CogBlogged from ‘October, 2004’

Gerry caught me on iChat tonight and let me know he was having trouble reaching Flickr– he’s right! What’s happening? And it looks like they are based in Vancouver… Did Mount St. Helens blow a big cork and blast it north? I hope not! Maybe flickr is just flickering.

My editor was pressuring me. I had stalled on my next technology article for the Fall 2004 issue of our publication, the mcli Forum. I had waited too long to do interviews with some faculty (there are some coo, things some folks are doing with teaching GPS… maybe in the Spring…) What would I do? Then a flash of brilliance (or I thought, maybe it was the lights flickering down the hall). Since we were introducing wikis via our Ocotillo Action Groups, an interview with someone that could talk profoundly about wikis would be key. Like Brian Lamb, who just wrote the great article on wikis in EDUCAUSE Review. My flash was asking Brian if I could conduct an interview via iChat. I could have done an email interview, but this sounded more spontaneous. And fun. I have to say it worked well. I got about 15 questions answered thoughtfully [...]

I hope this is the last on MLX spam for a while. I’d rather be writing code for adding features to it than trying to fortify the moat. And I guess my finger pointing at domain registrars was off base as pointed out by some comments earlier today. Somebody out there must be responsible. My hourly spammer’s last submission was about 8 hours ago. Maybe they have homework to work on. Or they figured out the futility (in my dreams) or they are reloading for a different tact. Or picking other victims. One should never be confident they have plugged every hole. In a way it was a learning experience. I found some new ways to create activity logs, tools to display and add functionality to them, some some cool thinks about hashes. Update Oct 4:: They are back. Good morning spammers….

Our hourly comment spam assaults on the Maricopa Learning eXchange ceased around 10:00pm local time yesterday. My best guest is that the spammers mommy finnaly told him/her it was time to shut fof the computer, brush their teeth, and off to bed. Likely, after a bowl or two of Cocoa Puffs this morning, they will be back in action. Or so they think. All of their spams have been intercepted, logged. The IPs recorded include: 210.251.92.104 218.50.2.74 220.93.120.39 61.50.172.143 80.55.203.182 80.58.14.107 and trace to various networks in China and Korea. Taking a different tack, I looked up the various gamvling and pharmacy URLs they were trying to be inserted in our site. Interestingly enough, they were registered to different persons, such as: Alexandro Marie Old Eagle School Rd 63 Swaledale Wisconsin US 76127 Jazmyne Benjamin Wister Rd 40 Rodman Florida US 65255 Isabella Perla Continental Blvd 28 South English Maryland [...]

I had a surrealistic moment in Walgreens. I was there to pick up a (legal) p;erscription. Walkign out, I noticed that the soothing background music was actually the pseudo 1960s Pictures of Matchstick Men by Status Quo which I always took as a trippy psychedelic song. No Muzak or cheap midi version, it was the full song, It was creepy. Then again, give a nod to the old rockers, they are still at the music in this video.

Yes, I have been a bit obsessed lately with the roaches who have been spamming our Maricopa Learning eXchange. This is not all I have been doing this week, but it grinds away. I have a latest fix which will be secretive since I believe the spammer is a reader here (“howdy!”)- but so far, from the new spam logs I am running, they are going directly to the dung heap. From the patterns I recorded up to now, it is apparently the work of one spam roach, and this roach has likely written a script to do this, or they just enjoy cutting and pasting their spam into forms. His/her format is sadly predictable. In a way, I set one trap. We now have a spam key hat is generated from the comment submission form, but it is embedded in the for as a hidden form element. Any script [...]

I seem to keep forgetting to take a look at the nifty Blogdigger service- a site that allows you to drop in a pile of RSS feeds, and have it return to you a single RSS that represents a combination of all the content. And there is more every time I go back. My experiment has been to assemble the RSS feeds from known learning objects (ugh here comes that word…) repositories into one Learning Objects Bloggdigger group. You can subscribe to this feed via its own RSS URL: http://groups.blogdigger.com/rss.jsp?id=252 But when you go to the Blogdigger page for this group they offer a search field, so you can key word search for results within this pile of objects, for example, all the items among the Learning Object feeds that contain the word “math”. Nice. But wait, there is more. This customized display also has a customized RSS feed- so [...]

I’d say it is nothing new these days to highlight or discover a new use of weblogs… No wait a minute, it still is interesting to see what pops up on the blog-o-verse. I’ve been at it since April 2003 and have helped a few groups and individuals in our system get started including 3 our our college centers that support faculty with technology. A number of them sputter in an out and you realize that it takes an extreme form of OCD to continually blog. One of our colleges has done quite a bit with student weblogs, and was highlighted in Stephen Downe’s excellent EDUCAUSE Review article on “Educational Blogging” — unfortunately, I cannot seem to find any links to send you, but trust me, somewhere out in Mesa Arizona, students are blogging. They also are doing it with the blog feature inside an internally developed ePortfolio system first [...]