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.
UCalgary Widget
But, this widget isn’t a Widget. It’s a Windows .exe application. Leaving us MacOSX users out in the dark.
It’s taking some time to get the Podcasting program off the ground here at UCalgary. In the meantime, here’s a preview of our beta distribution system.
UCalgary Podcast Distribution (beta)
I’ve heard rumours that we’re working on a more scalable system, and I’m looking forward to that. The dubbing facility is just about maxed out at the moment…
There has been much talk and hype about Peak Oil - the fact that the global production of petroleum is about to reach its maximum level, after which it will start to decline until it eventually becomes a scarce resource and we all have to scavenge in landfills for decades-old plastic to recycle.
I’m pretty hooked on the new games for the iPod. I’ve already bought 4 of them, and am trying to hold back from buying the rest. (I know - I should have bought the bundle, but I didn’t think I’d want them all…)
They’re really great implementations, most are likely better than their desktop counterparts due to being better suited to a circular controller. I’m addicted to Zuma. Like a junkie.
I’ve been following the TED Talks videos as they’re published - recordings of the various presentations at the 2006 TED Conference/Symposium. There are some absolutely amazing presentations, ranging from Al Gore, to Nicholas Negroponte, to Mena Trott (and many others).
TED Talks in iTunes
The video production and publication is sponsored by BMW, who are hoping to be associated with the innovation and Deep Thinking presented at TED, and I think it’s a great example of how online advertising can work.
I was asked to share my Edublogs reading list, which is published automatically by my copy of BlogBridge, in the BlogBridge Topic Guides website. It’s basically a web front end for the .opml file generated by BlogBridge, but it might be a handy way to share the list.
So, now I’m a “BlogBridge Topic Expert” - I’m rather uncomfortable with the term “expert” but it’s their word, not mine. The new Edublogs Reading List is online, and (I think) should stay synced with my list in BlogBridge, so maintenance won’t be a problem.
I must have blinked when this was announced, but OpenAcademic.org sounds like a perfect scenario. Development efforts to integrate some of the biggest open source tools used in online education. It sounds like the goal is to come up with a way for Drupal, Elgg, Mediawiki and Moodle to all play nicely together, in such a way as to be easily deployable and maintainable by even the smallest school. Rather than attempting to build The One True LMS, they’re taking the approach of playing to the strengths of the available tools, and putting the effort into integration.
Ronald Moore and his crew have been consistently doing amazing, high quality work. They’ve “gotten it” in a whole bunch of ways, from podcasting show commentaries as episodes air, to blogging, to video blogging behind-the-scenes stuff. I’m so totally, perhaps unhealthily, hooked on this show.
But they totally dropped the ball on the Season 3 webisodes. There are 10 mini-episodes leading up to the season 3 premier, viewable on the scifi.com website.
I’m doing a couple of projects that involve writing some custom code and deploying it on Other People’s Servers. The code works great locally and on my server. I can run through the entire thing, and it works great.
Then, I move it to Client’s Colocated Server That Is Managed By A Third Party. It’s completely locked down. Like I can’t even use which to find commands in bash. Like I had to grovel for MySQL command line access (and was eventually granted mysql - but notmysqladmin access). Want a text editor? Yeah… We haven’t enabled your account to see any of those. Want to run your custom code? Yeah… It’ll fail for some unknown reason. Access to the error log so you can debug it? Nah…
