Here’s the presentation, with the clips and selections Brian and I used during the welcoming reception for the Canadian eLearning 2007 conference on Tuesday. I wound up not recording audio during the presentation, so you’ll just have to imagine witty and entertaining banter and intros for each video. Brian was responsible for both the witty and entertaining portions of the presentation.
The video selections came to 48 minutes. We were given a 45 minute slot after the welcome reception supper meal. You do the math…
I hate that I have to manually (or scriptedly) call cron.php for every Drupal site I run. Even for multiple Drupal sites on the same server in a multisite configuration. Yes, there are ways to automate it, but eventually they fail. I just manually called cron.php on one of our main sites, after realizing it had silently failed for the last 32 weeks. Hundreds of reminder emails are being sent out now, for events that were held months ago. Yes, there are modules to have cron.php called periodically (poor man’s cron…) but they’re flakey at best, and risky at worst (there is a chance of overlapping cron.php calls if the timing is just right).
I’ve been exclusively using Aperture for about 6 months now, and absolutely love it. The non-destructive edits are liberating. The RAW support is fantastic. The workflow stuff is great. Vaults? Great. Loupe on RAW images? Perfection.
But, of course, I’ve got some gripes.
It’s hard to copy individual photos between computers. If I have Aperture on a desktop and a laptop, and I want to copy just a handful of photos and their metadata (stars, keywords, etc…) from the desktop to the laptop, I have 2 choices:
create a new Project to contain these selected images, then export/import it. This would make me organize my photos according to which sets I want to move between computers, with no semantics retained.
export the Masters for the selected photos from the desktop, copy them to the laptop (USB thumbdrive, sftp, whatever…) and import them as new photos. All non-EXIF metadata is lost, and has to be manually re-entered.
But Aperture already has an “export metadata” option… Why not let me export just a selected set of photos (masters and versions) as well as their associated metadata, in a format that can be ingested into another Aperture without manual intervention or redundant/meaningless Projects used as interchange vectors?
No keyword tag cloud. I’ve got a BUNCH of keywords, but the keyword viewer (i.e., searching) is kinda sucky for that. I want a nice tag cloud.
Performance on my quad-G5 (with stock video card) is rather craptastic. If I disable the second display view, it’s marginally better, but it’s generally a dog on this box. It’s much faster on my MacBook Pro. I’d love it to run a bit better on the quad…
Albums sometimes forget their designated sort order. I use a “general” project, and it’s got a couple thousand images in it by now. Half the time, it decides to ignore my “newest first” sort order and show photos in “oldest first”. It’s kind of nice, to be occasionally reminded of the first photos I shot using Aperture, but it’s not how I told the album to be sorted. One additional click of the sort triangle, followed by a 2 second wait as the 2000 photos are reordered…
Here’s the playlist Brian and I used for our presentation during the Canadian eLearning 2007 conference welcome reception on Tuesday evening. I’ll try to compress a version of the presentation with our clip selections (we only showed short clips from many of the videos) but I won’t get a chance to do that until the weekend.
intro
who the hell are we, and what the hell are we doing there?
Brief riff on new abundance of online video and DIY creativity in era of YouTube
I had a total blast hanging out working with Brian for the Canadian eLearning 2007 conference welcome reception entertainment gig we got coerced invited to do. Here’s the clip we put together as the intro segment for our Online Video Party redux, based on being in the spiritual home of the most inspired group of video comedians ever assembled: SCTV!
That was re-edited and audio dubbed in a cookie-cutter “pub” in “Bourbon Street” at West Edmonton Mall. We could tell we were in “Bourbon Street” because of the authentic Celine Dion and Bryan Adams soundtrack, and the always impressive New Orleans wide selection of only the finest alcohols - Coors, Coors Lite, Bud and Bud Lite.
I learned long ago, that when given the opportunity to do anything with Brian, I should jump on it. Doesn’t matter where, or what. Just do it. It’ll be interesting, or at least fun. Most likely, it’ll be both, in spades.
I was handed the chance to do something fun with Brian as part of the welcome reception for the Canadian eLearning 2007 Conference in Edmonton next week. It’s something new for the conference - entertainment as part of the welcome reception. What to do? People will be eating/drinking/talking, so a full-on presentation wouldn’t go over very well. What to do… What to do… How about an Online Video Party?
I was just in a meeting with some folks in our campus IT department, where we were trying to figure out what the official University of Calgary supported podcasting solution would be. We were basically trying to decide if we should jump onto iTunesU in a big way, or roll our own service.
iTunesU is a really strong choice, in that all of the infrastructure bits are handled. No drive space to worry about, no backups to remember. Everything just works. But, it’s outside of our control, and is rather strongly Apple-branded. Even though it’s not an exclusive arrangement, and the content can/should be in multiple formats, it’s hard to sell that combo to people who are either
I just conducted some exhaustive and scientific research, trying to gather more information about iPhone availability in Canada as the big US release date approaches.
OK. Some clarification. By “exhaustive” I mean “I did a lap around Market Mall and poked my head into the Rogers and Fido shops” and by “scientific” I mean “I asked them ‘so… iPhone much?’”
Regardless… The typical response was something like “eye phone? no.” That is, when I got a response at all.
I (still) spend a fair amount of time thinking about the learning object repositories work that was done back at the turn of the century. A bunch of folks (myself included) took up the task of building software to let people easily publish, describe, share, find (and hopefully use) digital assets or learning objects (assets with a bunch of metadata tacked on the side).
I think it’s fair to say that the experiments failed pretty dramatically. The only content that was added to CAREO was done under the auspices of Large Projects and/or Institutions. Individuals, by and large, didn’t spend much time with it, or its ilk. Why is that? Why have other applications and platforms gone on to be much more successful, by any definition of the word? Well, here are some reasons:
I just enabled FeedBurner caching/serving of my blog’s RSS feed. The goal is to dramatically decrease the load on the server by redirecting RSS requests through FeedBurner’s server rather than mine (well, Dreamhost’s). Google just bought FeedBurner, so they’re not going anywhere. I’m trusting in Google not to do anything evil. I can always pull the plug on them and take control of the feed if needed.
Another bonus (for me, anyway) is an estimate of stats - how many folks are subscribed to the feed. That’s always been a total crap shoot, with nothing more than edumacated guesses and darkened dartboards providing numbers. Now I might get a better idea, and am braced for the emphatic “5 subscribers” that it will be flashing at me shortly.
Shortly after I made the switch from Drupal 5 to WordPress 2, I started thinking about the various apps and hosting providers I’ve used to run my blog. I actually had to mine the archives to remember it all, because it’s changed a lot. Over the last 5 (or 6, depending on how it’s measured) years, I’ve used 6 different applications, on 4 different hosting providers. That speaks volumes about interoperability, making it easy enough to move to a completely different weblog applications on 5 separate occasions. Sure, there was some data altered and URLs adjusted, but all posts and comments made the transition successfully each time.
