I’ve just installed a captcha. I was getting more than a little irritated by the large volume of spam I was getting, and I’ve finally given in. Akismet was one possibility, and while that won’t put anyone off commenting because it’s transparent to the commenter, it costs money. A captcha is free, but might put some people off – on the other hand, since 100% of all comments on this site have been spam so far, there isn’t really much to lose.
What else? Well, I’ve decided that by the time of the first anniversary of this site (which will be in April), I’ll make a serious attempt to publish it. That means making some videos to illustrate the demos. This might work (to my astonishment, one little YouTube video I did a couple of years ago has had 5000 hits, and I only put that up to show my nephew how to solve a puzzle). I also aim to put the first few chapters of the book up, register the demos on some OER (open educational resource) indexing sites like Jorum and OER Commons, and investigate Wikieducator.
One issue I’ll have to sort out is the licensing… currently the demos have a rather odd licensing agreement, due to the fact that they are live web applications, rather than anything you can download. So it doesn’t really make sense to release them under any of the usual licensing agreements, there’s nothing really to release. I’ll have to investigate this one a bit more.
What else is new? Well, I’m just finishing off a demo about the token bucket algorithm for a module I’m teaching on Internet Protocols, and I’m finding that it wouldn’t be difficult to expand this to cover a range of other QoS routeing and queueing issues as well, so I might keep adding things to this for a week or so before releasing it. After that, one on multicast routeing would be useful as well, but I doubt I’ll get time to finish that one before I have to give the lectures this year.