CogBlogged from ‘June, 2005’

Darth Vader is baring his soul in blog format Darth Vader is an immaculately conceived knight-bastard imbued with magical powers who rules the known galaxy at the right hand of the merciless and brilliant Emperor Palpatine I. Though he maintains palaces on both Coruscant and Vjun, Vader spends most of his time travelling aboard Executor, the flagship of his deadly pan-galactic armada. He enjoys fixing things, listening to music, and crushing people’s tracheas with his mind. There is a huge amount of writing, perhaps storytelling in blog format here. If you think it is trivial, note the number of comments: Must have a galactical sized Technorati profile Tip of the blog hat to Sébastien Paquet

The blog may be blinking in and out for a week. I’m currently visiting family in San Diego through Monday (look for some pix soon of Sani, my step-son’s cute ‘little’ Great Dane puppy) and a hope flight back to Phoenix to catch a Tuesday morning flight to Hawaii for the 2005 NMC Summer Conference. Looking forward to visiting there with the great bunch of people who go to NMC events, as well as colleague Bert Kimura, who I’ve worked with on the TCC Online Conferences the past few years (via iChat, Bert’s been teaching me the key Hawaiian language expressions, mahalo, Bert). Yes, someone has to go to Hawaii, so I raised my paw. Blogging on the beach? I doubt it. Hope to be a bloggin at the conference, until then I have to cram in some, ahem, last minute work on my presentations.

Will deftly spotted and posted about a site that showed in real-time the update action over at WikiPedia: You can see the line for each edit in Wikipedia as it’s made. In the few moments it’s taken to create this post, over 80 edits have been made about everything from the Pakistani Coast Guard to Keropok (the most visible fried snack in Terengganu) to Mog (a playable character from the Squaresoft game Final Fantasy VI…Huh?) How cool is that? And how cool is it that just in these last 15 minutes, dozens if not hundreds of people have felt compelled to add what they know to this “compendium of all human knowledge.” but do not bother getting your own glance as blog-popularity (blogularity?) killed the site: “Sorry, rcdumper is a prototype tool not intended for widespread public use. being linked from a high traffic website has created too much load, [...]

For an upcoming presentation, I was doing some random clicking at Blogger to find some tacky or “bad” blog examples (they are out there, stuff you’s not want to be on screen when the boss wanders in). It’s sad how many URLs there are wasted by lik spammers who create Blogger.com sites just to spam them selves. See example but for **** sake, do not click any of their insipidly pathetic links. Spammer, spam thyself.

If anyone is more into sarcasm than myself, they are hanging out at the Uncyclopedia “the content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. A total loving mimicry of the WikiPedia, at the Uncyclopedia at least there need be no debates about authoritative resources since it proudly claims to be full of lies. Just look at the decrepit logo! Uncyclopedia is an encyclopedia full of misinformation and utter lies. It’s sort of like Congress or Parliament. Unlike Congress or Parliament, however, we do have a sense of humor. Nonetheless, this is one of the only factual pages, before everything turns into a puddle of utter confusion and disarray. Savor it. And for the love of Sophia, we know you like disarray, (and confusion) but stop adding confusion to this non-confusing page which leads to confusion, and possibly disarray. Which we wish to stop. Non-non-confusion, that is. Not disarray. Or is it the [...]

In Executing Learning Objects, Resurrecting Sharing and Reuse, Scott Leslie takes some well thought shots at the sacred cow term of “learning objects” (and his animation of the “execution” could use more blood, guts, and squeals). As part of a workshop for the BC Educational Technology Users Group, Scott has nicely posted his materials in wiki fashion (he is now an alumni of the Brian Lamb School of Wiki Presenting, I signed up more than a year ago and the thought of “power” and “pointing” has never reached any proximity)…. as Scott writes: I began the session with a formal execution of the term “learning object” which you can see at the link above (feel free to reuse this – maybe if it’s played enough times the term will finally die off)…. As I go on to explain, it’s not the concepts the term was supposed to foster that I [...]

I was experimenting with the Jots.com bookmark and publish to weblog API, but as duly noted in comments by Will and James, it was turning my blog reading into more of a linkatorium: I’d rather get it by subbing your Jots feed rather than your blog feed. True, so I am shutting of the publishing of “Today’s Jots” and may set up the feed as a sidebar WordPress Page. I have been adding a few of these by setting up a few of my othe feeds to publish to the page via Feed2JS, such as my presentation RSS feed and another one I played with doing a feed for the technology articles from our bi-annually published MCLI forums (such much worth subscribing to the feed as its update change is twice a year, but RSS makes it handy to publish the summaries elsewhere). On another front, I am still weighing [...]

Movie mistakesgoofs, bloopers, pictures, quotes and trivia from thousands of moviesTags: pile FeedWordPressFeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for WordPress. It syndicates content from newsfeeds that you select into your WordPress blog; if you syndicate several newsfeeds then you can WordPress’s posts database and templating engine as the back-end of an aggregation (”planet”) website.Tags: blog, rss, wordpress TagsurfTagsurf is a new type of online message board which uses tags to help organize subjects instead of threads or channels. Like Del.icio.us used the concept of tags to organize shared links, and Flickr used tags to organize and share photos, Tagsurf uses tags to help organize posts and messages between users. You can sign up for various alerts based on tags, so you can be notified of new messages instantly across a variety of mediums: IM, Chat and Email. Tagsurf is a hyper-forum: It allows you to communicate on a variety of levels, [...]

Borrowing again on my vast array of literary resources, paraphrashing from 1979′s Steve Martin’s The Jerk: Navin C.D.B. Johnson: The new spam book’s here! The new spam book’s here! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity I need! Casino, Pills, and Porn links in my blog! That really makes somebody! Things are going to start happening to me now. Yes, a mark of blog distinction surely must be in attracting spammers, right? That’s right, the spam roaches are rubbing their little antennae at my blog front door. Fortunately, WordPress keeps them all at bay, tossing them into the moderation queue, and a few at a time are easy enough to flush with one click. Sadly, I see the tide growing, and really do not want to waste my time getting notification of a new comment that provides irrelevant cruft like: … when playing slot machines online or at a land [...]

Planet IdentityPlanet Identity is an aggregation of public weblogs related to Identity Management. The opinions expressed in those weblogs and hence this aggregation are those of the original authors.Tags: rss The RSS Files — Readers Weigh InMy suggestion was to scrap RSS, which stands for "Really Simple Syndication," and replace it with KOSS, or "Kind of Simple Syndication." I believe that this presents a more accurate description of how most people outside the technophile community will think of it after they try using it.Tags: rss mozexMozex is an extension which allows the user to use external programs for these actions: * view page source * edit content of textareas (possibly utilizing a spell-checker in the text editor) * handle mailto, news, telnet and FTP links * download files Mozex works with both Mozilla and Firebird. Currently only the *NIX and MS Windows versions of these browsers are supported.Tags: plugin