CogBlogged from ‘March, 2005’

I keep recording the audio “skyperview” and “iRiverView” interviews I am doing for the upcoming article I am not yet writing, and have 21 now in the collection: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/podcast.html Most of these were colleagues I cornered with my mp3 recorder, as well as a few more audio devices So added to the list: * Eric Feinblatt and Michael Feldstein– from the SUNY system, we were having a Skype conversation so I just tagged on the interview http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/eric_and_michael.mp3 * Shelley Rodrigo– English faculty at Mesa Community College (one of the 10 Maricopas) when she dropped by my office to chat about her work with our Ocotillo Hybrid Structures action group. She’s one energetic teacher! http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/shelley_rodrigo.mp3 * Cheryl Colan– wears many hats as a part time Media Technician at Phoenix College (another Maricopa), part time web designer for me at MCLI, as well as a talented digital video editor and digital storytelling [...]

Carbon Copy Cloner is worth 12 stars out of 10 for a Mac OS X application. After a rebuild of the OS on our XServe (that powers this blog and Feed2JS), our temporary solution was to build the OS on an external Firewire drive loaned by a helpful Apple engineer who trouble shooted our server issues. Since we are running smoothly, and Al needs his drive back, CCC made creating a local OS a snap. Our XServe has two internal drives, one with most of the content, the other with the OS. The advice was to move all data off of the Volume that houses the OS, including the web directory (already done), the QuickTime streaming movies directory, and the location of the mysql database files (that required command line creating a symbolic link so the files could be found on the secondary drive.) So it was time to put [...]

I’ve always admired Google for taking the time to do important things like rotating their logos. I was a little curios when I reached for my favorite web tool today to find something and saw: And of course a quickie search revealed that today is Vincent Van Gogh’s birthday. Among other things you get by going sideways from a search is a short story called Van Gogh’s Birthday Cake and the oddly-dressed logo at Candy Genius. 152 candles to you, Vince.

Today we announced the opening of registration for our May 16-20 Learnshop “Bringing Digital Storytelling to the Classroom LearnShop”– with 12 available spots. Check out the chronology: * 08:53:24 AM : email announcement sent * 09:03:22 AM : first registrant signs up * 11:03:24 AM : 12th registrant signs up 2 hours and 10 minutes to fill a workshop. And here I thought people in our system were ignoring system-wide messages.

Since I am pondering doing the MovableType to WordPress conversion, I’ve done a bit of reflecting on the last two years of blogging. Nothing profound has emerged, but I did start to think about the part of a blog post I spend the most time on (obviously it is not spell checking) — coming up with a good title. A good post title, grabs attention, sets the mode, and I often tried (in vain) to hit the punny spot. It’s worth being original, and just not having a dry, ‘just the facts ma’am’ sort of title. So I thought, why not peruse all of them via a MT template that displays all blog entries listed my title in alpha order? The template was a snap, the meat of it being: <ol class="posted"> <MTEntries sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend"> <li> <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"> <$MTEntryTitle$></a>   (<$MTEntryDate format="%B %e, %Y %I:%M %p$>) </li> </MTEntries> </ol> So here [...]

Some might squint at my ethics, but by an interesting sequence of events, this Friday Brian Lamb is coming to Maricopa for a Dialogue Day on Learning objects, Wikis, and Other Curious Things. Brian and I have done a number of great collaborations since we both started chatting at one of those stale lecture format conferences, and have done some (I think) great work since then. So I was rather agreeable when Lisa Young, co-chair of our Ocotillo Learning Objects Action Group, e-mailed me a few months back and said: I’ve been reading a lot of great articles and blog posts by this guy at University of British Columbia and I think we would make an excellent speaker. Do you think we can bring him to Maricopa? Sure, no problem! So while Brian writes Far more disjointed than usual. It’s yet another cry for help…, we’re lining up an audience [...]

You can have your wiki and move it too. Several times this past year (and well this past week) I have had reason to move an entire UseMod wiki to another server. It is easy and tricky at the same time, and I think I have it all figured out now. One need was to have copies of the wiki as backups and to run locally from my laptop (I run all my web apps on my personal unix G4 powerbook). This was useful for example, when we presented at the League For Innovation conference in New York City that wanted $700 bucks for an internet connection in the presentation rooms. Zppppppf to that! I just ran the same wiki on our server from my laptop, and as a bonus, I could work on the wiki on the plane flight over. The other need is moving a wiki to another [...]

flickr foto The Result of Our Online Application Programavailable on my flickr Over the past two years we developed and implemented an online system for faculty to submit applications for professional growth summer projects, for their reps to review applications, for a committee to submit their scores. Sadly, they insist on this– printed versions of all 120+ applications. Can anyone hear the trees falling in the forest, or is it just me? Sigh. Big sigh. Huge sigh. We’ve moved most of the process of our faculty professional growth summer projects application to an online system, home built. Applicants create their drafts online, electroncally send drafts to colleagues, submit to their college reps for approvals, reps can return for edits, review committee members log in to enter their scores and comments, and the results are tallied to a giant display so the committee can make their final recommendations. All of that [...]

Regarding the recently blogged More Frivolous Fun: Spelling with Flickr, there is a new feature that you can use a small chunk of cut and paste JavaScript to put in the source of your web page, and have it dynamically create a different set of flickr-ed letters on every page reload… think of it as a dynamic logo. As noted in the comment from Eric the site creator, you can now use his script to generate a logo dynamically in a page via JavaScript: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://metaatem.net/spell.php?picsize=s&string=CogDogBlog"> </script> I like it! I like randomness, mixing up content, etc. Thanks Eric!

Two years, a year ago, it was noteworthy when feedless-sites were worth announcing they had added an RSS feed. Is it really newsworthy anymore? There is some sort of tipping point at work here, just curious if the threshold has been lost. It takes me back 10, 11, 12 years ago when the first web sites were popping up. Every (almost) new site was nesworthy in its presence, announced in the NCSA Mosaic What’s New Page. I recall combing through my multimedia magazines, noting the first companies that had a URL in their ads. I was collecting them like mad in manually edited collections. There was no Google, no Internet Explorer, not even a Yahoo (well maybe a baby Yahoo). It was a trickle, then a steady rain, than a constant flow, then it is just part of the scenery. Will the same happen to RSS? Will its absence be [...]