certainly seems right on the cutting edge, and it would be brilliant to continue to support them.

Cleveratom Website

Hal

It’s been a while since we created the first Cleveratom website, and it has never been anything except a holding page linking out to our respective blogs and places we normally write to. However, that’s all set to change.

Over the next few days we are going to experiment with linking WordPress blogs together using RSS feeds to see if we can populate a central site from all of the sites currently being posted to by us. If it works, the Cleveratom site will have an instant makeover. If it doesn’t, we’ll try again with a different system. Current Favourites are the better CMS systems, and one I’ve not seen much of before is TypoLite… already installed, I’m finding out what it will do for us.

Mobile phones on trains

Hal

I’ll start by saying I don’t actually mind people using a phone on a train. In fact, I’d prefer people spoke than sat in silence, even if the speaking is to an unseen recipient in a conversation. I also think there are times when a phone on a train is essential, particularly at those busy times when you need to be in touch for work reasons but have to travel to meetings by train.

I’m not worried so much about the London Underground or any other tube based train system. I kind of expect not to be able to use my phone on those. They are, for the most part, underground! I realise that in the Dartford Tunnel you can get a radio signal in your car, but in a tube train you can’t. ’nuff said.

What I really, honestly, absolutely can’t understand is why overground trains have such exceptionally poor reception for mobile phone signals. Even when the train is running through a massively open area, and phone masts are in plain view, my phone struggles to get a signal. Perhaps the train was going too fast… (err, ok, perhaps not).

So here’s my idea and this should work on any electrically powered train.

If the trains had mobile phone ‘base stations’ in each carriage, capable of handling the numbers of phones in use, and those base stations were connected to the overhead cables, surely the cables could be used to carry the data signal to a repeater station that then linked to the main cellular network? It seems as if this isn’t possible – I can’t be the first to think of it, and I’m sure some phone companies will have investigated why this isn’t possible. I’d like to know where I can read about it all and find out why it isn’t possible. If I am the first, and it turns out it *is* possible, then why the heck hasn’t it happened yet?

OK, I’ll come clean. I was on a journey from London Euston to Preston in Lancashire on Friday (yesterday). We went right through the middle of the country, via Milton Keynes, Wigan and so on. I needed to make one five minute call, but it took over an hour to complete with all of the dropped signals and nonsense I had to contend with. I was really quite agitated by it all, and I can’t be the only one to have suffered in this way.

Is anyone doing any research into this, or a feasibility study? I’d love to be involved.