CogBlogged from ‘January, 2005’

flickr foto MCLI Server "Farm"available on my flickr A tour of the mcli server “farm”, more of an agglomeration. Starting from the left, we have “Jade”, a 1.33GhZ Apple Xserver that runs CogDogBlog (weblog plus a few more), the Feed2JS site as well as virtual hosting Maricopa eP, an electronic portolio system. The Xserve also does some QuickTime streaming, such as our examples of Digital Stories created by faculty in a summer workshop. Below the table, the left tower is Azurite, a Mac OSX server (1 GHz) that mainly hosts project files and FileMaker databases used my our office staff. It runs as a web server just a copy of our Writing HTML tutorial as well as a smaller amount of QuickTime streaming. The tower on the right is a 664 MhZ Pentium 2, also know as “Realgar” where I test a few new applications, run an evaluation license of [...]

As a geek happens a lot- I get curious and start poking around on the net, peeking at web page source code. Tonight, I was checking out the NOAA weather forecast for near our cabin and there was a little note near the top: New! Cell Phone (wap) URL: www.srh.noaa.gov/wml Now I have a stone age cell phone with no hope of being WAP capable (Wireless Application Protocol) but vaguely recollect how the limited display capabilities require web content in WML form (Wireless Markup Language). Well, see more on the WAP/WML acronym soup from W3Schools. You can get at info pretty quickly through WAP since it is designed to be just data, structured, and lightweight (the NOAA urls load s-l-o-w on the 28 bps modem speed up here). So here is what I dug up….

Rummaging quickly through my filtered email (some legit things keep falling through), I came across one of those ones with 2 cryptic links and then a whole raft of random words. I think the intent is to try and flood or fool email filters (but this is my un-educated guess, but see The War On Spam for more). Just for fun, I decided to take the words, add a few RETURNS and indents, and present it as “Word Salad Spam Poetry” (word salad being the jumbled of un-related words by those suffering from schizophrenia)…. yeah, like it says, “Cherry nebulae dogleg stealthy slump” <strong>Who's the new player in the pherma biz!</strong> Cream kelp honeybee katie inquisitive, lamplight functor darken. Maxima    concert grocer        lapidary marque. Take corrupt decay casteth bellwether angential gettysburg? Christ hexameter aldrich james kirkpatrick chromatograph sleepy door. Kidde rena reticent dacca belt miasma newfound brush     assault [...]

Sometime between 1:00 Am yesterday and 11:00 am today I think this server was down– I could not ping it nor access any content on it. I was rather worried, knowing that there are many people using Feed2JS for their sites, and the sites will just stay in an endless attempt at loading if the server is not there. My aoplogies if this did happen. The problem is that right now I am at my cabin in Strawberry, where heavy snow has been falling for about 2 hours (it is lovely), and I had no intention of leaving heaven to kick start a server– and I was not able to contact anyone that could. I started exploring some ways to try and build a timeout option in JavaScript, but struck out. The issue is that a page contains a statement like: &lt;script language="JavaScript" src="http://www.mcli.loc/jade/feed/feed2js.php?    src=http%3A%2F%2Fjade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu%2Falan%2Findex.rdf"    type="text/javascript"&gt;&lt;/script&gt; and apparently [...]

The new Journal Of the Hyperlinked Organization (JOHO) metaphorically paints folksomony and controlled vocabularies as “trees vs leaves”: Folksonomies are different in important ways from top-down, hierarchical taxonomies — the shape we’ve assumed knowledge itself takes. The old way gets some experts together who create a nested tree of concepts into which everything in a particular domain can be slotted. Think of the Dewey Decimal System. Think of the Tree of Life. The new way invites users of information to add a word or three to the objects they want to find again. The old way provides the vocabulary we are to use. The new way lets us use our own words. The old way puts the control of the classification system in that hands of the owners of information classifying it. The new way gives control to the users of information. The old way creates a tree. The new [...]

I am a card carrying porcupine. According to Amy Gahtan’s new series on “Handling Online Vermin”, the internet is swarming with undesirable, nasty “vermin” who apparently threaten the well being of innocent online souls: online media presents a deeply weird juxtaposition of isolation and connectedness, anonymity and identity, parts and whole. In this baffling environment people can be unbelievably brash and vulnerable at the same time. In this realm, the vermin of communication thrive. Recognizing them, and choosing to react appropriately, is the key to avoiding their damage… Now Amy writes very well, writes often, and covers a lot of territory in online communication. I scan her “web” feed and read most of her articles. She may be surprised, but more often than not, I either agree with much of what she writes, or learn from her shared experiences. Sometimes she tosses up a tater, though that is too much [...]

CDB readers may know of the struggles written here to solicit Maricopa people to share their instructional materials and teaching ideas in our Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) which is at almost 1100 items. Our efforts have included bribery and competition, but have yet to embrace physical threats. If I had a buck for every time someone told me “I am going to take some time next month to get you some MLX items” I’d be retired on my own private island. Out of those 1100, probably 200 are there as direct result of online reports to other electronic systems, maybe 60 are things we have entered in other people’s names so we could populate web sites with content (see how the winners of the Innovation of the Year program are pumped from the MLX to its own site). The same goes for an ePortfolio platform, developed at one of our [...]

I recently wrote some criticism of views that RSS feeds are “only for new stuff”, and given that I had a request today for a randomized Maricopa Learning eXchange feed, it was time to put my feeds where my mouth is/was. Before today, the feeds we generate as fixed static files (updated every hours as a cron script) on the MLX where the 10 newest items over all, the newest items and random items per Maricopa College, newest items in a set of subject areas (Biology, Humanities, …)– and available as both RSS 1.0 links and JavaScript include files (unlike FeedtoJS, these are static files that just echo the output created from the hourly updates, cheap caching). I just updated that set of “fixed” feeds to include ones that are random selected items in the discipline areas. That was an easy update, and something that just fell off the radar. [...]

I saw today that RSS might be starting to meme its way across our system. It takes time. This morning I got a call from a faculty member asking where she can get software to see RSS. I sent her googling in “Desktop RSS Aggregator” not recalling which of the 90 or so ones is “best”. In an hour, I got an email from a web developer at one of our colleges as one of their committees wants an “RSS feed on their committee page featuring 3 random MLX items related to instructional technology.” Good signs indeed. Next thing I know, someone will want to use a wiki. Wait a minute! That request came 2 days ago,

Check out this flickr spawned creation, the Squared Circle Poster. It is a mosaic of 2600 photos from the flickr Sqaured Circle Group (photos of circular objects inside a square image): This image was made by compositing 2600 photographs and arranging them in a fibonacci spiral, a form commonly seen in plants, such as sunflowers and pinecones. The image was produced by Jim Bumgardner using images from the Squared Circle photo pool at Flickr, the photo-blogging website. Jim is aiming to turn this into an actual poster, and to do so, he is seeking to get permission from the people who shared the 2600 photos on flickr– and he is appealing to them to make sure they have applied a Creative Commons license (tools built into the flickr site) that alloes derivative works. He even created a second graphic that shows in color the images that need permission changes (it [...]