My blog has been receiving spam in what looks to be a new wave of spam attacks. First, the spammers seed the whitelist by posting apparently innocuous comments with no URLs, or with a URL that doesn't contain spam. Then, once they're in, they wait a bit and then throw the switch. The spam starts a'comin' and it sneaks through Spam Karma 2. Very annoying.

One thing I really like about SK2 is that it is standalone - it doesn't rely on any network connection or other systems to flag stuff as spam. It just tracks IP addresses, user agents, and sniffs the content and URL for attempted comments.

EduGlu is a concept that came out of some discussions at Northern Voice 2006 - almost exactly 2 years ago - as a way to make sense of an individual's distributed content in the context of a course. The problem is on one hand very simple - a person publishes a bunch of stuff, and all they need to do is pull it into a course-based resource. On the other hand, it's really quite hard - how can software provide what appears to be a centralized service, based on the decentralized and distributed publishings of the members of a group or community, and honour the flexible and dynamic nature of the various groups and communities to which a person belongs?

I've been monkeying with a Drupal site that looks like it could fulfill most (even all?) of the mythical Eduglu concept - a website that aggregates all feeds published by students in a class/department/institution, and helps contextualize them in the various groups/cohorts/courses each student participates in. It's getting really close - it can currently suck in all kinds of feeds, auto-tagging items, and even lets students create their own groups and associate feeds with them. There are issues, to be sure, mostly with respect to honouring the original tags in the aggregated items, and with taking advantage of the social rating system added to the website, but it's so close I can taste it.

I decided to move my blog hosting back onto the North side of the border. There were a couple of reasons, but by far the largest was the ongoing poor server performance I've been having at Dreamhost. It seemed like there was nothing I could do to improve performance, or at the least reduce bottlenecks. Enough was enough, and it was time to move. CanadianWebHosting.com has some good prices - a touch more expensive than Dreamhost, and not with the insane (i.e., infinite and imaginary) limits on bandwidth and drive space. It felt like Dreamhost was overextended, at least on the server I was on. Whereas my old Dreamhost server had typical loads (as indicated by top) around 50, my CanadianWebHosting server has a more sane 0.1 average. In initial testing, dynamically generated page loads went from 20-60 seconds down to 400ms or so. I can live with that, especially with static page caching enabled so most accesses should be almost instantaneous.

If you can read this, the move she is done. I'll write more on that later, but hopefully the performance problems this site has been having for almost 2 years will be a thing of the past *touch ethernet*

I was present at a faculty collaboration project meeting today, and one of the profs was showing some of the resources they've built to support their classroom teaching. It was some impressive video work, which the prof admitted could easily have applications in other classes, or institutions, or even other disciplines. He then went on to describe the rigorous steps that he'd had to take in order to prevent that from happening - video being hosted on an internal streaming server so nobody could find it without seeing the video embedded on a course within Blackboard. He was struggling to implement the embedding as effectively as he wanted. When asked why that was necessary, why not just put the video onto YouTube or Google Video? They had actually thought of that initially - it solves the bandwidth, hosting, and embedding problems quite nicely.

So MSFT is trying to spend $45 BILLION dollars to buy Yahoo. Rumour has it that the borg want Yahoo's search and advertising stuff, which would be a little odd - I can't remember the last time I searched using Yahoo, or saw a Yahoo-powered ad. Whatever.

But, Yahoo does own two resources that I care a great deal about. del.icio.us and Flickr. It's pretty safe to say that neither of those are worth $45 BILLION, so it's likely that they aren't the direct targets of the acquisition attempt.

I've had an iPod Touch for almost a week now, and aside from driving people on Twitter nuts by exclaiming how unbelievably awesome it is, I have some thoughts on how it could be better. Nothing groundbreaking, I'm sure, as anyone who spends time with it will likely come up with a similar list. The short version is that I LOVE it. In an unhealthy way. I haven't been this impressed by a piece of technology since my first Newton MessagePad 120. And before that, my Amiga 1000. It's that much of a game changer. [ed: both of those technologies are now defunct?] My iPod Touch has quickly become a very powerful mobile email/Google Reader/Twitter/Flickr/Blog platform. I'm not sure I could give it up now.

Turns out the feed for my blog decided to bork about 4 days ago. David sent me a kind note (as he always seems to do about 5 minutes after fecal matter impacts spinning metal) but I couldn't find wtf was wrong. A few days later, and it's bugging me, and FeedBurner is choking on the fumes. I try FeedValidator.org, and it's all "hey! dude! your feed is all like 404, 'n stuff!" And I was all like "no fracking way. it's all good, man. haven't even touched that stuff in a long, long time, brah." and then FeedValidator says "whatever, dude. I'm telling you, it's gone. 404. MIA. Fix it."

MacOSX 10.5 added some bling, possibly to "catch up" with Vista. The transparent menu bar sucks. Completely. Please, someone at Apple, fix this.

I've got my desktop picture set to cycle through some of my photographs. Most of the time, it's not a big deal, but occasionally, one comes up that causes my menu bar to look like this:

Seriously.

Yes, transparency is cool. It's great to show off the power of the UI renderer, etc... But not at the sake of readability.

Walking across campus this morning, I passed a couple dozen students with laptops open, sucking the wifi network. I wasn't trying to snoop, but I noticed that well over half of them had browsers open to Facebook. It struck me that they are spending much of their time pumping content and data into a proprietary commercial venture. And they're fine with it. I'm pretty sure they're capable of understanding what it means to provide so much information about themselves - what they like, who they know, what they're doing, the music they listen to, the books they read, their vocabulary, things they're selling/buying, etc...

This post is in response to Chris' Twitter Condom post.

I've been on the fence regarding public or protected tweets on Twitter.com. I've actually toggled that switch at on at least 3 different occasions, and then reverted back to Public maybe a day later.

Public tweets are visible to the world, indexed by Google, and make it easy to nanoblog (something that can be encapsulated in 140 characters or less, which might not otherwise be blogworthy). Protected tweets are private, and are visible only to those people whom you follow on Twitter. They aren't indexed by Google, and they're essentially part of a private conversation.