Landing in San Francisco this morning, we had an interesting experience. We were escorted in by another plane (no, it was not an F-16). I’ve never seen, nor been a part of, a tandem landing. A bit of an odd experience, to say the least… I’ll update with a photo (I snapped a couple of shots). The two planes landed on parallel runways with about 2 seconds between them…
I’m in the Pachyderm project update meeting now, at the Grand Hyatt. Great group of folks!
Read MoreFound this gem on the Wordpress Wiki: Auto shutoff comments. It includes code that you can use to create a plugin to automatically close comments after a set number of days - handy for keeping those evil spam roaches at bay.
I just copied the second block of text (the one by Scott Hanson) into a file called “Autoclose.php” and uploaded it into my Wordpress plugins directory. Went to my admin console and activated the plugin, and it seems to work just fine! At least this will keep the roaches confined to a small subset of posts on this weblog, instead of letting them roam unfettered over the 476 posts accumulated over the years…
Read MoreRob Reynolds has just posted an interesting piece on the coming LMS Wars. He likens it to be on par with the telecom industry’s battle with legacy/enterprise protocols (ATM) vs. upcoming anarchy-driven protocols like IP. (IP is now in the lead, by the way)
The existing LMS industry is analogous to the IT industry, and democratizing tools such as weblogs, wikis, rss, podcasting, etc… are the underdogs.
I think the LMS vendors are smart enough to try to incorporate the best of these tools if they want to survive. Because if they don’t, the subversive tools will overtake them very quickly.
Read MoreI volunteered to manage an Education node of the iPodder.org podcast directory.
It’s kinda empty at the moment. If you know of any education-related podcasts, please let me know if it should be included in the directory.
Read MoreDavid just published a great post on developing with WebObjects. He really boils down the WebObjects development experience into a few bullet points, which I will copy/paste here for searchability…
The last point is really the best one - I’ve come across this so many times on CAREO and Pachyderm. We’ll be building away and I’ll just stop and say something lame like “Wait - this is getting too complicated. There has to be an easier way…”
Read MoreI just checked the Apache logs and grepped out the lines dealing with the podcasts, and it looks like the podcasts have been downloaded a total of 1377 661 times! (see update below) Holy crap! Who is downloading this stuff? No, really. I’d love to know. If you’ve downloaded any of the experimental podcasts, please let me know!
The simple and not exactly efficient command I call to count podcatches is:
Read MoreWell, they’re opening one in Toronto. Looks like the Rest of Canada has to wait until at least the middle of 2005 before more Canadian Apple Stores will be opened.
Come on Apple Store Calgary! They’re just finishing up renovations on Market Mall - that would have been perfect timing to sneak in the black barricades for construction of an Apple Store… Oh, well…
Actually, wait - that’s too close to my house. I can’t afford having an Apple Store that close. I’m still looking for a way to fund my impending addiction to the iTMSCanada…
Read MoreI was hoping to use GarageBand instead of Audacity as part of my recording suite, but the stars aren’t aligned…
The only mic I have on my desktop G4 is my iSight camera, which sounds pretty good, but runs at 48KHz. GarageBand only likes 44.1KHz sources, so it doesn’t work.
Doh. Looks like I’ll be sticking with Audacity. There wasn’t a real reason to switch, just that I like GarageBand a lot ;-)
Read MoreJosh, King and myself went to see The Incredibles last night, after grabbing a bite and a pint at Kilkenny’s Pub.
It’s all been said about the movie already, but man does Pixar rock. The story was rich, deep and detailed. As were the characters. Many of the scenes could have been used as matte backgrounds in a Bond film. This was by far the best movie I’ve seen in a long, long time. It’s kind of weird - after the movie starts, you just forget that it’s animated. It fades away and doesn’t get in the way. Not like another movie that kinda hits you over the head repeatedly with the “Hey, Look at the kewl animation we’re doing! Isn’t it realistic?” card…
Read MoreStephen Downes has been running his Edu_RSS educational blog aggregation service for a while now. I’ve used Edu_RSS to build conference blogging aggregators (for Merlot 2003, and NMC 2004). He has now put together a page that spits out all posts related to podcasting. Since he’s semi-selected the feeds to be somewhat educational in nature, this becomes a feed about podcasts in education. Very cool.
Read MoreFirst, they try to kill weblogs via comment spam, now they’re trying to take over wikis to sell viagra and casinos and cheap electronics.
Someone please hit these spammers with a clue stick - WE DON’T WANT TO HAVE YOUR ADS ON OUR WEBSITES, AND WE WILL SPEND TIME AND ENERGY REMOVING IT! They are doing the equivalent of taking a crap on our front porch. We could ignore it, but that would be just plain nasty, and really wouldn’t benefit anyone (except for the spammer, who has an insatiable urge to defile any and all public spaces).
Read MoreI just checked the webserver logs, and the first 2 podcasts have been downloaded a total of 237 times so far. Holy crap! I would have guessed maybe half a dozen times. Wow. I just did some basic math on that, and that’s over a gigabyte of podcast downloady goodness! (thank goodness for campus bandwidth ;-) ) As Adam would say: “Boing!”
And I’ve gotten some interesting feedback as well. I found the podcasting experience strangely cathartic, so I plan to make a bit of time to keep experimenting with it. I spent a few minutes over the weekend messing around with GarageBand to make the requisite Cheesy Podcast Intro. It should be Just Cheesy Enough…
Read More