I just checked the schedule, and I'm going to be part of a panel discussion titled "Social Software for Learning Environments". The other panelists are Chris Lott, Sylvia Currie and Jon Beasley-Murray, with moderation by Brian Lamb.

It should be a blast. I've been following Chris and Jon's (and of course Brian's) blogs for a long time now (I'm sorry Sylvia - I don't think I've seen your blog yet, although I've seen your tracks on many of the blogs I read). I'm not completely sure what I'll talk about for my portion of the panel presentation, but I'll likely share some experiences from weblogs.ucalgary.ca, our incredible success with the student teacher blogging/journal program, and the shared social software hosting environment I'm working on with BCIT for BCCampus.

Just downloaded the latest build of Flock. It sure does feel faster than it used to. It's feeling faster than Firefox, even. Not sure if that's possible, or just an illusion. Whatever.

Let's see if it handles Categories while posting to Drupal any better than it used to...

Nope. It still provides an unsorted list of my hundreds of categories. Not even a text field with autocompletion. Close. So close... Manually categorizing post from within Drupal's interface (which has a nice text field with autocompletion)

The Sulphur Mountain Gondola in Banff runs a great hi-def webcam. I've been syphoning images from it via a cron job every 5 minutes in order to make a time lapse movie. I'd originally intended on just doing a week or two. Then, I forgot about it, and the automated cron job continued quietly curling images onto my hard drive for 6 weeks. Just shy of 1GB of jpeg images.

Lawrie switched from a Canon SLR to Panasonic DSLR body over Christmas, and was looking to sell off his old Canon EF lenses. I picked up his Canon 75-300mm f4-5.6 USM Mark II for a good price.

It's not the best lens ever made, and the optics aren't much (any?) better than the kit lens, but it sure is long. I wanted something with a good reach, and this sucker has that in spades. At 300mm, the visible area is about 6? across (if I hold my arm out in front of me, with my hand up and fingers together, it's about 3 fingers across).

It's not all sunshine and beaches...

The Teaching & Learning Centre picked up a new Canon Digital Rebel XTi and 28-135mm USM IS lens, primarily to better photograph events and workshops. I took a quick walk around this side of campus to try it out. Man, do I love the new lens. The XTi is a pretty nice upgrade, too. I'm still really happy with my (now obsolete) XT, but the XTi is nice. The LCD feels HUGE. The 9-point focus is good (although I have my XT set to center focus only, so the extra 8 points would be wasted).

After realizing that the sympal_scripts were silently failing to properly call cron.php on sites served from subdirectories on a shared Drupal multisite instance, I rolled up my sleeves to build a script that actually worked. What I've come up with works, but is likely not the cleanest or most efficient way of doing things. But it works. Which is better than the solution I had earlier today.

I also took the chance to get more familiar with Ruby. I could have come up with a shell script solution, but I wanted the flexibility to more easily extend the script as needed. And I wanted the chance to play with Ruby in a non-Hello-World scenario.

I've been setting up a shared Drupal hosting environment on an Ubuntu Server box, and just about everything is running great. Drupal's running, MysQL is running, and everything feels nice and fast.

But, the server can't see itself on the network. It can't even ping itself (via 127.0.0.1, localhost, or either of the domains pointing to the box). It can ping other boxes, though. It can't curl or wget or lynx any of the sites on itself. It can't telnet to its own services (which makes setting up mail services etc... a bit tricky).

I had a long post written up about the execution of Saddam Hussein. I decided at the last minute to not click the "Submit" button. But, my friend Niran wrote up an eloquent post that says it much more clearly.

One thing I'd add is this: I'm truly curious about the proportion of the American population that think Saddam was executed as part of the War on Terror™, or to grant democracy in Iraq. His execution had nothing to do with either (no WMDs have ever been found, and execution by a foreign power - even through a fledgling local puppet government - is no way to instill democracy).

I'm running a couple of servers full of Drupal sites hosted in a multisite configuration (one copy of Drupal used to host dozens of sites, each with their own sites/sitename directory. I'd been using sympal_scripts to automatically run Drupal's cron.php script for each site in order to keep search indexes up to date and run other routine maintenance functions as expected. It's easy enough to drop a curl http://server/site/curl.php into a crontab, but as you start adding sites to the server, it becomes unwieldy to maintain a current crontab of sites to cron.

Just got a funny automated email from Skype, reminding me to use up my Skype credits before they expire. But I've used up my credits long, long ago...

Hi there dlnorman ,

It appears that you haven't used any of your Skype Credit for a while now.
Skype expires inactive credit balances and you have 30 days left to take
action to keep your credit.

Your account details:

Skype Name: dlnorman
Balance: CAD 0.00
Expiry date: 2007-01-29 00:00:00+01

I'll be sure I use that credit up. Maybe I'll call nobody, for zero minutes. That should just about do it. Phew!

This was 2006, at a glance. I picked one photo from each month, with a bonus one for December (there were 13 slots...)