CogBlogged from ‘March, 2005’

I just noted that podcasts are screaming up the meme charts, and a day later some exciting news. Audree, who programs our eportfolio system available at Maricopa and her Chandler-Gilbert Community College has announced the upcoming availability of streaming media being built into the system (see latest ePortfolio enhancements, nicely published in an eport): The (opensource) Darwin Streaming Server will be installed on all machines along with a set of opensource utilities called mpeg4ip. The Quicktime client will be used exclusively (unfortunately, proprietary features preclude interoperability between streaming media servers and clients at this time). Quicktime is a standard player which is very easy to install. When an ePortfolio user adds a Collection item or Document with an extension of mov,mp3,aac,mp4v,mp4,avi,mpg,mpeg, they will immediately be taken to a “Streaming ePort Page”. This is similar to what happens when ePort users upload .html files  - they are immediately taken to an ‘Upload Image/Reference’ eport page. [...]

It is no secret for us in instructional technology that podcasting is becoming the raging meme of excitement, a good thing. Maybe it is because of media attention, or just the whole iPod thing is just too cool. I’ve heard it uttered much more recently in emails and conversation with faculty in our system, and it is seemingly leaping over blogs and RSS and wikis (who’s strange-ness is a large hurdle to overcome). Some preliminary observations: * Publishing audio has always been there. Some think that providing audio content online is equivalent to podcasting. For years, we have been able to record audio, save as MP3, and provide it as a link from a web server. Technically this is not podcasting but people refer to it as such, and it is technically trivial to do once you figure out how to record/digitize audio. May the gods bless Audacity for providing [...]

I just spent about 20 minutes doing my regular spam rotations- this is a shuffling of my MT blog script names, changing of the required key phrases on some of the sites. I have a half written post I’d like to finish soon on what to do to make yourself less of a target. In a nutshell, anything your blog does that is outside the patterns of the defaults settings makes it harder for the spam harvesters. So if your MovableType comments script is named “mt-comments.cgi”, well you are wearing a sign on the back of your shirt that says “Spam Me”. While doing the routines, I saved and recycled the MT activity log- woah, is there a lot of stuff the MT Blacklist plugin stops cold. In fact, it sure looks like the cause of some of our server outages a few weeks ago was repeated spam attempts. Just [...]

This week is our system’s Spring Break, and even us administrative grunts get Thursday and Friday off. I tacked on a day off Wednesday, and how am I and Mrs. CogDogBlog relaxing? We are re-landscaping the back yard, hauling sand, rock, and brick, moving hard desert earth, yanking out of control cacti, extending a brick patio. Our self-imposed sentence is 2 days of back busting labor. Actually we enjoy the hard work, and it is a great mental break from the office chair. Get outside, get dirty, and build something with your own hands. Priceless. The delayed gratification is heading up to our cabin for the next 4 days.

I had 5 minutes of technical glory today, where I felt like I mastered the machine. The rest of the day I may have been under its thumb, where I belong. Readers may note that a few weeks back I was dealing with some strange web server activity every Saturday morning that managed to take out my XServe that runs this blog, Feed2JS, and our eportfolio service. The man from Apple said, “Stick a Fork in It”, so 2 days before leaving town for a conference, I was re-installing a new OS volume (all the data resided separately). Everything was up and running except for the pesky perl modules (DBI and DBD) that MovableType needs to use mySQL database. I tried: * command line cpan (failed) * fink /fink commanded (installed but not in directories available to MT) * The Mac OS X installer for DBD::mysql (and Bundle::DB) downloaded from [...]

I’ve been very happy with our purchase of phpQuestionnaire, a PHP + mySQL set of scripts that have allowed us to easily create, admin, and export dat for online surveys. It’s been a champ, not a chump. Today I was doing a CSV (comma separated value) export for a recent survey, somthing I had yet to use. This was so I could put the data in Excel for a project manager at one of our coleges. I was disappointed to find that in the open response questions, any RETURN characters entered in the text area input fields was NOT stripped out on the CSV export. this cause major havoc, as on import to Excel, the RETURN indicates the end of a data row. As an end around, I resorted to a series of BBEdit search and replaces. The data first record was easy to spot as it was always a [...]

Whew, this is fun! Without much effort, I have added another 5 interviews, each under 5 minutes, for my upcoming article on digital net audio, You can find all 11 and (more as I add ‘em) on the mcli Forum Spring 2005 Podcast. Joining the crowd, and rounding out some of the gender gap thanks to this morning’s call for help, are: * D’Arcy Norman, University of Calgary * Sherri Vokey, University of Nevada – Las Vegas * Bert Kimura, Osaka Gakuin University (Japan) * Susan Smith Nash, Excelsior College (New York) and Xplanazine writer * Sue Lister, Ontaria Canada (she made it easy by sending my a URL for her own podcast response to my questions) I’ll be gathering a few more through the end of next week (I am on break through March 21)– now looking to widen the geographic reach (although I’ve chatted to Japan just today). [...]

Sébastien Paquet is blogging the Information Architecture Summit in Montreal and is somehow (speed typist, total recall, good tunes??) blogging out extraordinarily detailed notes– see just a sampling from March 7 Thanks Seb!

Our Ocotillo project’s use of blogs+wikis+boards, coined last summer as “Small Technologies Loosely Joined”. The premise of this was that each of our 4 working groups would maintain a regularly updated blog as its public “face”, use discussion boards for some asynchronous dialogues (and guest experts), and the wikis for brainstorming. The suite of tools (MovableType for blogs, UseMod for wiki, and phpBB for the boards, plus an events database) were all threaded by RSS, meaning 4 groups with 4 channels each of feeds connected to one central “dashboard” view of our efforts. Things have moved along since our launch September 2004, and much overdue is an update of how this is going. Before revealing the grades, a few general observations: * The more familiar tools were more readliy accepted * It takes some compulsive personalities to be at this regularly * In a larger organization, time is needed to [...]

Thanks for those who have volunteered so far for my 5 minute web audio interviews (see details). I have a few more days leeway in the process, and since the audio can be added as an online supplement, I can keep on doing them for the rest of the month or more. So far it is working out well- I have done 3 using my iRiver mp3 recorder, two via iChat and one via Skype. For the latter, I use WireTapPro to record just the audio out (as the interviewer questions are edited out), and it is pretty quick to edit and save as MP3 with Audacity. So far I have interviewed: * Colin Holgate http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/colin_holgate.mp3 (New York City multimedia developer) * Ben Brophy http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/ben_brophy.mp3 (MIT user interface designer) * Phil Long http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/phil_long.mp3 (MIT Academic technology Strategist) * Tom Foster http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/tom_foster.mp3 (Instructional technologist, Chandler-Gilbert Community College) * Gerry Paille http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/gerry_paille.mp3 [...]