Blog Posts

Calgary Blog

Ted Buracas just launched a Calgary blogging site: the Blog at Calgary. It looks like a great start, with links to local media, arts, music, entertainment, etc… I’ve already found a new Jamba Juice replacement called *atomic - downtown, just north of The Bay. Next time I’m downtown, I’ll have to check it out (although that may not be for awhile - I seem to be downtown about once per season or so…)

Feedster Top 500 List

I was checking my feeds this morning, and saw that Jenny Levine (of The Shifted Librarian fame) has been added to the BlogBridge Experts List - giving her top library-related blogs as a starting point for folks who are into that kind of thing. Very cool.

In the announcement, they mention that The Shifted Librarian is a pretty highly ranked blog on the Feedster.com Top 500 list. It’s sitting at #369 right now. That’s also very cool.

del.icio.us issues

Come, on, Yahoo! Get del.icio.us into your data centre… Apparently there was a power failure in the server hosting facility where del.icio.us has been living (assuming it’s not in Yahoo Central yet), and it’s been barfing all over everything all day. I just went to get some links from my account, and got this instead:

Structured Blogging: Semantic web for the rest of us?

SFMOMA is Podcasting!

I just got an email from Peter Samis, the lead Pachyderm wrangler at SFMOMA (complete with signature Tilley). SFMOMA just launched their podcasting program. They’re providing a feed with a variety of content providing information about the exhibits at the museum.

And, here’s the kicker. They’re taking it all the way. Instead of charging a fee for providing this service, they’re providing a discount on museum admission to people who take advantage of the podcasts! Talk about an awesome way to give people an incentive to come to the museum. The best of both worlds - they can take advantage of the podcast without stepping foot into the museum, but if they’re in the area, they get a break for coming in and seeing the collections in person. That’s great!

Ubuntu Linux on an 8600?

Well, I’m kinda stumped. I’m following Brian’s lead in playing around with the Ubuntu Linux “live demo” cd - the one that lets you test drive linux on a mac without actually installing it. Worked ok on my Powerbook (albeit rather slowly), but I can’t seem to get my old 8600/300 to boot from the disk for the life of me. Searching Ubuntu Linux’ documents turns up dead links. Google turns up references to BootX and yaboot (BootX for Old World Macs like mine, yaboot for New World Macs). I’ll give up for now, but would love to get linux running on the old faithful Mac at home.

On the possibility of autism

My son had a speech therapy session yesterday, and we were all thinking things were going pretty well. He’s been doing so well that I didn’t even take time off work to go to the session (I have been to almost every other session). Then, I get a phone call at work from my wife, and something’s not right. Hard to make out what she’s saying on the phone, and then I recognize a few words. Autism. Asperger’s Syndrome. The therapist says she saw some signs that were pointing to a possible case of Asperger’s Syndrome, and that she’d like to refer us to the Children’s Hospital for a full assessment and possible diagnosis.

MediaWiki and Access Control

I’ve been asked by a couple of people about ways to restrict access to pages in wiki.ucalgary.ca. My initial response was often something like “wha? that’s just wrong. you don’t lock down wikis…”

Then, they explained more about what they wanted to do, and why they couldn’t just leave the pages out In The Wild and trust that it was private through obscurity. Things like collaborative student experimental writing, where it would be a Bad Thing™ if things like the Wayback Machine kept eternal snapshots of not-fully-baked writing, which could come back to haunt someone later. Shouldn’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater - restricting access to pages within the wiki would let them play, without exposing them more than they’re comfortable with.

Updated Blogroll / Links

I know - nobody reads blogrolls anymore, but I needed something mindnumbingly trivial to do for a few minutes. So, I had Blogbridge spit out an OPML file of my subscriptions, and I’m updating my various linkositories (Bloglines, Links) with the updated goods. Bloglines has been chewing on the file for 15 minutes, so no promises that it’s being updated successfully there…

477 feeds - that’s actually down a bit from what I was reading before - and it looks like several feeds have borked htmlUrl values so you might need to grab the opml source to get more info on some feeds.

Yet Another Wiki Spam Attack

Over the weekend, wiki.ucalgary.ca got hammered by a(n apparently) coordinated and distributed spam barrage. Hundreds of pages hit, new pages created, talk namespaces crapped into, etc…

I think I saw part of it happen in “real time” - I was watching a movie with Evan, with my Powerbook plugged into our TV (the only DVD player in the house), and every now and then I heard the system beep. After the movie ended, I saw the Watchmouse monitoring page for wiki.ucalgary.ca saying there was trouble connecting, and the main wiki.ucalgary.ca page was showing a MySQL connection error. Reloading the page made it go away, so I didn’t pay much attention.

del.yahoo.com

Well, this explains a lot - first, a serious congratulations to Joshua, and kudos to Yahoo for picking up del.icio.us. (and thanks to Les Orchard for the heads up)

I’ve been wondering about the business model for del.icio.us since before I started using it - wondering how it was going to be paid for. It’s a free service, with no ads. Soaking up ungodly amounts of resources and bandwidth. Now that it’s Yet Another Yahoo Family Member, it should benefit from Yahoo’s infrastructure, and lose the imperative to “monetize” - since it’s part of the value-add for Yahoo.

Drupal 4.7.0 Beta 1 + Quiz Module

In a master stroke of synchronicity, I was looking for a download of Drupal 4.7 to test out the Quiz module just yesterday afternoon. This morning, I see that Drupal 4.7.0 Beta 1 was released! So, I grabbed a copy of it and set up a fresh install on my desktop. Some really nice refinements to Drupal. The configuration side of things is starting to make sense. Good to see them giving it some proper love.