wiki.ucalgary.ca got hammered by a vindictive wiki spammer last night. But, here’s the thing - the spam prevention blacklist worked perfectly. The spammer wasn’t able to add any of their own links to the wiki. So, they decided to punish me by vandalizing 50 of the most popular pages on the wiki with an apparently random (and invalid) spam URL.
The software they used to do this evil deed automatically created a new account for each edit, and the whole thing took them less than 10 minutes to do. It took me 45 minutes to undo, even with rollbacks etc… because of their insidious creation of 50 separate accounts for 50 separate edits. I would have just reverted back to a nightly database backup to blow them all away in one fell swoop, but we had actual valid users making actual valid edits, and I won’t blow any of that away. Better to manually remove the detritus than to lose a single valid edit.
Just saw a tip about creating “feed books” in Elgg - subscribing to a bunch of RSS feeds that will be used to populate a blog. It allows filtering by keywords, so you don’t have to have your offsite cat blog post aggregated along with your Chem 350 research notes.
Combined with the cool community stuff in Elgg, I’m wondering how close this might get to EduGlu?
ps. I’m reading Cryptonomicon too much lately. The title of this post almost looks Outer Qwghlmian. Code talkers beware…
I got the LaCie Big Disk Extreme 500GB backup drive back today. LaCie is suggesting it was just a firmware issue, so they thoughtfully updated the drive, nuked the data that was on it, and returned it. Over a month after it died. Going a month without any kind of backups is a little scary. Here’s hoping it was just a firmware issue - the drive checks out OK now, and already has over 100GB of backed up data on it (and growing - likely will be close to 200GB by the end of the day) - and that’s only 2 servers backed up…
I just took a few minutes to install a fresh copy of Drupal 4.6.5 along with the Aggregator2 module, which provides Glu functionality to Drupal. You can provide a bunch of feeds, and it sucks them in as if they are native content to that instance of Drupal. It tries to assign taxonomy/categories based on the data in the RSS feed, and provides some interfaces to view the feeds and items. I set up a prototype on my desktop box (so it might not be running all the time, and may disappear if my new box ever shows up), but it’s there to play with. I’ve pre-seeded it with my blog, flickr, and del.icio.us feeds, and took the liberty of adding the same for another couple of folks (Brian and Alan) to see how it handles multiple users adding data.
More faves. I couldn’t use the cool new Ruby-powered favinator because it somehow conflicts with the CSS on my blog, and I haven’t had a chance to debug wtf is acting up there. Regardless, here they are. Links to individual photos on the Flickr page for this snapshot…
I’m involved with an ePortfolio project with our Faculty of Education - aimed at getting student teachers to build a series of high quality, interactive, personalized portfolios outlining their development as professionals. It’s more about the journey (self reflection, writing, documenting) than the destination (the final website) so we were looking for tools that wouldn’t require technical know-how in order for the students to produce interesting products. When the project got off the ground (in the fall of 2005), there wasn’t really any off-the-shelf product that fit the bill, so we started to implement an instance of Pachyderm so the students could start authoring in it.
Sami went out last night to take some pictures around Campus. And was accosted by an undercover cop who demanded to know why he was taking pictures of a public place. He had to show ID, his information was recorded (including his driver’s license - how is that a required piece of ID when you’re not, say, driving?), along with several other questions about why he was there in the first place. He was asked to show the pictures he had taken. Then it was suggested that if he wants to take pictures of a public place, which was build with our tax dollars, that he needs to apply for permission, in writing, before that is allowed.
This is one of those things that, as a parent, sends an icy shiver down my spine. An unfathomable loss to a young family - their 6-year-old daughter dying suddenly of bacterial meningitis. They’ve taken to blogging as a form of therapy, and/or an expression of love for their recently departed daughter.
I can’t even imagine how much strength it must take to survive such a loss, let alone to work through the grieving process out in the open.
It started out as a simple photo collection mission. Shawn is in Hong Kong, and asked if I had any pictures of the “Goddess of Democracy” statue that was erected on campus in memory of the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989. I didn’t have any photos handy, but wanted to take a couple.
It’s weird how walking around campus with a camera in hand makes you see things slightly differently. I’ve been on campus since 1987 (with a short hiatus when I was working downtown), and never realized that much of the drabbery around here is really kind of interesting. It’s not a beautiful campus like UBC or Stanford or anything, but it’s interesting in its own pragmatic way.
I was bugging Boris with some emails today to ask about Drupal’s support for structured blogging. I was asking if Drupal would be getting something like the WordPress Structured Blogging plugin, which provides templates for authoring various microformats.
It wasn’t until after he responded that I realized how silly my question was. Drupal doesn’t need the plugin, because support for custom formats and authoring templates is baked into the DNA of Drupal. Even for non-coders, anyone can make up new formats (and templates) on the fly using the flexinode module. And several other formats are already available as prepackaged modules (events, reviews, etc…)
Scott Lesliementioned that he thought EduGlu was a bit of a misleading name for this conceptual educational RSS mix workflow application, and he’s totally right.
The *Glu projects are primarily about aggregation. Merging a bunch of different feeds into a single stream. At first blush, that’s what EduGlu is sort of about, too, but it is also about doing much more with the aggregated data. It may have a “default” view on the data that mimics the *Glu merged River of News, but it will also need to be able to generate alternate views of the data based on identity, context, and relationships with other content and concepts. Sounds muddy, because it is.
