The Mavericks online exhibit prototype was tested in a Calgary school on March 10th. It was the first formal evaluation of any content produced using Pachyderm 2.0, and the evaluation report was provided at today's Mavericks steering committee meeting.

I was braced for negative feedback - a natural reaction when a new piece of software is being tested in the field - and was pleasantly surprised by the feedback we received. I can't provide the full report (I didn't write it, and I'm not sure all info is available for publishing), but the abridged version is roughly:

I'm wondering if there might be a way to visualize the buddylist relationships in a Drupal site. It would seem as though when a user adds a buddy to their list, that they are defining a working relationship between themself and the other person. This is likely more useful than an org. chart, as it's a real-world, practical, and explicit representation of a link between people.

So... Would it be possible to map the relationships that have been explicitly documented between users of a Drupal site? Kind of like "6 degrees of separation", but showing the actual interpersonal relationships of the community...

I was just reading the newspaper while eating lunch. I never read the newspaper. Perhaps this is why...

On page 8 of the first section, was an article titled "US warns allies over arms sales to China" (several articles in today's paper start with X Warns Y over Z). Normally not a big thing. Didn't even plan on reading the article. But, a huge photo above the article piqued my interest. It had been obviously manipulated to remove information that was part of the context of the photograph. It is a photo of some protesters, who are showing signs/placards/banners denouncing Condi's visit to Seoul.

BoingBoing.net just posted a link to gnomz - a web-based comic authoring tool. Just fill in a web form that lets you pick the backdrop, characters and enter some dialog, and it generates a comic. Sounds lame, but it could actually be a handy way to create graphic representations of narratives or dialogues.

For example, I created a quick (and lame) comic about a professor who is concerned about using a wiki.

Sorry for the delay, folks. I finally got the Education Directory for iPodder.org updated. There were several new podcasts to be added in both K-12 and Higher Ed categories. Be sure to check them out!

According to Adam, there are now 4213 podcasts in the directory (not counting the ones I just added). And I'm pretty sure there are podcasts out there that aren't in the directory. That's a pretty vocal long tail...

I keep noticing Drupal-powered websites all over the place. A month ago, I thought Drupal was some quirky, esoteric content management system. Now, I see that it's a quirky, esoteric content management system that is used by a whole lotta people. And it scales from 1 user to 150,000 users. The SpreadFirefox project added 20,000 new users to its Drupal site in one month. There's apparently a telecom somewhere with 150,000 users. It's being used on several university campuses for campus- and department-blogging initiatives. It powers the new OurMedia.org content archiving/publishing project, which will likely/hopefully have about 3 bajillion users after it takes off.

Well, it's officially in alpha anyway. I just created an account on OurMedia.org - a joint venture between Marc Canter's folks and Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive group.

Marc was pimping the project back at Northern Voice - but it was undergoing last minute tweaks so wasn't officially released then.

It offers free hosting for content (audio, video, images, etc...) for eternity, as part of the Internet Archive project. Very cool.

The OurMedia.org website is a Drupal site (put together by Bryght, it looks like) - it's quite nice. I may have to will borrow some ideas from it for weblogs.ucalgary.ca.

I've been using maps.google.com since it was first released. Absolutely love it.

But... Wouldn't it be even cooler if you could toggle between street map view and satellite image view? Or, perhaps overlay the street maps on top of the satellite images?

If only Google had access to a catalog of satellite images like Keyhole. Oh, wait! Look at the bottom right corner of the Keyhole home page... "Powered by Google"

Here's hoping the Keyhole team is talking to the Maps team...

Inspired by the stuff I saw in DrupalEd, I installed the "Buddly List" and "FOAF" modules for Drupal on weblogs.ucalgary.ca.

Buddy List (buddylist.module) gives an instant-messenger-like buddy list, where you can identify users in that Drupal server as "buddies" - friends or acquaintances. It then provides you with a list of your buddies, and a page with recent blog posts from all of your buddies. It also provides an RSS feed of your buddies' blog posts, so you can just subscribe to the users you care to listen to, rather than subscribing to the whole site, or subscribing to a bunch of individual RSS feeds (one per buddy). Very cool. This was the biggest draw for Elgg in my mind, and it's now mostly available in Drupal. You can't currently define the type relationship with a buddy (co-worker, classmate, friend, instructor, etc...) but it's a start.

This has been demoed publicly before, so shouldn't be a big NDA risk. I just held a 4-way video conference using iChat on Tiger. It was pretty darned slick, and I think was only limited by bandwidth.

Note the cool reflections on the "desktop", and the viewing angles of the participants. Seems much more natural than just tiling a bunch of video views into a window... And you can add people to an open video conference just by dragging them from your buddy list into the video window. Slick.

I'm a big fan of the concept of "code smells" - the notion that you can subconsciously evaluate the elegance/correctness of a code by how it "smells" to you. Similar to "beauty" in mathematics or physics, I suppose.

Sean Corfield, at An Architect's View, just posted an overview of Josh Kerievsky's session at SD West.

For example, when touring the Pachyderm codebase, you can tell who wrote it by the smell. King's code smells like a tropical beach. Clean. Breezy. A place you want to spend the day hanging out.

Who knew? Microsoft doesn't like the iTunes Music Store... Their logic is a bit bizarre, though, and kinda reflects the whole user experience with Windows. See if you can spot it: