I’ve been using Telus DSL for my home internet connection for a few months, after being a Shaw cable internet subscriber since 1997. I’m growing increasingly frustrated by the unbelievably non-broadband performance of Telus DSL. I have run multiple bandwidth tests on various services, and typical throughput ranges from 11K/sec to a whopping 18K/sec. On a service that promises 1500 kilobits per second. I would get almost the same performance with a 56K modem!
Tim Bray just posted an awesome article: It’s Not Dangerous, in response to the FUD about how blogging will get you fired.
I agree 100% with Tim’s conclusions on how blogging can benefit you. I’m going to knock on wood and hope I continue to avoid the potential downfalls (but they’re related more to being reckless than being a blogger - hopefully that doesn’t apply to me).
I just finished the first round of authoring for the Mavericks exhibit, using the Pachyderm 2.0 Beta 1 software. It’s by far the largest beta test case we’ve had. Currently, there are 67 screens in this project (but there will wind up being hundreds of screens), with many assets, and lots of text. It should be a good stress test for all parts of the authoring and publishing processes.
I was just poking around in the logs on weblogs.ucalgary.ca to see if everything was continuing to run smoothly (it is, touch wood :-) ) and noticed an entry in the log that stated a user had added a post using the Blog API (MovableType compatible). I knew that was possible, and had tested that myself.
What surprised me was the name of the application this user was using: Zempt. I’d never heard of it before. It’s an open source project, currently running only on Windows, but with versions slated for linux and MacOSX.
I got to give a presentation to a group of about 15 anthropology grad students today, about new technologies for teaching and learning (the official topic was “new technologies for the classroom,” but that’s rather limited, no?). I had initially planned on talking for only 15-20 minutes of the hour we would have, and we booked a lab so every person could hammer away at weblogs, wikis, etc… I wound up giving the whirlwind tour of new technologies - intro to blogging (3 people read blogs, 1 has one already), wikis (huh?), Flickr (one user), social bookmarking (huh?) I showed them the new weblogs.ucalgary.ca service (which worked fine in the demo, but the LDAP connection died when they tried to login - think that’s been fixed now). The students were quite interested in the tools, and we had a discussion about how they could be using wikis to collaborate with other students and colleagues. I told the story of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, TheFuss, and Pachyderm (showing the paper we wrote for Museums and the Web 2005 in a wiki). Next time I do this, I’ll have to remember to break it into smaller bite-sized pieces. Perhaps a session on weblogs. One on wikis. One on RSS. One on social bookmarking… Links and resources for this session are online here and here.
Quick note to self: When installing MacOSX Server, always always follow up by installing the Developer Tools. Things like make and other goodies come with the Developer Tools, and will make life simpler. For bonus points, install Fink as well, so you can easily install all kinds of funky utilities and apps over an SSH connection.
Alan’s almost got his server up. It’s basically running now, on an external firewire drive. He just needs to finish tweaking that installation, and move it onto the internal drive module.
Just got an email from Alan Levine asking me to light the beacons to send word throughout the Kingdom of Man that his XServe has succumbed to the unblinking gaze of Sauron himself. As a last ditch effort to salt the earth lest Evil gets a foothold, the server promptly decided to rename/delete some rather critical files. Needless to say, it’s now a smouldering pile of shiny brushed aluminum (until probably Monday, when a fresh hard drive module will be slapped in and life-giving charges of electricity once again flow through its temperamental silicon heart).
Paul and I just had a brief meeting to discuss what we wanted to do about this. We decided that the best thing to do would be to set if free, and see if anyone on campus starts fiddling with it.
It’s a beta, and we’ll be experimenting with the best setup of modules and content, but the only way to know if this boat will float is to put it into the water. So…
I’ve been going through the various options, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Drupal may well be the best solution for what we’d need for a campus weblogging service. It doesn’t have per-blog themes, but that’s coming in Drupal 4.6. The rest of the package is rock solid, and the LDAP integration means every @ucalgary.ca could hit the ground running, as Drupal creates weblogs and forums on the fly as users enter the system. That makes administration much simpler for me, and makes the system more flexible for the users.