Blog Posts

TT solo

Had a sudden chance to head out for a quick ride to prep for the gran fondo. Good ride! I kind of zoned out for a bit and missed the turn onto Bearspaw Road, but got an extra hill climb in as a result. :-)

on mat honan's "hacked" AppleID

So, Mat Honan had his AppleID account hacked (or “hacked”), and the attacker then nuked his devices using the “remote wipe” feature. Some scary stuff. He says he lost a year’s worth of photos, and a bunch of other stuff.

Turns out, this wasn’t a technical hack, but a social one. The attacker simply called Apple Support, claimed to be Mat, and provided the Super Secure Information That Only The Real Account Owner Could Possibly Have: his address and phone number.

Canadian Learning Commons conference session on DS106

blurb about the conference via @ppival:

On May 7-9, 2012 the University of Calgary hosted the 6th Canadian Learning Commons Conference. The theme of the conference was New Media, New Fluencies and Life Skills Development: Preparing Learners for the 21st Century.

I was asked to do a session, and worked up a presentation describing how the DS106 course experience can be framed as a student-centric learning commons, placing the student in the role of teacher (and vice versa). Wherein, I used the words “cool” and “awesome” entirely too often.

jobs

prompted by Stephen’s post, which was prompted by this post. Looks like I’m a little below the projected average…

• fabric packager - angel merchandising - taking big rolls of fabric, splitting it into smaller spools for distribution to craftsy fabric stores. gagging at the Giant Insects that came bundled in the fabrics…
• housekeeping - heritage park - met a then-teenage Mrs. @dlnorman on the job.
• midway operator - heritage park - gotta balance the ferris wheel, or it won’t spin. stop rocking the chairs!
• science communicator - calgary science centre - also built interactive exhibits for some of the big summer shows (Dinomania, Backyard Monsters, Marine Monster Mania). HyperCard, FTW!
• (undergrad student. BSc and BEd at UofC)
• programmer / webmaster - Faculty of Nursing, University of Calgary - built a series of (award winning!) CD-ROMs for teaching nursing students about various psychomotor skills. helped to build some of the first for-credit online courses.
• senior programmer - Discoverware, Inc. - built a good chunk of a rich media LMS, then the dot-com bubble asploded everything…
• consultant - independent - various projects, including building a prototype learning object repository, video markup tool, and a learning objects based corporate LMS
• software developer; eLearning consultant - Teaching & Learning Centre, University of Calgary - started out finishing the LOR prototype, then wound up working on Pachyderm and Mavericks, blogs, wikis, workshops, etc. etc…
• IT partner - University of Calgary

Good times.

Bragg Creek to Millarville

a week in sicamous

We headed to the Sicamous area for a week away. I could totally get used to lake country…

On audience and connections

Long, rambling post ahead, fueled by summer vacation, campfires, and mosquito repellant…

I’ve been struggling with the sense of audience and connectedness through online tools for years now. This is one of the reasons I’ve had a tendency to delete accounts on various social networks, as I occasionally become uncomfortable with the deals involved in using them, and the artificially inflated sense of connection that they foster.

I follow 438 people on twitter right now, and over 1000 people follow me. Or, “follow,” as the online social media connection is fundamentally superficial and tenuous. I’m probably only really connected to a dozen or two of those people in any meaningful way, with relationships that I value. Some of those connections have developed into deep friendships lasting for over a decade now.

CBC News and photo credits?

I was just checking my RSS feeds, and saw an article from CBC News.

I thought to myself, “hey! I’ve seen that photo somewhere. wait a minute… I think I took that photo…”

Some quick poking around on my gallery site, and hey presto. Yup. I shot it back in June, 2009, not far from my house.

Looking at the article on CBC’s site, there doesn’t seem to be any mention of that fact.

google encroachment

First, they provided a search engine. Then they monitored every search query, to push ads. Then, they added additional services, including email and RSS, to track everything you read and everyone you know. Then, they added social layers, to track everything you do. Then, they added DNS services, to be able to track everything you read and do, even outside of Google’s suite of monitoring tools aka online services.

Now, they want to lay their own fiber-to-the-home internet service. They say it’s to ensure network neutrality, and to provide a stable alternative to the big telecom companies’ cable and DSL and fiber services. That sounds awesome. Everyone hates the big telecom companies, always screwing us over and gouging us and etc.. etc…

Custom Press This - Pixel Envy

Nick Heer (another Calgarian WordPress user!) posted a modified WordPress press-this.php file to enable Markdown syntax: Custom “Press This” — Pixel Envy.

custom press-this.php file has been updated to work with WordPress 3.4.

It really just modifies the core WordPress wp-admin/press-this.php file to use Markdown syntax, rather than raw HTML. Not elegant, and will need to be updated if that file changes in future versions of WordPress. But it works, and that’s all that counts.

Michael Geist - Why the Supreme Court's Copyright Decisions Eviscerate Access Copyright's Business Model

The cumulative effect is clear: schools can rely more heavily on fair dealing for the copying that takes place on campus and in the classroom. This includes copies made by teachers for students for instructional purposes, copies that previously formed a core part of Access Copyright’s claim of the necessity of a license. Indeed, it will be very difficult for educational institutions to justify the Access Copyright license in light of this decision.

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debugging the text editor in sharepoint

tl dr; run IE in 32-bit mode. Seriously. I know. That’s what I said, too.

I’ve been using Sharepoint 2007¹² with my group, to share information about groups and projects on campus. It’s been working, but we just started using the wiki tool³, and my inability to make the visual text editor turn on became really troublesome. I’d never been able to get the visual editor to show up. I looked in settings - the visual editor in Sharepoint 2007 is implemented as an ActiveX control⁴ so I made sure I was running Internet Explorer⁵ (IE9 on Win7). I made sure that I had ActiveX enabled, and that security settings would let it run. All set. Still, no visual editor. WTF?