CogBlogged from ‘April, 2005’

I’m tuning into some podcasts, finally. Today on my 11 mile bicycle commute (something I need to get back to doing regularly), I carried my iRiver in my pocket and listened to Rael Dornfest – Rules for Remixing, a session from the ETech Conference. It made for a nice ride in. My only flub was the wind inside my helmet made it hard to hear the audio without cocking my head sideways (making it harder to see traffic), and when I stopped to up the volume and accidentally skipped to the next track. I had to go back and start Rael’s speech again (the interface on the iRiver is intuitive for about 3 people, likely the ones who made it). An energetic speaker, Rael makes a case that the culture once limited to hackers, people who pried open technology, tinkered with the parts, and created something new, is now a [...]

Actually, we are not sure if the ePortfolio had anything to do with it, but one of the members of the student panel discussions at our February Dialogue Day with Helen Barrett, Nestor Martinez got some good news. According to a post from his teacher, Dale Doubleday: On a different note, those of you that attended the Dialog Day with Dr. Helen Barrett may remember one of the student panelists, Nestor Martinez. He is the art student that has been publishing his graphic design and painting work on his ePortfolio. His reflection on his work made him recently decide to continue to study, but in the area of painting, after he completed his AA degree in Computer Graphic Desing next month. The Phoenix College Art Department is proud to announce that Nestor received the Eric Fischl Merit Scholarship this past week. Eric Fischl came to Phoenix on Friday to personally [...]

It’s a new spam free day for CogDogBlog and our other affiliated MovableType 2.661 blogs here. I’ve successfully integrated James Seng’s captcha plugin, so that all comment posts require a human to type in a randomly generated security code that appears on screen as a graphic image or ‘captcha’. Spambots cannot automatically read these, so any spam that dribbles in is human posted. Spammers thrive on automation, not manual effort. This would not have been possible had not Audree, our eportfolio programming genius, been gracious enough to help with the cryptic perl installs of the GD.pm and GD perl libraries. Thanks Aud! Some notes: (*) Yes, D’Arcy, I know that captchas are a total barrier for the visually impaired. My plan (not fully implemented) is to provide a link to our standard feedback form which is accessible. This form publishes no content online so is useless for spammers (though they [...]

My (non-)friends in the Texas Hold ‘em camp are knocking about again. Shoot, maybe one of these days I may get around to learning this game of poker, though it surely will never be via one of their #$*@-ing web sites. These spammers are nymphomaniacs in the sense they just cannot seem to stop shoving their URL encrusted packages into any web form they can find on our sites. That is, they cannot help themselves to stick their unwanted, undesired, PPC (Porn-Pills Casino) into places on our site where we offer a place to provide feedback or to request information. Since I have the feeling they read me here (hi there spammy! how ya doing?) the news is that these forms never post any content online. Y’all are wasting your spam time and effort. Why not bombard someone else, someone bigger. It is pretty easy to smell the spam stench, [...]

The Flickr Related Tag Browser is a cool way to surf and cross surf related tags within the vast flickr photo-empire. Flickr Related Tag Browser lets you surf Flickr’s ‘tag space’. Flickr tags are keywords used to classify images. Each tag has a list of ‘related’ tags, based on clustered usage analysis. Thanks to the Flickr team for their great API. Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. I could not agree more with that last sentence. Is there a lesson out there as to what can happen when you let folks loose on data via an open API? That more people will enter a site through these more or less freely franchised outlets? It seems like the antithesis to rigid corporate portals. But enough of that let’s walk through how it works (Geez, I wish I was set up for screencasting!)…

Do you like someone else’s web design color scheme? Curious as to what color codes are used? Try Red Alt – I Like Your Colors. Just enter a URl, and it fetches the colors used as defined in HTML or CSS (some sites seem not to give them up as easily, perhaps with the @import method of CSS?). For example, I ran it on the BurningBird site and found out shades or reds and brown’s in Shelly’s current bird theme: Fairly cool. I don’t get much from top designers like http://www.stopdesign.com/ or http://www.zeldman.com/, maybe their colors are tucked away.

More on the feed front. Sam at KinScape has offered and become the newest of the Feed2JS public mirror sites: http://www.kinscape.com/feed2js/ serving up feeds to JavaScript from a server in Michigan. Again, it was about a 30 minute install via ftp (mostly me finding my own typos and errors). We’re ready for more takers, let’s span the globe! Also, I got a cryptic email from Sunil, a student at the International Institute of Information Technology in India, where it looks like theyh have set up some modified versions of Feed2JS to aggregate a bunch of student blog posts into a one page blogroll (a lot of local hits but it does not take forever)… Sunil and friends (“Intellectual Depravity”) are running some Bloxsom blogs there but some, like “reality bites” are blogspot sites: I’m someone who thinks Arundhati Roy is a spectacular blend of Michael Moore’s wit, Noam Chomsky’s intellect, [...]

I whimsically, and falsely, wrote My Dentist Has an RSS Feed (there was a point, but that post has scrolled away…). However, he is rather wired for his work. Today, at his new office, they used a digital xray machine that takes the photos of your teeth, but they insert a mini sensor card in your mouth, that is read almost instantly into a computer and projected on a flat screen in the office for him to examine and show me (no plasma screen yet). Apparently the cost savings (on supplies, film, chemicals) are significant, the images sharper and saved to an electronic record, and also since the coverage is larger, I am exposed to less x-rays. It’s one of those subtle things I like to notice where technology slips into ordinary activities, and is useful. At other doctor’s offices, I see reams of paper, paper notes, large bukly files, [...]

Often this blog has published my rants and vents against our IT department, like last month’s escapade with a hacked server. It’s only fair to report when things go the opposite way. I met face to face with the head of our server team and their top Linux tech, and they were both helpful, supportive, and we came up with some interim and long term solutions that can take me out of the hassle of being a server admin (of which I do poorly). Essentially, an aging server we currently use for our main site ( as well as hosting about 10 other major web sites in the system), is going to be getting a colossal upgrade, moving from what now feels like a moped to a new Maserati, and eventually an array of development servers on retired PCs will merge to the big box upstairs. Anyhow, the guys were [...]

Okay, maybe we’ve gushed a bit already, but something has happened here in our system. I think it is the Canadian aura, but after Brian Lamb’s Dialogue Day with us last week, people are now popping out of the ground like prairie dogs, and seeing a beautiful wheat filled plain of lovely information technologies… We’d published internally before on RSS (Fall 2003) and wikis (Fall 2004) without much of a measurable ripple. But already in a few days: (1) Our Blackboard admin has seen how Feed2JS and RSS feeds from the Maricopa Learning eXchange can be used to pipe content from our Blackboard Support materials MLX collection into a Bb site for the staff around our system that use/support Blackboard: Yeah, this is not exactly new or earth shattering, but they went and did it on their own. (2) Another group is using a new open wiki (unspecified, sorry) for [...]