All sorts of people connected with The Open University are blogging about their interests, experiences and knowledge they want to share with you. These people include not just academics but also librarians, tutors, techies and project managers all putting information out there and discussing ideas, it's a side of the OU that you might not have thought about, one that isn't immediately visible when you deal with the OU, or even work in the place, but it is quite an interesting side.

When you have an idea, it is natural to want to write it down, plan it, structure it, work though its aspects to produce something solid. At one time this was difficult, people had to make do with whatever was at hand, an example is the Mini which was initially planned with a drawing on a cigaratte packet! Fortunately mind mapping software came along that allows you to plan and structure your ideas.

If you have recently been studying a course on OpenLearn you might have noticed the link to "Knowledge Maps" at the top left. This takes you to a page with resources for a special version of the Compendium software adapted for OpenLearn. The Compendium-OpenLearn software is explained more fully at http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?name=KM.

As with previous blog posts on the subject of virtualisation, I used VirtualBox to run an image of Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition(tm) on Kubuntu 7.10. You will need a fairly powerful machine with a lot of free hard disk space and free RAM. I set aside 15GB of hard disk space for the image and 1GB of RAM to be dedicated to the virtual machine.

Students and staff of The Open University may be far flung sometimes, but thanks to Web 2.0 new opportunities are arising all the time for them to connect. The latest of these is the chance to share musical tastes and contribute a shared playlist that can be listened to on an online radio player. Many of you may be familiar with last.fm, a service which can recommend and play music you might like based on music you have played previously.

On Monday 25th February I gave an introductory talk on Linux for the TiCREG group here at The Open University. As promised in that presentation and for those of you who could not make it here is the presentation in both OpenOffice and MS PowerPoint formats with a list of references and further reading.

Download Presentation in OpenOffice/ODP Format

You have probably already heard of the One Laptop Per Child Project, which aims to equip children in developing nations with low cost laptops to aid their education. The XO-1 is the first machine to be made by this project, and is very innovative in both hardware and software design. Getting your hands on one of these machines is quite difficult, especially if you don't live in North America, but what you can do is get hold of an image of the machine's operating system and run it inside a virtual machine.

Do you like the new design for this website? I had been meaning to do a custom Drupal theme for quite some time, the old theme I had been using 'Sky' looked pretty good but carried with it a couple of problems. Firstly, it was a fixed-width theme. Fixed-width websites are one of my pet hates, and laden with problems, they don't get the most out of the available screen area, often leaving large empty spaces or disappearing off the screen. Secondly, you could either have a left or a right sidebar; I wanted both! Plus it is always nice to have a unique design.

Something that has become vastly annoying recently about Facebook is the sheer number of invites to add applications to a profile. The invites mechanism used to be a handy way to let your friends know about an application they might like, but unfortunately some application developers decided to abuse this process and force you to invite friends before you could use it. Eventually this lead to a situation where you could log in to your account and find a large number of invites waiting for you, many of them generated by badly behaved applications.