CogBlogged from ‘January, 2004’

As I write, my G4 TiBook is evolving from a Jaguar (wow, no links left at Apple)to Panther. I was getting worried about those messages every few days warning that iChat was going to expire. Then I heard about the Mars sim program Maestro that was supposed to be awesome, but on Mac required OSX…. hmm while waiting, maybe I will pop it down to this PC… All fingers are crossed given some of the troubles that can happen on an OS upgrade– usually I wait a bit for a shift, and prefer to do a clean install (wipe out the drive, start fresh)– but since I was willing to go that route and might anyhow, I aimed for the “Archive and Install” method. It would be nice not to have to reinstall all software, redo all the settings, etc. This gives me the chance to blog from a PC. [...]

Looking at the goofy banner on this blog and the reasons behind naming CDB, it is apparent that for 2003, I did lots of bloggin’, plenty of doggin’ (complaining about everything), but very little coggin’ So this month, I am back in the mountain bike saddle, riding 11 miles to work 2-3 times per week. A few years back, when I had more energy (and we had only one family car), I rode every day. Bicycling is some of the best thinking time of the day, a 45 minute slot of time to reflect and enjoy some desert scenery in the middle of Phoenix (see the 1997 vintage virtual bike ride site). So the cog action is back. Today, passing through a section of Papago Park reminded me of a classic story about great designs that fall short. In 1994, Papago park was a prison for German POWs, and a [...]

Got a nice email and link from the folks at Blog Harbor, a blog hosting service that offers a number of worthy add-ons for those who prefer not to tinker (and mess up) their own blog server. They have created a nicely formatted and structured guide to a hosted version of our RSS to JavaScript feed scripts. See Add RSS Headlines to Your Weblog. Hopefully that will be a good nudge for me to get my act together and clean up our demo site for the RSS to JS demo and script. It needs help, I know! It needs to be segmented into meaningful content sections, I know! It needs some basic documentation, I know! On a related front, some mis-placed comments in a recent post led to discovery of a small problem with some RSS feeds using the ‘ HTML entity in the RSS feed- it is a valid [...]

These winters in Arizona are tough. Some days the temperature drops into the mid 60s. Likewise was my vain attempt today to tune into the RSS Winterfest. Every attempt use the link provided by the automatic email registration message, took me to a promising entry lobby, but every click of “Launch Presentation” resulted in a “session expired or not found” message. Same for Mac as well as the beige PC box in the corner of my office. I did get to muck around the conference wiki which seemed to survive a few hundred people editing pages at once. I had even entered my name as a wiki link on the front page, and returned later to see that someone (likely inadvertently) deleted it. That is the way the wiki bounces. I was hoping to be able to tune in during a dull planning meeting, but no such luck .Later I [...]

Did you ever have one of those days where every piece of technology you touched went up in screaming flames and thick smoke? That was today for me. It began while trying to test the new 2.661 version of MovableType. Typically what I do is to create a copy of the MT scripts in another directory on my CGI directory (editing the mt.cfg appropriately) and making sure I make copies of all extlibs and plugins that I have installed (a small number, the MTBlacklist plugin to zap spam, the ifempty plugin to set up better name individual archives (read more), and the MT_RSS plugin to insert RSS feeds in the sidebars. So I install the new version, run mt-check, swap names of my current and new MT directories… and all kinds of crap starts to happen on rebuilds. I revert back, and still get weird things. Server error logs are [...]

Sending attachments by email has become as ordinary as brushing your teeth… well, substitute your own regular habits. My mom reads and sends attachments. But is this always the best way to manage content that might be useful to others? at a later time? in an environment where it can be indexed and keyword searched? Here is a small tale.

I am curious to “be” at the January 21-22 online conference, RSS Winterfest. Most conferences, in person or online, I generally approach with low expectations– mainly out of frustration over the years that the only format for professional communication that seems to be used is the 50 minute lecture to a passive audience. I have been at educational conferences where presenters use this format to talk about the need to change the mode of interaction in education, that lecture format must go- the old saw about “Sage on the stage becoming guide on the side….” Their next step is to dim the lights, cue up the powerpoints (and the audience head bob starts). It has happened a million times. Online conferences seem to push the old format the farthest away from its stale equilibrium position and ones where the tools are left open, they continue to have a life of [...]

Not that anyone but me cares, but number 4 (my French numbering skills went out the ouvre) in my recent spate of blog tinkering notes (1, 2, 3) was a recasting of the date-based archives, the monthly archives MovableType builds for you. With the out of the box templates, MT simply takes every blog entry you made within a month, and builds one long giant page with them al glued together, one after another. Scroll, and scroll, and scroll is the action if you had a prolific month (or wait and wait and wait if you are not on high speed connections). Like the category archives recently altered, the new approach is to have the monthly archives simply list a compressed version of a blog entry with a link to the full enhilada, say for example, look at November 2003.

Ever since I launched this weblog April 2003, I have been talking up blogs quite a bit in my system. The usual heat seekers grab on to the potential and some of the more technology skeptical folks at least do not wrinkle their brows in confusion when I mention “blog”. I’ve run a few “BlogShops” , set up some blogs for folks to experiment with, etc. Most seemed to lack the almost OCD tendencies needed to keep at the practice. The uptake has not quite taken off yet, even after some nibbles that seemed like 2 colleges saw blogs as a possible KM (Knowledge Management) tool but went not much further than thinking about it. Some days it feels like the technology universe here is hemmed in at WebCT, Blackboard, Word, and PowerPoint, while I keep seeing much more interesting things way over the fence. I was starting to think [...]

Brian shares yet another brilliant article draft “Wikis: Hypertext on Steroids”, worth reading and following links from if you are looking for what may be the next edge-like instructional technology. For those who have not “wiki-d” it is an intensively interlinked web site where any visitor can edit and create new information. It bends your head backwards until you see when it works well, most notably the open content reference encyclopedia WikiPedia which this year has managed to surpass the Encyclopedia Brontosaurus, er, I mean Britannica. I have just begun first forays into some wiki experiments, which from experience are excellent for remote collaboration and building of resource collections. Brian is a few steps ahead with his AdventuresInWikiLand. A struggle I have with wiki entries is a usual lack of context or navigation if you end up on node or page within a wiki of content say via a web [...]