CogBlogged from ‘November, 2004’

Ouch, my blogging fingers are rusty. Among tweaking and updating many of our project web sites this week, an inordinate amount of time has been spent: * cleaning up the droppings we find on our wikis (Thanks for all the potted meat food product shipped directly from Southeast Asia- love those links). * sorting through a database connection error that sent me more than 300 error email notifications in 12 hours, not the best thing to deal with while I was on a 26k dialup connection. Deleting them all crashed my OSX Mail.app repeatedly. Worse, I found out the error was likely operator induced (meaning my own dumb fault) when I updated a code library using a wrong a test version, yielding a mis-typed database login. This ended up clogging a database with an inability to handle connections, somehow the sftp process tanked…. * adding new grep matches to the [...]

Surely of interest to no one, but I’ve been fortunate to enjoy a rather lazy extended piece of time, 6 days wrapped around Thanksgiving at our Arizona mountain hideaway in Strawberry (yes readers, Arizona is not a swath of Arabian windswept desert, but have places with trees and weather). I had sworn our elevation was 6000 feet from a local topo map, but was sadly informed via my GPs that we site at 5620 feet. Yep. winter weather rolled in today with morning hail, snow, and rain, and we are warmed by a fire in our wood stove. And this is primitive, as the occasional internet access is at a whopping 26 kbs via dlal up. It makes ‘surfing’ a completely different experience lots of patience and paddling required. After a return home last week from the 3 weeks of great but intensive workshops in New Zealand (23 of ‘em), [...]

Scott Leslie recently wrote about using Rollup to put together a super feed of his favorite educablogger’s furl and deli.icio,us feeds: lots of folks have separate Furl and del.icio.us sites/feeds. I’ve been subscribing to one or two of them in the past, but wanted to get all the ed tech bloggers’ bookmark feeds in one place. So off I went to Rollup.org, where I created a new RSS feed that rolled up the Furl or del.icio.us RSS feeds from Alan, Brian Lamb, James Farmer, Greg Ritter, George Siemens, Trey Martindale, Harold Jarche, Will Richardson, D’Arcy Norman and myself. I would have added more, but these were all I could find. So the handy thing about this is that I can subscribe to one feed in my bloglines account and see all the URLs collected by all these brainy folks. which is syndicating from http://rollup.org/rollup/rollup.php?id=495 So we can say Scott is [...]

Our system is somehow involved with this but I cannot quite figure out what it is or does.

flickr foto dog-truckavailable on my flickr Another one for the Cut Outs Flickr Group — emphasizing the blue door in this shot in Rawena, NZ. It was really the color of the door that caught my eye while enjoying a “flat white” at the cafe, worth setting off as a “cutout”?? Still, it takes a sharp eye to find the puppy. Following one of jill’s links landed my in the Flickr “Cutouts” Technique Group. This is YACTAF (Yet Another Cool Thing About Flickr)- a group allows you to contribute photos from your own collection to a group pool (via your Organizr tool) which has a layer on top of it a discussion board. So here is where Flickr does it again- provide a forum to share image editing techniques, a gallery to show off the products, a forum to exchange ideas…. voila! Could this be one of those so called [...]

I’ll take one of these, please. You can have a lot of faith in the sensible writing of Danny Goodman, who long ago for me threw all kinds of new light on HyperCard, and later JavaScript… My job in this book is to translate the gobbledygook spouted by all sides of the email wars into language that any email user can understand. My main goal is to snap email users out of their passive roles, waiting for others to solve the “email problem.” The real power, it turns out, lies in all of our hands On the other hand, I do have several thousdand fabulous offers from Nigeria for free enlargement and enhancement of my ….

Via open artifact cam this link to MovableBlog’s Integrating del.icio.us with PHP and Magpie describing a way to embed the output of your del.icio.us links in a web page. As always, there are many paths to the same destination. As frequent readers know, this can be achieved via the JavaScript approach using our Feed2JS service or standalone code. Of course there is a round trip delay for this as a PHP script must be called which then fetches a fresh feed from the source (or loads a cached one). Or maybe JavaScript is just too clumsy for your tastes, If you are on a PHP capable server, you can install Magie (which you need to do with the approach described via MovableBlog), but if you also use our PHP version of Feed2JS you can achieve the same effect. The advantage of our approach over the one described above is that [...]

For the benefit of my fellow American travelers, I am sharing some key learnings that may save them embarrassment, shame, or international ridicule when visiting this beautiful place. Note- this is very much not to be taken seriously! I am writing this on the plane back before it all starts to fade away to the memory banks. BELIEVE IT OR NOT Kiwis are many different things A “kiwi” may refer to the flightless nearly extinct bird that is in severe endangerment from introduced mammals. Or it may mean the fruit, and sometimes that might be a yellow fruit, not the green ones we are used to in American grocery stories. Or, most likely, a kiwi is a New Zealander, and it is said with great pride. One most important transportation factor, is that kiwis actually drive on the LEFT side of the roads (the will say we drive on the [...]

Today is my last day in a little slice of green heaven known as New Zealand where I have been visiting and giving workshops at several institutions in the Auckland area (see the CogDog’s upside down inverted cousin, the CogDog(kiwi)Blog). Among other bits, I’ve been stirring up the interest in wikis here– and like my standard fashion, I go about getting folks excited about technology and then I leave ;-) All of my workshops and presentations have been provided in 100% wiki format, and you can find a mirror of this content at: http://realgar.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/wiki where you may notice that this wiki is completely read-only, a steel walled, secret service escorted, roach proof one way wiki (to keep the traffic down on their server here, be nice!!). There is a new collection I quickly assembled for my last demo today “Riding the Wiki School Bus: How Educators are Getting on Board” [...]

Feedster is offering a new search tool to help you find content that comes from weblogs, a handy way to scope your web searches. For the uninitiated, Feedster provides a google-like interface for searching things found in RSS feeds. It offers tools to store your own set of feeds (like another flavor of Bloglines as a web based RSS reader), services to get updates by email, and likely quite a bit more (it has been a while since I rummaged around Feedster). Some quick and not so dirty examples of Feedster Blog search results (you gotta love being able to save these as URLs): Learning Object Podcast Social Computing Probably a little used gem of note that Feedster search results are themselves available as an RSS feed, e.g.: Learning Objects Feedster Search RSS a tip of the bloghat to the RSS feed from ResearchBuzz for the link.