Blog Posts

Flickr Faves 2007/01/10

CAREO: Resurrection

One of the tasks that’s been on my desk for awhile has been giving some love to CAREO. It sorta stopped working a few months ago, and nobody really cared enough for it to be a High Priority Urgent Fix. The hard drive started to corrupt, and services went from spotty to unavailable. And stayed that way.

Actually, I think it’s a pretty impressive statement about Institutional Repositories that something that was once trumpeted as The Next Big Thing can be out of action for 9 months without many people even noticing. Relevance of top-down, centrally ordained institutional Repositories?

How about an ePhone?

Wow. iPhone. Must have one. It’s like Newton 2007. I wonder if Inkwell works with it…

Now, if it is possible to write apps for it (or even just web apps might do) this might be an awesome platform for education. A community outboard brain in every pocket. I imagine it’ll only be a matter of time before there are Bluetooth laboratory instruments - pH meters, thermometers, GPS, photometers, voltmeters, etc… Your own personal laboratory instrument manager and data tracker. Tied to your blog, Flickr, wikipedia, del.icio.us, etc..

Education Sessions at Northern Voice

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.

Testing Flock (again)

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)

A Month and a Half in Banff (via timelapse)

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.

Canon 75-300mm USM Lens

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).

Flickr Faves 2007/01/02

It’s not all sunshine and beaches…

New Camera Toys

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).

Script for running Cron on all sites in a shared Drupal instance

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.

Ubuntu Server Not Seeing Localhost?

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).

Death of a Dictator

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).