Man, does THIS take me back. C64 Games Online - a collection of old games from the Commodore 64, ported to java as applets. I have no idea how many hours I wastedspent playing these games as a kid.
I just updated my copy of Blogbridge to the latest weekly (2.12) and in this version they threw the switch on OPML publishing of folders/guides of feeds. I took a couple of minutes to gather my education-related subscriptions into one guide, and tried publishing it as OPML.
It contains 102115 feeds of edubloggy goodness. There are some stale feeds that I just can’t bring myself to delete (you know, in case they ever post something). If you’re using an aggregator that groks live OPML feeds, just subscribe to the URL. If you’re using anything else, you may need to download the OPML and manually import it.
There are lots of people (Gardner, Brian, Tama, some /. trolls) posting interesting and thoughtful responses to the iTunes University service. It seems like the (online) consensus is something like “It sucks as a concept - forcing universities to lock content behind walled gardens, restricting access and requiring proprietary playback mechanisms.”
This is a valid point, worth consideration. However, at the risk of appearing to be an Apple apologist, I’d suggest that the alternatives be considered.
Yojimbo 1.0 was just released - by Bare Bones Software (the folks that make the kick-ass editor BBEdit), and it looks like the best personal content manager I’ve used. DevonThink is overly complicated, and Notational Velocity is a little to simple (but that is also its strength).
Yojimbo takes the best of both approaches, and distills it all into a simple (but powerful) interface on top of some powerful (and elegant) features.
I would have blogged this sooner, but was having The Day From Hell™ - regardless, this is pretty cool stuff. Apple has opened up the iTunes media warehouse for any campus to share audio and video via the iTMS interface. This will allow any campus to replicate something like the Stanford iTunes Experience relatively easily, with the possibility to hook into things like lecturecasting, alumni communication, community outreach, etc…
I’m going to be cheerleading and doing whatever I can to get the University of Calgary to take them up on this.
I’m pretty sure my hardware is retalliating against the new Conservative regime.
The XServe that drives weblogs.ucalgary.ca, wiki.ucalgary.ca, and pachyderm.ucalgary.ca just went south. Refuses to boot now. It’s a cluster node, so we’re trying to find a video card to see wtf is going on…
Update: OK. We found a trusty old ATI Rage 128 card, slapped it into the XServe, and booted that sucker up. It was spending a looooooong time on the boot spinning pinwheel screen - assuming it’s checking the disk here. It had to chew through ~50GB of data, so that took awhile. Then, it wanted to update firmware, so we did. It’s now fully patched, and apparently running OK. It’s seeming awfully slow, though. It’s not a RAM thing, with 5GB of the good stuff in there. It just took over a minute to connect via SSH. Definitely need to look into that. Perhaps AFTER the big afternoon presentation that relies on the software running on this server…
Well, not sure if it’s an “extreme failure” or just a failure of a LaCie Big Disk Extreme. Either way, my shiny new 500GB backup drive decided to go on strike yesterday. Maybe the most depressing day of the year got to it. Maybe it thought, as a 500GB drive, that it should have been doing more exciting things than just backing up my crap.
I was copying over the latest MySQL dumps from our production servers, and got an interesting error - “write error” - meaning, of course, that the file could not be copied to the BDE. Mwaaaaah? So I fire up Disk Utility, and it greets me with this:
I just needed to do something different while avoiding eating lunch at my desk. I had downloaded FlightGear this morning, after mentioning it to Gord, Julian and Patrick. Fired it up, and although it’s a bit quirky, the price is right. I eventually figured out how to take off. The default plane is a Cessna, and the default field is just south of San Francisco (I didn’t know that before I took off, but recognized the landmarks pretty quickly).
I’ve just realized that the “Promote to Front Page” option - which lets users flag their content so that it will be displayed on the front page of the Drupal site as well as in their own blog/group pages, is rather borked. The setting that enables this option is part of the “Administer Nodes” access permission. Enabling that permission also grants the user to edit any content in that instance of Drupal. Which might be fine in a small and closed system, but when you’ve got a system like weblogs.ucalgary.ca with a growing number of users, and they’re using it for academic purposes, it’s not a great scenario.
weblogs.ucalgary.ca as been running for almost a year - it fired up shortly after Northern Voice 2005 - and it’s spend most of its short existence sitting essentially idle (except for the spammers that keep sending a couple hundred attempted spamcomments per day).
Now, we’ve got a couple of profs using the service in class, and the posts are pouring in. And some really interesting stuff, too. They’re taking advantage of Organic Groups to carve out semi-private areas of the service, where they can post stuff and restrict access to those in the class, or open it up for specific posts if so desired.
This is so depressing. It looks like Harper might be on the path to a minority government on Monday - with a slim possibility of pulling off a majority. That is sad for so many reasons.
In my riding, “my” MP Rob Anders doesn’t even have to show up at local events and debates. He’s rated “F” for his performance in the House, he’s described as dangerous and scary by reporters across this country - even by reporters in the States, where he made an impact as a Republican cheerleeder. He called Nelson Mandela a communist and terrorist, and blocked the granting of an honourary Canadian citizenship to the man. Then refused to come to the phone when Mandela called him with a “WTF?”
Kids in the Hall are/were the funniest comedy troupe on TV. Better than Saturday Night Live back in its heyday (and KitH coughed up funnier stuff than anything SNL has done in the last 20 years).
Dammit. It’s LA-only. That’s hardly a tour, is it?
davidicus, you’d darned well BETTER go to this thing so I can live vicariously through you! ;-)