T320 Ebusiness Technologies Blog

Some useful XML links for Block 2

Here are some useful links for Block 2, mostly about XML, XML Schema, XSLT etc, including a free book to download.
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TMA grade: not so bad

I think I must have been very lucky to have found the TMA 1 Hints and Tips just as I got to the point of having to cut down my word count by half. Despite the worrying tutorial, I got a better grade than I usually do. But I seem to be in the minority!

Judging by the uproar on the T320 forums, many people got a much worse grade than they normally would and, as some pointed out, at this stage (a level 3 course) that could have a direct effect on people’s final degree grades.

Luckily, as it’s a new course in its first year of presentation the course team seem to be taking on board that they will need to make some kind of adjustments, and it sounds as if grades for TMA 1 will be adjusted as the question was ambiguous and the word limit was very short (1500).

Videos: Amazon, Web 2.0 and Service Oriented Architectures

Hooray! I’ve found out how to embed Google and YouTube videos in my WordPress blog (very web 2.0 I know) by using a WordPress plugin called Easytube, so here are some of the videos referenced in the course material:
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First tutorial…

Well, my wish did partly come true: it turned out there was a problem with the OU’s ‘Tutorial Finder’ and I did have a tutorial after all. My tutor emailed us and posted the details in the course forum.
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Trying out some Last.fm widgets

I’ve carried on experimenting with Last.fm and now that I’ve listened to more of the music and added some songs to my playlist I thought I’d try out some of the widgets: it’s Web Services in action folks!

So I’ve figured out how to get the playlist widget and ‘Top Albums Musical Quilt’ for embedding in WordPress (here they are – not sure if the red goes with the blog theme or not!). I haven’t listened to enough to get my personal charts yet, and I was disappointed that you have to pay a subscription to get your own personal radio station, but maybe I’ll do that to cheer myself up if I don’t get the couple of days of extra work I’ve been interviewing for.