Blog Posts

American Inventor Stupidity

OK. I admit it. I’m watching American Inventor.

And I just can’t stop wanting to scream at the TV “The solution to burning christmas trees isn’t a fancy invention for fire suppression. STOP PUTTING FIRE HAZARDS IN YOUR HOUSE.”

There. That’s my invention. Leave the trees outside. Fires suppressed. I haven’t had a real christmas tree inside the house for, what? A quarter century?

Now, where’s my million dollars?

Comments on ETS Talk #28: The Digital Commons

I listened to the podcast while riding home this afternoon, so I couldn’t respond in real-time. Here’s hoping my memory isn’t completely jumbled, because there were several things I wanted to respond to. I couldn’t find an entry for episode 28 on the ETS Talk site, so here goes…

iPhone - I agree that the iPhone is an amazingly compelling device. Even if it was just a wifi-enabled iPod that allowed web browsing and email, it would be worth the money. If I was in charge of a department, I would issue each staff/faculty member an iPhone (unactivated - they can activate or migrate their own cell phone plans if needed). It would be money well spent, in order to have everyone able to play with the various collaboration apps we all use, anytime/anywhere.

Inuktitut syallabics in blogs?

I just got an email from a colleague at UCalgary, posing a really interesting question. She is doing some blogging and writing with some residents of Nunavut, and needs a way to represent the Inuktitut language online.

There is a reference to Inuktitut syallabics in Unicode, but I couldn’t find any implementation details so I’m wondering if anyone has any experience dealing with Inuktitut as digital text? Can typical blogging platforms deal with it? How do you handle text input? Do you need special fonts to display it?

On the changing role of the Organization

I’ve been wrestling with this concept for some time now. As a member of a University, I am affiliated with a number of organizations. Each of these were set up years ago, as part of various efforts to help connect and support individuals and groups in their work at any number of distributed institutions of higher education. Many are communities of practice, at least in name, and all attempt to offer services and resources to their members.

Blogfunk

I’ve gotten tired of my crankiness and self-censoring aborted blog posts. It’ll be a good idea for me to put the blog on hold until I’ve worked the funk out of my system. Time to switch to lurk mode. I’ll probably still be on Twitter, and commenting on other people’s blogs, and of course posting to Flickr. See you on the other side.

OpenID plugin borkage

My blog was down for much of the morning, and after contacting Dreamhost tech support ninjas, they told me that my account was sucking the RAM out of the server, and that wasn’t cool. They gave some tips on how to reduce memory usage (didn’t work), and then I rolled up my sleeves to debug my WordPress site to see wtf was going on.

I started by SSHing into the server, and moving my wp-content/plugins out of the way and creating a new, empty plugins directory.

Why it's important to "own" your content

I’m connecting the dots between two otherwise unrelated items that were in my Google Reader inbox this morning.

1. Random Mind: USC Film Students Fight Back
2. Dave Tosh: Data Ownership

The first article is about students at USC Film School realizing that the copyright for their student films belongs to USC. Which means they can’t do things like post their work to YouTube, or enter them at Sundance (without first going through channels to get approval from USC). I’m assuming that USC asserts copyright over student works because there might be a chance to monetize - it is Film, after all. Are there other examples of schools asserting copyright over student works? Why hasn’t this been flagged as an issue before this?

Rogers, iPhone, and Consumers

I just contacted Rogers via their website, to try to gather some information on iPhone availability plans in Canada. I know, it’s a longshot, but if I don’t ask…

Upon visiting Rogers’ website, I was presented with a “language preference” page that, in my opinion, is rather badly crafted.

Maybe I’m being overly sensitive, but I really don’t like being referred to as a “Consumer” - it casts the relationship between an individual and a company in rather explicit terms.

Shut Down...

I’m going to do something today that I have never done before. Ever since I’ve had a “work” computer, starting in 1994, I’ve never turned it/them off. I’ve always left them on as personal testing/staging servers, “just in case” I needed to grab something. It’s often been handy (and occasionally essential), being able to SSH into my work system, or run test web apps on it.

I’ve never given much thought to just how much juice must be sucked up by the systems, even when left running essentially idle evenings and weekends. Apparently, this habit costs US businesses $1.7 BILLION per year.

1 Month with Google Reader

I can’t believe it’s been a whole month since I started trying out Google Reader (GR) full time. I wanted to see if I could live in a browser-based aggregator, and was curious about how far it had come since the early days.

The short version is: it’s less efficient at reading boatloads of feeds and items. But, the always-on, available-anywhere design of GR makes it worthwhile.

The long version is, well, longer. I still much of the niceties of BlogBridge (BB). Things like having a “photo gallery” view, for viewing images in feeds (I subscribe to a fair number of Flickr tag feeds, so this is quite handy). I’ve got a workaround for the star ratings that BB uses - I’ve created two “tags” in GR: “5-stars” and “4-stars” and have applied them to appropriate feeds. That definitely helps prioritize reading important stuff from all of my feeds/tags without having to hunt for them. Because it’s browser based, I can use native del.icio.us interfaces, so that feature from BB isn’t missed. The most annoying thing I’ve found with GR isn’t directly GR’s fault. I have to do a fair bit of clicking to get through all of my tags. I need to do some more work to add appropriate feeds to “5-stars”, “4-stars”, “3-stars” etc… so I can focus on levels of importance rather than subjects.

Is MyDropBox.com Vaporware?

We’ve been looking at MyDropBox.com, trying to gather more info about their “Peer Re:Mark” peer review building block for Blackboard. It sounds rather interesting, and we’d love to try it out to evaluate for use on campus. The technology has become secondary, though, because the company has been completely unresponsive through the communication channels they provide on their website. I can only assume that the company is no longer viable, and/or that the product is vapour.