Work

I just tried to navigate around in my Time Machine backup, only to find that it was woefully out of date. I'd set it to automatically back everything up, and had assumed that it would, you know, automatically back things up.

It hadn't been doing it.

Since December 5, 2007.

Over a month ago.

And I'd assumed that I had a reliable hourly/daily/weekly/monthly backup.

I just got my signed travel request approval to cover my pilgrimage to Lotusland for NothernVoice 2008. I mean, I was already planning on going, even if I had to stick the trip on my Visa card, but it's nice to know I can go with blessings :-) The moose is loose!

As I've said a few times, this is my one must-attend event. If this is all I get to do in 2008, the year would still be a success. The biggest draw for me is being able to hang out with a bunch of people whom I both respect and admire, and let myself get pulled out of my normal comfort zone to kick out the jams for what isn't a purely educational, nor a purely technology conference. I've blogged before about why I'm looking forward to NV08, and why previous NorthernVoice conferences have been so meaningful for me.

I worked with our Faculty of Education to build a community blogging website for use by after-degree student teachers as part of their personal/professional development, reflection, and collaboration process, as well as to collect materials for use in ePortfolios. They had a set of pretty simple constraints. Because the student teachers would be writing about activities in the K-12 classroom, and likely would be posting media (photos, videos, etc...) they needed to restrict access to the site - there could be no public access to this content. Additionally, they needed to control with a fairly fine granularity which individuals within the community would be able to see specific pieces of content. Because of these constraints, we couldn't just load up WPMU and set them free, nor could we just point them to WordPress.com or Blogger.com. What to do...

Northern Voice 2008 is now on the calendar - February 22-23, 2008 in Vancouver, at the UBC Main Campus at the palatial Forestry Sciences Building. This is the 4th annual event, and I've had the extreme pleasure to have attended each of the previous 3 years. It is my one must attend event for the year - if the only conference travel I get approved is for NV08, I'll consider the year a success. I just filled in the official "Travel Approval Request" form, and should know if the U of C will sponsor my way in the next couple of weeks. If they pass, I'll find another way. I'm going.

I've been using the WP-Cache 2 plugin for some time, as it offers pretty effective file-based caching of WordPress pages to help reduce the load on the database server and reduce page generation time. But the plugin has kind of languished without any real updates for months(?) or years(?).

Donncha O Caoimh, the WordPress guru who's name I'll never be able to pronounce, released an updated and refined caching plugin called WP-Super-Cache, based on the great start offered by WP-Cache 2.

Today is a memorable day. It's the day that CAREO, the learning object repository we built at The University of Calgary, is being officially decommissioned. Unplugged, mothballed, and put into storage. It's been a wild rollercoaster ride for these 6 years, but that ship has sailed. Back in 2001, when CAREO was first created, there was a need for a concrete prototype of a repository. Other available software didn't quite do what we had in mind, and it was relatively easy to just go ahead and build some software to test out some ideas.

Others will write more profound and deeper posts describing what's so freaking cool about MacOSX 10.5 Leopard. This post is just my initial gut reactions. Want more meat? Surf over to arstechnica.com.

I've played with seeds of 10.5 for what seems like years (but is really only a year?) through our Apple Developer Connection subscription. But all of my previous experience was in carefully isolated cleanroom installations, to prevent any bugs from nuking my production system. I'd never tried an upgrade install. I'd never run it for more than a day or two tops because bugs and instability sent me running back to 10.4. So, this is my first real time in Leopard, without an alternate or backup system running a previous version Just In Caseâ„¢.

I just poked through Rory's A Typology of Learning Object Repositories article, starting with the tables, and found a few errors relating to his description of CAREO. Here are the corrections (I don't have Rory's email handy, and there aren't comments on the DSpace page for the article):

• CAREO supports hosting content as well as linking to other servers. That was one of the primary goals of the project - to allow people to easily post content without having to know FTP. I don't have the stats on this, but about half of the items in CAREO were uploaded to the CAREO server via the "add object" form.
• For "maintaining" an object - CAREO lets the owner of the object edit the metadata, including replacing the media with an updated version.
• CAREO does allow retrieval of metadata - there's a "metadata" button on every object - which shows up once you are logged in.
• CAREO requires an account to submit objects, but anyone can create an account.
• The metadata schema used was IMS LOM (and later IEEE LOM).

But, it's all a bit moot, as institutional and provincial support for the CAREO repository evaporated long ago, and the application itself is on its last legs. It's no longer supported, is barely functioning at the moment, and will be decommissioned at the end of the month.

We use the Events module to manage workshops here in the Teaching & Learning Centre, and use the “Upcoming Events” block to display the next few workshops on our website. Works great, but the default text leaves a bit to be desired. By default, it shows the event title, and “(2 days)” - which indicates that the event begins in 2 days.

But, it could also mean that the event lasts for 2 days.

It's still not officially released, and I'm still in the early stages of putting together a funding proposal to turn it into a supported service, but if you're willing to live life on the edge and risk a little beta goodness, UCalgaryBlogs.ca is kinda on the air.

All you need is a valid @ucalgary.ca email address, and you're off and running. You can create as many blogs as you like, and can select from a bajillion available themes.

Part of the functionality of the Pachyderm authoring application is the dynamic and on-the-fly resizing of images to whatever dimensions are required by the flash templates that are used to display a screen in a presentation.

I wrote the first version of the image resizing code using Java Advanced Imaging (JAI), and it worked quite well. But, during the authoring of the Mavericks prototype, it became apparent that the quality of the resized images wasn’t quite up to snuff. I tried setting JAI to use bicubic interpolation (InterpolationBicubic and InterpolationBicubic2) instead of the default nearest-neighbour (InterpolationNearest) method. Still produced inconsistent results.

The XPlanaZine article by Susan Smith Nash appears to have kindled some thoughtful commentary on the blogosphere (on a Saturday, no less). I agree completely with her reservations (as well as those of Darren Cannell). Reusability is pretty much a fallacy, especially when attempted with highly complex "learning objects" like websites, powerpoints, etc...

Real reusability becomes more difficult (and less useful) as a resource becomes tailored for any specific context (by adding complexity via structure and content). This is David Wiley's "reusability paradox", and there's no easy way to get around it.