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.
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.
