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).
Read MoreI’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.
Read Moreweblogs.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.
Read MoreThis 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?”
Read MoreBoing Boing: Kids in the Hall staging reunion tour
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! ;-)
Read MoreI just downloaded the latest build of Flock, and went to configure my blog for posting. But Flock’s handy dandy blog account configurator was hanging while trying to communicate with my WP 2.0 blog. A quick peek at the Flock forums revealed this is a known bug, but no fix was offered.
But… you can trick Flock into letting you manually configure a blog. When adding the account, just give a bogus URL (or, in my case, I tried to configure it with my http://…/server.php file directly. That will fail, and bring up a dialog asking if you want to try again, or cancel and manually configure. Click “Cancel” to continue (of course - I love intuitive dialog boxes…)
Read MoreI’ve been using Blogbridge for awhile, but I didn’t truly appreciate it until I tried to switch to another RSS reader. After I left, I realized I was spending much more time reading my feeds than I was when I was using Blogbridge. After switching back to it, it’s like coming home. I’m blasting through my feeds quickly, and “checking in” isn’t an onerous process anymore.
So, what makes Blogbridge better? How am I more efficient using Blogbridge than the other reader apps? Let me count the ways:
Read MoreI’m trying really hard to get motivated to get back into the mind numbing mundanery of the copy-and-paste festival of horrors that await me on a project. While unsuccessful at motivating myself to deal with that particular albatross, I did find some more awesome photos on Flickr…
Thanks to a pointer from Alan, I took another look at my 43Things account. It’s a place where you can track stuff you’d like to do - like a shared wishlist. There are 2 other related sites. 43Places lets you track places you’ve been and/or would like to visit. 43People lets you track people you’ve met or would like to meet.
Sounds a bit lame on first blush. Why do that in a public place? What are they doing with the data? Amazon is an investor, so why would I feed my data into the corporate beast?
Read MoreDave Hyatt Tim Hatcher announced last night that the latest nightly builds of Safari now include a new tool for web developers to view DOM and CSS elements/attributes on a web page. I tried it last night, and it’s excellent - even better than the one built into Firefox. You just right-click anywhere on a page, and a contextual menu item will let you “Inspect Element”. This is perhaps more intuitive than Firefox’s “enter a new mode, then click somewhere on the inspected page” method of visually selecting an element to inspect.
It took a bit longer than it did the last time I switched (I’m older now, I guess), but I think my transition to the Dvorak keyboard is nearly complete. I now “think” in Dvorak - my fingers are naturally finding the right keys without any intervention. Most of the time. Occasionally I have to pause to think about where a letter is - mostly when entering passwords or shell commands.
Read MoreStructured Blogging was just updated to version 1.pre13, and one of the changes is apparently a new content type (well, it may have been in 1.pre12 - I skipped a version) that supports a structured review of a journal article.
This could be quite useful in academic blogging. Imagine a spider that crawls the blogs of your students (or of students and professors across the ‘sphere), indexing journal article reviews. It could make it very easy to share notes and thoughts on an article, or to create a distributed journal bibliography for communities of practice…
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