The BlogBridge folks rolled out a cool update to their RSS reader. The biggest addition is a very handy search tool, strongly inspired by Spotlight. Here’s a sample of a quick search to find any posts in any of my feeds which have been published since yesterday, and contain the word “podcasting”:
Now that’s just plain cool. It was technically possible by creating SmartFeeds in previous versions, but that was a clunky process that wasn’t well suited to ad-hoc on-the-fly searches. They’ve been working on some UI refinements to remove or rethink or hide the geekier things, which is a good thing.
I just went through my email inbox and nuked over 4500 messages. All since January 2005. Anything important is either archived as a project file, or available through the magical wondrousnes of The Goog.
I’d been letting messages just stay in my inbox, using Spotlight and Smart Folders to find stuff easily, but over the last few days the U of C’s webmail client has been warning me (via a friendly BLINKING RED MESSAGE) that inboxes with over 5000 messages are bad, ‘mkay? So, I took the hint and nuked all kinds of stuff. Everything from “status update - February 2005” to various random ping messages.
Our fancy schmancy new Power Mac Quad G5 boxes were released to us this morning. 20" Cinema Displays, too. These bad boys have 4 x 2.5GHz G5 cores, adding up to 10GHz of raw power under the hood. Sure, there’s some overhead in spreading stuff over the different chips, and some software won’t take advantage of it, but having that much CPU power sitting ready is pretty sweet.
I’m trying to quickly check in from home, but the browser on my home machine is acting up and refusing to access websites. I guess that’s forgivable - I’m still running my (otherwise) trusty old PowerMacintosh 8600/300 running MacOS 9.1. Before you laugh, this bad boy was literally the fastest personal computer in Calgary for a few weeks when I got it, and I paid more for this system than many people pay for cars.
It’s the end of an era. The Learning Commons is no more. It’d be dramatic, if we weren’t just changing the name to the “Teaching and Learning Centre”. It’s a little less pretentious, and should require less explanation about what we do. It’s a shorter web domain name, too - just “tlc.ucalgary.ca”. Maybe we should have thrown a “2.0” in there for buzzword compliance :-)
I’m so sick and tired of people and companies slapping “Web 2.0” stickers on their websites/products/blogs/resumes to show how kewl and innovative they are. I saw a website for a design company that mentions “Web 2.0” a whopping 5 times on their home page alone, and once more in the title of the page. I get it. You’re innovative. I should worship you.
Here’s an idea. Just do cool stuff. Be innovative. Stop trying to brag your ass off by buzzwordifying everything. It’s starting to come across like some kind of high school clique - jocks, preps, bangers, and the “Web 2.0” gang. If you’re not in the Web 2.0 Gang, you suck. Whatever. I was an outcast then, and I’m happy to be one now.
I just checked in on Josie’smap of Edubloggers, and has it ever grown! There are now 347 people around the world identifying themselves as “edubloggers”. The pattern of distribution is interesting, too. Most of Europe and North America are saturated. Africa is basically unrepresented, and northern Asia (including all of Russia) is blank.
Patrick Feng attended a recent Alberta Ingenuity Media Master Class event on campus aimed at discussing the communication of science and research with the general public and in The Media. He live blogged the session, and has some interesting thoughts on the various presentation styles used by the 5 presenters as they talked with Jay Ingram and the audience about their research.
I’m most interested in what seems like an emphasis on conversational (or at least natural, less formal) presentation styles. I think we need to figure out ways for more professors to take advantage of this style. Many stick to chalk-and-talk (or ppt-and-talk) because it’s an easy, low effort presentation style that feels like they’re accomplishing something (I have 150 bullet points in this ppt! it’s great!).
I tuned into what promised to be an excellent session on flexible, organic, dynamic ePortfolios using social software, only to find myself holding back from screaming “Levine’s law! For the love of God, Levine’s Law!!!” as bullet point after bullet point was dutifully addressed.
I’m just putting some additional refinements to my automated server backup process, and have rolled together a handy script to backup each database into its own backup file (so I can restore a single database, rather than blowing them all away to restore from an --all-databases backup.
I’m going to work on making a fancier / more dynamic script based on MySOL’s show databases command to get all databases backed up individually without having to remember to add them to the backup script. In the meantime, here’s how I’m backing up my databases.
Just writing down the process so I don’t forget. If anyone else gets some use out of it, that’s cool too…
Here’s how I just set up my Mac to automatically back up 2 servers, as well as my home directory, to an external firewire drive. The process uses stuff that’s included with MacOSX, so won’t cost a dime. And it’s automatable, so I won’t forget to run it.
Set up SSH to allow automated connection
Following these instructions, boiled down to bare essentials below. Run this stuff from the “client” machine (in my case, my desktop box in my cube) - where all data will wind up.
Our fancy schmancy new Power Mac Quad G5 boxes were released to us this morning. 20" Cinema Displays, too. These bad boys have 4 x 2.5GHz G5 cores, adding up to 10GHz of raw power under the hood. Sure, there’s some overhead in spreading stuff over the different chips, and some software won’t take advantage of it, but having that much CPU power sitting ready is pretty sweet.
