CogBlogged from ‘July, 2005’

flickr foto New Toyavailable on my flickr I just got this new camera, a Canon Digital Rebel XT– going back to being a newbie learning a whole new interface. 8 MegaPixel SLR, wahoo! I’ve been saving up my spare change and with some help from sideline consulting, I bought a new digital camera, this Canon Digital Rebel XT. My previous 2 personal digital cameras and ones bought at work were all Olympus brands (I became enamored of their lenses with my first portable 35 mm Stylus used for many years), and had grown weary of the lag time and data writing lag of my Olympus 4040 (like the Elk cross the road in Colorado, but the time the 4040 was ready, I ended up with a photo of my rear view mirror), though it has logged unknown thousands of images. The reports on the Canon so far live up to [...]

It was getting tedious, even with my own multi-site bookmarklet tool, to load web sites I have scanned into both furl and del.icio.us– especially as Firefox seemed to 60% of the time lose track of the Furl content. It’s nothing wrong with Furl, I like the service, and it has most of the hooks I need… I just am trying to shave some minutes and keystrokes form my life. I’ve been more intrigued and using more often del.icio.us, so I decided to make it my primary dumping ground. There are more interesting ways people are writing applications that tap into it. My concern was that I would lose all the sites I had tracked earlier in Furl. But have no fear, Underdog, the Internet is here. Some quick googling got me to Anything Else’s (and read aloud the URL ;-) Furl to Delicious tools. Skipping the pythion stuff (I am [...]

Google is certainly sitting idly by while Yahooo ramps up its personal services. Check out the new Google personal home page, where you can select from a number of RSS sources, or connect your own: This was a quick set up with some of my own feeds, important weather selections, and a few of the presets that Google provides. Note many of the cool (yummy Ajax) in page editing. It is smooth. Note how can can re-arrange the layout by just drag and drop. Wishing a pachyderm might do that some day. I’m still musing how one might truly use this– it would be nice for folks like me who move from computer to computer. What sorts of feeds might one want to fit into a page. It’s kind of interesting when you plug in keywords to the create a section — somehow Google is searching for RSS feeds to [...]

AS an FYI, this blog, Feed2JS, and every other thing internet originating at Maricopa will be going offline Saturday July 30, from 7:00 Am to Noon (PST). They are needing to do major electrical upgrades to the main server room, and thus not only are web servers going down, so is email, phone, and internet connectivity for our entire college system. Oh my gosh, what will we do? I feel the shakes coming on already. The main room server has been running with several hundred boxes on a grid originally designed for a few mainframes– and in the midst of our strong electrical storms where outages are the norm, the need is strong to beef up the wiring and the back up generators. That is phase one- we will have complete outages again Saturday and Sunday August 6-7. There. No blog, no cry.

Holding back no barb, John Dvorak is a self proclaimed Creative Commons Humbug: Will someone explain to me the benefits of a trendy system developed by Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford? Dubbed Creative Commons, this system is some sort of secondary copyright license that, as far as I can tell, does absolutely nothing but threaten the already tenuous “fair use” provisos of existing copyright law. This is one of the dumbest initiatives ever put forth by the tech community. I mean seriously dumb. Eye-rolling dumb on the same scale as believing the Emperor is wearing fabulous new clothes. His first primary beef (besides not getting a personal email response back) is that he somehow sees Creative Commons licenses as being exclusively not allowing commercial re-use. I’m wondering if he looked closely, as adding a non-commercial exclusion is an option to CC licenses, not a built in factor. Moreso, CC licenses [...]

More fun, graphics creative Frivolity. Logogle, the Google Logo maker, allows you to turn any text into the style Google’s word log. See for example, the new monetizing entity, CogDogBlogoogle: This was found via a curious site trendalicious which bubbles up popular sites that have recently been tagged in del.icio.us: trendalicious is a near real-time view of website popularity trends as reflected by the del.icio.us social bookmarking service. All URLs that have been posted by a minimum of two people in the past fifty minutes are displayed, ranked by the total number of recent posts. Could be an interesting way to do an animated screencast over time to track popular memes… but in general, it is a powerful use of the collective delicious hive mind.

Breaking News! Based on all the feedback on my complaints about the slippery ear buds that came with my iPod Shuffle, I googled for the suggested Sony brand, and quickly found the Sony MDR-EX81LP buds at Amazon for $32 clams. And in white cables to match the pod. But what an even nicer surprise when the box came to my house in less than 24 hours than I ordered them! How the heck to they do that? I just plugged them in and the sound is much better than the Apple mini waffles. I’ll know better tomorrow when/if I go for a run. Just hope the cables hold up to the heat and my sweat here– there is a fair bit of packaging meant to wrap of the cords. Wow, does technology get more fascinating than this?

Today was time to knuckle down and get some work done. I am about 80% done moving an entire nested web site with connected database to a new server (this is going from a Linux running on a PC platform to our enterprise web server), and trying to get all the walls, roofs, and floors swapped without anyone even seeing a thing. The first step was moving all the databases from one mySQL server to another. It’s pretty easy to do dumps of the databases as a text file of SQL statements- I did it quickly in phpMyAdmin. Most of the ones less than 2 Mb then loaded easily into the new database server (also using phpMyAdmin) but the bigger ones (one is more than 6 Mb) had to be done command line. Not too bad. Created the new accounts on the new mySQl server. Changed my connection scripts on [...]

Not yet available in any stores! iPod Flea commercial I’m working now in a FleaCast. (Another fine Kotke remaidered link)

Wow, wow, and wow… I am very tempted to ponying up some paypal dough for Spam Karma 2, the powerful plugin for Word Press 2. It assigns incoming comments and trackbacks a karma value, based on your moderation habits, content in the comment, remote blacklists, and more. There is a raft of options for you to select how finely it works, but more or less it jumps into action before the bad spam hits your blog notification. You do get to monitor its logs, delete the bad spammies, get a regular report by email. You can “rescue” items that ahve been mis-identified (this does not happened yet). My approved comments (legit ones) have a positive karma average of 28.37 — and the bad stuff caught? It is a huge negative karma average pf -21784! Off the scale! The beauty again is that it is cutting off the spam (like the [...]