I went to the Opera yesterday. I saw Verdi's "Un Ballo in Maschera" which was the opening night of the new season of Spain's Madrid Opera in the Theatro Real. And all at my local cinema in Croydon!

In all sorts of ways this is a very exciting development. Musically the evening was really exciting: It is one of Verdi's great operas, all the singers were excellent, the orchestra was brilliant and the production (from London's Royal Opera House) was a real spectacle.

Technically it was very impressive: this was a LIVE performance. Not a DVD being projected: there were over 80 cinemas across Europe all taking this live performance from Madrid as a High Definition/Surround Sound (Dolby 5.1. for those who are interested!) video stream.

I also think that there is great potential for schools to take part in this: while ticket prices were higher than usual for a film they were a fraction of the typical opera ticket and you saw the singers in close up (there were seven cameras used so you were given different angles not just a "front-on" view). So, all you music teachers out there take a look at these two websites to find out where and when the rest of the season will be playing and go to an opera coming to a cinema near you soon.

Here is a list of ROH season's performances and the whole season, a list of participating cinemas and lots of details about the technology are given on the Arts Alliance Media website.

Welcome back to the new school year. The LHC started yesterday and despite some of the scare stories we are all still here!

This is a really fantastic story to start the year with. If you want to read more about the LHC - what it stands for, what it is trying to do and why it is so important then take a look at the New Scientist's Special Report. There is a video and the first image produced by the collider as well as links to some absolutely stunning Virtual reality photographs - there are three images 1,2, and 3.

As usual the BBC also has some very good coverage as well. There is a news special which includes a report on computing at CERN. Did you know that the inventor of the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee) worked at CERN and that it was developed originally to help scientists share their work?

And, of course, there was the Torchwood play.

Great news for Elgg the platform on which LL4Schools is based - they have been recognised as best open source social networking platform. Here's what they say on the Elgg site

We're pleased to announce that Elgg has been featured as the best open source social networking platform in InfoWorld's 2008 Best Of Open Source Awards. Elgg joins WordPress, which won for best blogging platform, Firefox, which won for best web browser, and MySQL, which was featured as the best database system.

From the article:

While Elgg lets corporations, governments, and schools quickly establish blogs, the system's collaborative features encourage building communities of users with shared interests. Other Elgg fine points include podcast support, file repositories, user profiles, an RSS aggregator, and branding features. Significantly, the software integrates with other IT systems and provides OpenID authentication.

More...

Russell introduced the Conference and got us off to a storming start with some though provoking videos, cool technology and provocative rhetoric! All the links are online so if you missed anything just go to his site. The best hardware (cost?) must be the complete internet radio station - and the insight into just how "live" much live radio is...

Thought provoking - can it be that only the UK and France filter the internet in Europe? The Ofcom report - good report but boring video!

Simon Finch followed Russell (not and easy job!) and talked about embedding VLEs. Now may not sound particularly interesting but Simon did and good job of showing where we are rather than the blue skies of Russell's - this is where we want to be.

The depressing thing about Simon's talk was that he admits to spending far too much time showing teachers the fundamental skills like "right-clicking"! A real indictment of in service training....

The first computer ever - Manchester University's "Baby" is sixty year old - the forerunner of the computer you are now sitting at! As part of the 60th Anniversary celebrations the BBC has released what they believe to be to oldest computer music recorded in 1951 on a visit by the BBC to the University.

A scratchy recording of Baa Baa Black Sheep and a truncated version of In the Mood are thought to be the oldest known recordings of computer generated music.

These songs were played on a Ferranti Mark 1 computer which was commercial version of Baby.

There is a link to the music in the article and a video from a 1948 BBC TV report on the "birth" of Baby. Remember that while you are listening to your iPod, listening to internet radio, or using QueBase that it all started with a computer in Manchester where the answer was displayed on a small, green screen!

I was near the Tate Modern in London a couple of weeks ago and took these photos of the huge Street Art pictures on the side of the Gallery. Is it art? What do you think?

The new iPhone from Apple has arrived! If you like cool technology then you have to admit that this is a really neat device - and the price has come down. And it is available on O2's business accounts now as well - I've just registered my interest for one!

I spotted two stories on the BBC earlier this month. Having just move my own mail server I was particularly struck (after hours of struggle trying to stem the flow!) in Spam reaches 30-year anniversary. Apparently the first email message which can be considered as spam was send on 3rd May 1978 to 400 people. Thirty years on anyone who runs a mail server is swamped in the stuff - there are billions of spam messages sent every day - and has to put in place a whole gamut of strategies and software to stem the tide. The FBI suggests that 75% of net scams (attempts to defraud internet users) snare people via junk e-mail.

Statistics also suggest that 80-85% of all e-mail is spam with some 100 billion messages sent every day.

This quote is worth reading:

"Spam is a burden on all of us," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "What's worse is that a lot of spam is deliberately malicious today, aiming to steal your bank account information or install malware."

So do not open any mail you suspect of being a spam and explore the anti-spam/junk mail facilities of your e-mail client.

The second story is much more positive. It is about various projects at the Xerox Palo Alto research centre - Xerox plans the future of today. One of the more unusual is a project to develop re-usable paper for computer printers. The reason for this is that they estimate that over 40% if printed documents are used only once - printing out an e-mail for example. Xerox's paper will revert to being blank after 24 hours ready to be reused up to 100 times.

Now, where did I put that plot outline for my spy novel....

Today's Guardian (the Link Section) carries an article about LL4Schools in the context of e-safety and the Byron review by Julie Nightingale. I think the section about LL4S is positive and fair: I agree it lacks the popularity of Bebo, et al, and I do not expect it ever to be as popular with pupils as these sites but that is not really the point. The plain fact is that Bebo, MySpace, etc. are just not suitable form using the classroom as teaching tools. it is too easy to reach inappropriate material and not all pupils will have accounts on one system.

What LL4Schools provides is a place for schools to use, to enrol as many pupils as they like, knowing that all others users can be traced and are who they say they are. Then, within this trusted environment, both teacher and pupil can work together and collaborate with others: and use the power of web2.0 to facilitate learning.

Facebook has another security issue with user's personal details. Coming after their well publicized problem with the default privacy settings (see this blog entry) the BBC have uncovered another potential problem with the application feature. Their report gives more details but the problem appears, to me at least, to be a fundamental one to the way the API (Application Programming Interface) that Facebook works.

The API allows programmers to use to write applications (games, quizzes, etc.) to work within Facebook: the problem is that this API also allows the application access to the users' profile data - and that of their friends. So you don't even need to have installed the rogue application yourself to be a victim: just be a friend of someone who has.

Is this just another example of naivity on the part of enthusiastic programmers or a more fundamental problem with the way many social network sites (and I am sure Facebook is not unique in this) view their users personal data?

If you have a Facebook account then make sure you really know what any applications you add are doing? Do you trust them? Who wrote it? Do you really need it? If you don't know or trust the source of the application the don't install it! This is really the same advice that I'd give about any software whether installed in your facebook area or on your own computer: at least with software you install locally there are anti-virus programs to give at least some protection. But, as far as I know, there is no way to test whether these facebook apps are OK or Malware.