CogBlogged from ‘June, 2005’

I am convinced all of my software projects are perpetually in progress, but that never lets me stop from spitting out a new one. As a preface and someone who has worked with them seriously only a few years, I am deeply in techno love with database-driven web sites, notably the object of my affection being mySQL. There seems to be no limit what one can do (well my technical skills can be limiting) and to reshape information in ways not possible in the static pre-life. But enough warbling. This is the latest creation.

I’ve been jumping between my Mac web browsers, habitually in Safari, running to FireFox to try the cool new stuff, or to log into a site as a different user. But now I think I will not be going back to Safari. There is just Too Much Cool Firefox Stuff– greasemonkey, the search plug-ins, RSS reader extensions like Sage, Fox-only things like the mechanism in TiddlyWiki as described by Brian Lamb. The only hang up was the motley crew of bookmark tools I had lingering on the Safari toolbar… no sign of an easy export. A dab of Google gets me to the Safari Bookmark Exporter (wonderful tool) that allowed me to export the Safari bookmarks to a Firefox friendly HTML file. Sweet. I know, I know. Firefox has been cool for a long time. I’m just a creature of browser habits, but have finally picked up and made the [...]

This is the real kind of scary. A large wildfire has been raging this week north of the metro Phoenix area– while some 11 properties in the forest burned, the far north bits of million dollar homes were spared of damage by the Cave Creek Fire. The world’s largest saguaro cactus was a victim along with a lot of wildlife. However, extremely dry conditions and strong winds from the southwest are pushing the fire quickly north, with not much to stop it from chewing across some of the most rugged backcountry in the state, which is a tinderbox. See the news story and photo in the Arizona Daily Star and updated coverage by the Fire Incident Management team. It is a front of 50 foot flames chewing across dead grass and brittle trees. And it seems to be bee-lining a path northeast to our little cabin in Strawberry, with only [...]

A faculty colleague from one of our colleges emailed recently from an institute up in the northwest, asking for recommendations he could share on online professional development opportunities for faculty. I have somewhat limited experience myself with the TCC Online conferences and some ones from the Australian Flexible Learning programs I did a few clicks back. I dredged through some of my bag of links collection for people who do great wok in this area like Tom March. The Computers in Writing Online Conference hosted at Kairosnews blipped across my readers a lot lately. And with a bit of Googling and I dredged up another dozen or so. But I thought, what a tedious manual process. This is the place for social software. Maybe it could be a big meme, or even a medium sized one. So I went and delicious-ed them all using my custom tag of edpdonline, which [...]

flickr foto This Old Phoneavailable on my flickr This may shatter my reputation as a techie, but I have hung on to this Nokia phone since 2001– I really am not a huge mobile phone user, and I come it at max maybe 150 minutes a month. All this phone does is enable me to make phone calls (shocking), though in fits of boredom, I have played "Snake" on it. As you may notice, it has been sporting a lovely bit of duct tape to keep the battery connected. But Old Nokie is now retired, and I am sending this phone via my new Motoroloa V10, a camera phone that I used to take this picture. Actually, I first got a Nokia 6225i but never got it to send pictures nor could anyone at the store or the tech support line. Hint- never buy a new phone at the store [...]

Skepticism is healthy and leaves room for later acceptance, eh? As previously barked, I am not convinced yet that there is a natural leap form the success of podcasting to saying video will take off just the same. I would enjoy being wrong. David Weinberger, the Cluetrain guy, the Small Pieces guy someone I read often and respect immensely — is posting video interviews with the blogerati of the Supernnova 2005 conference. It is being referred to as “blogcasting”: Blogcasting is a new program being launched at this year’s Conference, that offers a video-based online blog format with a twist. It will feature hosted interviews with speakers and key conference participants as well ad hoc commentary from our attendees. Our Conference commentator, David Weinberger – popular industry analyst, writer and blogger – will interview panel moderators as well as approach session attendees; distilling the key points, asking the questions on [...]

More exclamations of “holy flickr” emitting from my room. The flickr montager generates a mosaic image based on tags of a word from flickr. I played a bit with it, tried my own montage on the tag “dog”. It randomly chose some image of a pocket puppy type dog (or as my friend Donna refers to ‘em, as “barking slippers”) and generated a montage image of it base don other flickr photos tagged with “dog”. Digging in deeper, I tried to think of a tag that would pull up my own photos, so I used “Mickey” for my former Labrador (and logo for my sites) where I have a bunch tagged. The image chosen to display was of a cake with Mickey Mouse. Sigh. But hovering over the icon images that form the larger one, I found a few of my own photos. Imagine th fun when I realized that [...]

I’ve had a peek inside what Brian is agRSSively leaking… no wonder he’s been so darn quiet. This will rock (and maybe bust their server)

I am in pain. This hurts. There is a telephone conference blabbing on my desk, and I am ignoring it. This is a technology project coming out of a large organization we are members of, and I have been tapped to be our system’s rep. It is aiming to create yet another searchable archive of educational resources, but the development is fixated in a 1980-1990s model of information architecture. It flies with the grace of an iron pigeon. They are pounding away at creating fixed hierarchies, long flowing submission forms, limp content evaluations, but the prototype interface is making my lunch hard to keep down. It is a clunky wobbly wheeled portal approach straight out of Internet 0.5. No RSS. No comments. No tags. I am having trouble resolving this with what I see externally in terms of folksonomy, social networks, ontologies being over-rated. I am keeping a low profile. [...]

I really should be doing other work, but I thought of a quick improvement to the Built In Blogger presentation I did at the NMC 2005 Summer Conference on “More Than Cat Diaries: Publishing With Weblogs”… the hiding and showing of slide notes (using the “+/- notes” button in the top left) displayed a CSS chunk of text by toggling its display properties. What I did not like was that the notes simply showed up at the bottom of a slide, so a full screen slide, the notes would appear out of screen, below the fold line (requiring a scroll down). Well that was an easy fix- just change the positioning properties for the div to be absolute, so now a slide that appears like this: When you click the button in the top right, now the notes appear layered over the slide: And an extra right aligned button under [...]