Twitter’s been flakier than usual this week, and supposedly the twitgineers are busy fixing database borkage and scaling stuff up and twiddling bits and furiously adjusting the machine that goes PING!
And yeah, they’ve had investors temporarily filling bank accounts to pay for the lavish web 2.0 drug binge parties development of a more robust and scalable nanoblogging platform.
But… Where is the money really coming from? It’s not advertising. It’s not subscription fees. The only other reasonably viable option is that they’re building it up to hope to sell it to some web 2.0 behemoth. And I can’t see why Yacrosoft! would pay $millions for it. Or anyone else, for that matter.
The 3 days in Saskatoon for TLt2008 were absolutely fantastic. It’s fun turning into “conference D’Arcy” - the side of me that is ever so slightly less antisocial and reclusive - the side that seems to show up at conferences. Not sure why that is, but it’s something I’ve noticed for years now. Maybe it’s the sense of being “away” - one part vacation, one part safe place to let loose.
I’ve been collecting some links to interesting educational simulations to show faculty members. There’s some great stuff out there. The list is NOT comprehensive, and I’m not including LOTS of great simulations. This is just the list I give to faculty members asking about effective educational simulations.
Sharkrunners (a Discovery Channel simulation for biology - tracking sharks using real data)
Mediated Cultures World Simulator (really cool non-technical geocultural simulation - thanks to Alan Levine for sharing the link to this one!)
Physics simulations by the University of Colorado at Boulder (thanks to Jennifer Jones for sharing this link!)
I spend a lot of time “being there” in various online places. I blog, I twitter, I post photos to Flickr, etc yadda yadda. I’m getting on a plane tomorrow, and planning on “being there” in the more traditional sense. I’ll be unplugging from the net as much as I can.
I’m not unplugging from my Network - many of the people in my Network are going to be there in person. I’m just deciding to not distract myself by constantly “checking in.”
WordPress 2.5 comes with a fantastic media manager, offering the ability to automatically resize an uploaded image into thumbnail and medium sizes as well as offering the original file. I’ve used this feature a bunch, both on this blog and my photoblog. I didn’t really think much of it, but just noticed today that the resized images were much less saturated than the originals. Here is a comparison of the same image, one resized by WordPress 2.5.1 (left), the other by Preview.app (right):
I was involved with two sessions at this year’s Faculty Technology Days conference on campus. The first one was a keynote panel on “Social Networking in the Academy” and the second was “Weblogs as Personal Repositories.”
Social Networking in the Academy
When we were planning the Social Networking panel, we realized that some of the faculty members might not be familiar with social networking, or with some of the aspects or implications of it, so we thought it would be a good idea to start the 2-hour panel session with a brief introduction to the topic so we were all on similar pages. Being the geek in the group, I volunteered to take that on. I wound up giving about a wiki-powered 25 minute intro to social networking (what it is, what it means, some samples, etc…).
I just installed the development version of the monotone theme over on my mindfulseeing.com photoblog. What a cool theme. It adapts the colours of the post page based on the colour palette used in the first image on a post. AND, it provides a great archives page with thumbnails from each post. Very cool. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for in a photoblog theme.
Because it’s not an officially released theme (yet) you have to check it out via the subversion repository, but that’s a pretty simple call to svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/monotone/
I’ve been prepping some resources to use during the Faculty Technology Days session on Social Networking tomorrow. How to best show what the Network is? What do the connections between people look like? Then, this morning, I see a post by Clarence Fisher describing Tweetwheel. It’s a cool little web application for generating a display of the people in the Twitter Network for a given account. Here’s mine:
I’m working on a project that partially involves the development of a website in Drupal to act as a directory of people who have graduated from a given University. Seems easy. I went into the project thinking it would be a trivial application of Taxonomies, or maybe some generic CCK fields.
Nope. Turns out the problem is much more difficult and complex than I initially thought.
Taxonomies won’t work, because of the need to tie a number of values together, namely the year the degree was awarded (say, “1992”), the type of degree (say, “BSc”), the specialization of the degree (say, “Zoology”), and the granting institution (say, “University of Calgary”).
It’s not a full examination of every technical aspect of RAW vs. JPEG, but I show some of the reasons why I try to shoot RAW almost all the time, as well as some reasons why I sometimes shoot in JPEG instead. Some of the subtle differences didn’t really translate into the compressed video files, but hopefully you can get an idea of what the extra data in a RAW file is handy for.
I’ve been struggling with this problem for some time now, and am a bit stumped. Bits of it are trivial to solve, but when I start hooking things up, there’s a pretty big gap and disconnect.
On the surface, it’s a simple problem. I’m using Drupal, and am building a website to store things like profiles for individuals. That’s easy. I need to add lists of the degrees they’ve been awarded. Like this:
It provides a cop-out, marketing-based, feel good way for people and companies to feel good about half-assed lame excuses for making a real sustainable difference.
Every day should be earth day. This one-day-per-year stuff is garbage. This “oh! what did you do for earth day?” feel good crap doesn’t help. Frack off. Every fracking day is earth day. What did you do for EVERY OTHER DAY OF THE YEAR earth day?
