Blog Posts

Red & Blue

I took this over the weekend at the Butterfield Acres Easter Egg Hunt. Evan had a blast. And, Wordpress (or Godaddy) is acting up, so I just needed to post something to see if I get errors. Regardless, it’s a pretty cool photo.

Migrating from WordPress to Drupal?

Sami IMed me this morning, and in part of the conversation mentioned this post he wrote, advocating for the WP developers to migrate from managing their own CMS codebase to using Drupal as the foundation of WordPress. Sounds pretty radical, but when I thought about it, it made sense. Drupal has evolved into a really kick-ass CMS, and we really don’t need a bunch of reinvented wheels rolling around in Web 2.0 space.

University 2.0?

I’ve been thinking about what some of the possible implications of this various “2.0” stuff might be on Universities (or, I guess, on academic institutions in general). Likely nothing too earthshattering here, just some thoughts that were sparked over the weekend while thinking about the upcoming BCEdOnline fireside chat we’re planning.

Disclaimer: This blog entry is written by myself as an individual, not as a representative of the University of Calgary. I’m not advocating for anything here, just thinking out loud about what some of the implications might be if some trends continue for another 5/10/20 years.

Penn State's Teaching & Learning with Technology Symposium

It’s a busy time for edtech conferences online. First, HigherEdBlogCon is running, now Cole Camplese and friends are putting on a shindig at Penn State, and sharing it with all of us!

Cole sent me a link to their Teaching & Learning with Technology Symposium website - a Wordpress site running a nice K2 theme. How cool is that, for a campus-wide symposium at a huge university to be driving the online resource for the event in an open source blogging app?
The agenda for the event looks pretty interesting. Everything from the usual suspects to “The Strategies of a Dog Who Finally Caught the Car” - sounds like Alan might have had an influence :-)

Playing around with the Samson C01U USB mic and Audacity on MacOSX

So, I mentioned that the combination of my shiny new Samson C01U and Audacity (pick a current branch and version) is a bit, well, cantankerous on my Mac. It frustratingly works just fine on the Windows boxes in our lab, but on my desktop and Powerbook much cajoling and incantations are required. Almost ready to break out the chicken entrails…

One thing that I noticed, which seems to help a fraction of a percent, is that the Samson USB mic is a 16 bit sample source. Audacity’s default is a 32 bit sample source. Not sure if that makes a real difference, since 16x2=32, but I set that bit in Audacity, and I think it works at least 3% more often than it did before (which means it works about 4% of the time now).

Mediawiki Spambot Blocking

Our little experiment at wiki.ucalgary.ca has been having some rough times. It’s gotten so frustrating that I’d had to temporarily disable new account creation in a desparate attempt to thwart the automated spambots (which automatically create a new account for each edit so it’s harder to roll them back).

I’ve just updated the wiki to the latest and greatest Mediawiki 1.6.1, and one of the new extensions that work with this version is one called ConfirmEdit. It can be configured to challenge “users” with a captcha upon account creation, as well as on each page edit (even only on page edits containing a URL).

Automatically backing up multiple Subversion repositories

We’re using Subversion to manage files for all of our projects in the Teaching & Learning Centre. More projects means more Subversion repositories to backup. Instead of maintaining a list of projects and repositories, we stick all repositories in a common root directory, and I’ve just put together a dead simple script to automatically dump all of them to a directory of my choosing. I’ve added this script to the crontab for the www user on the server, and it runs svndump on all repositories, gzipping the output for archive (and possibly restore).

Samson USB Microphone

I ordered a Samson CO1U USB “podcasting” microphone to use for my upcoming podcasting workshop. Brian has one, and it’s a beauty. Nice and heavy, and seems to have really nice and rich audio quality. Better than my little USB headset, Powerbook built-in mic, or iSight camera offer, anyway. It was cheap, too - under $80.

After I opened the package, I plugged the USB cord into my G5. It was recognized right off the bat, and iChat and Garageband were able to use it with no additional installation. Then, I went ahead and installed the Samson “applet” to get additional tweakery and bitfiddlery.

Higher Ed Blog Conference

I just about spaced and missed this online conference on “blogging” in higher education: HigherEdBlogCon 2006 (thanks for the reminder, Brian!)

The first round of online events (April 3-7 - right now!) is on the teaching implications of blogging. Topics like case studies, integration with LMS, blogs as personal learning environments, information literacy, etc…

The next round of events (April 10-14) is on library & info resources, followed by admissions/alumni/marketing (April 17-21) and websites & web development (April 24-28).

Managing Information

I’ve been struggling with how to best manage the constant flow of non-critical information that flows around me. RSS feeds. Email. Technorati references. Podcasts. The list goes on. I am going to try an experiment for a couple of weeks, prompted by a reinstall of the OS on my Powerbook.

Yesterday, before leaving the office, I fired up Software Update to grab the latest 10.4.6 update on both my desktop and ‘book. Came in this morning to find the G5 ready to go, but the Powerbook was sitting with an “Installer failed” type of message. I rebooted both, but the ‘book wouldn’t come back. So, I nuked it and reinstalled after wiping the drive.

Weekend in Banff

Janice treated us to a night’s stay at the historic Banff Springs Hotel this weekend. We spent the day Saturday doing some winter hiking at Johnston Canyon (everyone else had crampons and poles, we had runners…), then “doing Banff” for the afternoon, followed by a swim in the Banff Springs Hotel pool. We all had a blast. After supper, Evan and I explored the “castle” - finding all kinds of cool rooms to check out. The hotel complex is absolutely amazing. It’s some of the oldest architecture in western Canada, but there is absolutely no sign of decay or “oldness” to it. The whole place feels like a living castle. This is where the Queen stays when she’s in the area. Likely not in the room we had, with no view, and right next to the noisy old elevators, but in the same postal code.

Pachyderm Showcase

A showcase of selected Pachyderm presentations has been assembled, showing several completely different types of content being presented using the Pachyderm 2.0 authoring software.

Some really good stuff in there - I’m drawn for some reason to the second item on the list…
If you’re looking for some ideas of what can be done in Pachyderm 2.0, this is a good start. If you’re looking to see the various screen types in action, it’s also good for that…