Blog Posts

I give you KONG!

Albert Ip on Learning Objects

Albert totally nails it in his post on the Learning Objects “debate”. Basically - get over it. Move along. Do (and use) whatever is appropriate to what you’re trying to do. One size does not fit all. Caveat emptor, etc…

I especially like his tips for subscribers to “information transfer” vs. “social constructivitistic” paradigms of learning objects (and, I would suggest, of learning in general).

But wait! There’s more! Albert offers a website/wiki on “virtual apparatus”, which appears to be a set of guidelines for creating content in a consistent manner (did I interpret that right?).

Flickr Faves for 2005/12/29

A couple of weeks and 36 Flickr Faves later…

Fun with Rails - Bookmark Manager

I made some time to sit down and play with Rails this evening, and thought I’d work on a simple Bookmark Manager (ala del.icio.us) - a piece of software that I am sorta familiar with, since I use del.icio.us a fair bit, and have some ideas that I think would improve the service. So, I’ll try mocking them up in Rails to give me something to chew on while I learn…

What happened to The Year of HD?

Steve proclaimed 2005 would be known as “The Year of HD” at MacWorld SF 2005. We haven’t seen a lot of consumer-level HD stuff this year - there’s the iMovie HD edition, but that’s about it. The video on the iTMS isn’t exactly HD (320x240 MPEG4 video files). The only real application of HD is on the Apple Trailers and QuickTime HD Gallery. They’re great and all, but don’t exactly make this The Year of HD.

Yet Another del.icio.us Outtage

Here’s hoping the Yahoo! team throws more (or better) hardware at the del.icio.us server. This sign was spotted at the current colocation facility:

I hadn’t noticed that del.icio.us was down, but a comment from Rob tipped me off.

K2 Theme updated for WP 2.0

Michael just updated K2 to be WordPress 2.0-compliant. Looks like quite a few tweaks to the theme as well.

There were two gotchas that I found.

1. theloop.php has a stray character at the beginning of line 10. Just delete that character and all is well. (was solved in the comments on Michael’s announcement post)
2. Be sure to remove the old k2-options.php file so there isn’t method collision as the php files are dynamically loaded.

Looks like the banner image area has been resized a bit, so my banner images no longer fit perfectly. I’ll wait for the next rev. to make sure the new size is stable, then whip up new versions of the 36 banner images to better fit the new area.

Cocoalicious - del.icio.us client app

Cocoalicious is a kick-ass client application for MacOSX that connects to your del.icio.us account, making it easy/fast to search, list, add, index, etc. bookmarks in del.icio.us.

It provides some cool features, like adding star ratings to bookmarks, and has a built-in webkit page displayer. Very handy. It’s using the back-end API for del.icio.us, and feels much snappier than the bookmarklet version (or even the Firefox extension).

And it has the ability to make fulltext indexes (indices?) of all of the bookmarked pages, to make searching even more powerful. I’ve set it to go through and index each of my 800+ bookmarks, and it’s been chewing on that for a few minutes now. I’ll try some searches based on that index when it’s done.

Cocoalicious Screenshot

Showing the star ratings, searching, live preview, and tag list.

Thoughts after trying Firefox again

When I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.0 RC3 last week, there was a bug or issue that corrupted a cookie used by the fancy schmancy new authoring screens. Safari barfed all over that corrupt cookie, meaning I couldn’t use it to manage my blog. Firefox just ignored it (and the functionality that required that cookie apparently degraded transparently - the widgets were no longer collapsable or movable).

So, I thought it would be a good chance to switch to Firefox 1.5 for a while and kick the tires a bit as my primary (only) browser.

Impeachable Offense

2 words that are now synonymous with “Happy Holidays” - I first read about the uproar over SpyGate via Stephen’s NewsTrolls service. Then, I’ve heard it several times since then on American TV networks. On freaking TV.

So, an “elected” president apparently tramples the constitution, giving the nod for government agencies to spy on citizens just in case they might be doing something bad - without the need for judicial review or approval. And, that’s being acknowledged by Bush’s own people as an impeachable offence - with the story broken in the Traditional Media by the New York Times.

WordPress 2.0 Upload Management

They completely reworked how uploaded files are handled in WordPress 2.0 - they’re now put into folders by date to keep things nice and clean. Very nice touch. And thumbnails are automatically generated and linked if requested as well. Very cool. If it works, here’s a screenshot of the image upload form from WP 2.0…

First, you upload a file:

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