The U of C's connection to the commercial internet has been packet shaped for years. Back in the Napster days, they added something that makes any file ending in ".mp3" be transferred at about 2 bytes per second. The shaping filters have slowly been added to, winding up with something that basically says "is this file some form of media? then it's going to be slow..."

The latest case in point - I just tried to watch Stephen Downes' video commentary on his Group/Network whiteboard braindump. After about 25 minutes of downloading, I've managed to view the first 35 seconds of the video.

I've been trying to find an answer to this, but haven't found anything definitive either way. Occasionally, I want to bring my Canon XT DSLR along when riding my bike. I might want to photograph something on campus at work, or along the path.

So, the question is - is it safe to pack the XT inside a compact LowePro case, and stuff that in a pannier? It seems pretty secure, but I wonder about vibrations from the ride (about half an hour, ranging from 20-60 km/h, depending on weather, traffic, blood sugar...)

Larry Sanger announced his organization's intention to create a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia, with a different community/moderation model. Instead of just letting everyone create and edit pages, there will be a new class of citizens called "experts" who get final say. The rest of us are demoted to "unwashed masses".

From Larry Sanger's essay "Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge":

According to one source, there are over one billion (a thousand million) people on the Internet. That means there must be tens of millions of intellectuals online--I mean educated, thinking people who read about science or ideas regularly. Tens of millions of intellectuals can work together, if they so choose.

My brother has a house in Phuket, Thailand, so I've been trying to follow news on this week's coup to see what's going on. I had no idea there was an ongoing corruption scandal of that magnitude. It seems unclear whether this coup was a good or bad thing. Some people say it's bad because it's "against democracy" - others say it's good because it gives a chance to reboot a democracy after cleaning out the garbage first.

I passed the 1000 km mark half way into my ride home today. Since I started riding in July, I've now ridden over 1000 km just commuting to and from work, broken into 80 equal 12.54 km trips. That's roughly equivalent to riding from Calgary to Vancouver, even when accounting for vertical climb (92m per ride). I'm feeling better than I have in years, and am probably in the best physical shape I've been in since high school (although you couldn't tell by looking).

I've been using TextMate for about a week now, and while it's almost universally an incredible piece of magical software, I have been keeping a list of things that could use tweaking (you know, to make it even magicaller).

• Arrange Windows. BBEdit's got a great way to tile open windows. It's very handy to compare multiple open documents. Would be very handy in TextMate. Something like "tile all open windows in evenly spaced columns" or "tile them all in equal-sized windows arranged nicely across that 20 inch cinema display"
• Split window view. Terminal has it. XCode has it. BBEdit has it. Makes it really easy to work on 2 different parts of the same document.
• Reindent code. Like Tidy does for HTML. But for other code. JEdit has a pretty good one. XCode's got a really good one. It makes it very easy to keep source code looking clean and tidy. Bonus points for optionally adding documentation stubs for languages that use that sort of thing (javadoc tags, etc...) It looks like I could mess around with the Bundle Editor for various languages, but having this as stock behaviour would be a better way to share with the rest of the class.
• HTML and CSS reformatting - flat, compact, hierarchical. It's surprising how handy that is. Sometimes having the Official Tidy Cleanup Version isn't what you need.
• Tear-off bundle palettes. The "Select Bundle Item" menu/palette is close, but not task-specific. It's not as handy having to constantly search for a function. I'd like to just tear off the HTML, or CSS, or maybe both.
• Search all open files - if I've got a bunch of files open, from various locations (and perhaps on different servers) - they won't be in the same Project, so I can't use Find in Project.

Thanks to Scott for linking to this in his del.icious.net linkstream. It's a nearly-year-old article about implementing a "learning object repository" using the Small Pieces philosophy. For me, the takeaway message was a reinforcement of something I've been seeing a lot of lately.

My feeling is that the Capital R "Object" Repositories beloved of systems designers of the old fashioned IMS school are rapidly losing currency in higher education, but - bizarrely - gaining credibility among decision-makers in the schools sector.

TextMade is my current favorite text editor. But, while editing some files on our main Drupal server, I noticed it was leaving some ghost files around. The filenames were all prefixed with "._" so they didn't show up in the Finder, or in normal ls -l lists. From the text that was displayed in Drupal, it looks like it was storing things like cursor position and text selection in a file that was edited by TextMate.

I seem to be the only person on the planet not getting into the whole Talk Like a Pirate thing. I've got a problem glorifying piracy. The world has enough pirates right now.

I know I'm overreacting, and being overly sensitive about this. But, what's next? Talk like a rapist day? Talk like a murderer? Kidnapper? I mean, those are all pirate-related activities. How about Talk Like a Decent Human Being Day? I'd be up for that one...

I've been using BBEdit for what feels like a decade - it was the late '90s, anyway.

I just switched to TextMate. It's an amazing little editor, that feels like it's taken the best parts of XCode, BBEdit, JEdit, and many others, and mashed them all into one slick and powerful little app.

Here's probably the coolest feature (well, the coolest feature that I've discovered today, anyway). The HTML bundle has a "Validate Syntax (W3C)" action, which sends the contents of the document (or selection) to the W3C HTML syntax validator. The resulting page is then modified by TextMate, such that clicking the error/warning links in the report take you to the correct line in your source document. When I tried that the first time, I was stunned. But, of COURSE that's how it SHOULD work. Very cool.

The eMate 300 I ordered on eBay finally arrived this afternoon - the mailperson decided to leave the package on my front step in the rain/snow.

I fired it up, and aside from the battery being dead (it's only a decade old), it works great! The previous owner left it in Classroom Mode so I had to perform the über-hard reset (hold down the power key, tap the reset button on the bottom, and keep holding until the reset prompts come on screen). That got it back to factory condition - but I lost the installed copy of Works, and there were no install CDs provided. Doh. Off to unna.org...

There are posters and stickers all over campus right now, pointing people to the new UNow.ca site. The goal is to provide easy ways for people to keep up to date on news and events on campus. There's even a downloadable widget available.

But, this widget isn't a Widget. It's a Windows .exe application. Leaving us MacOSX users out in the dark.