CogBlogged from ‘December, 2005’

If you are a serious to semi-serious Mac user and do not own a copy of Alsoft Diskwarrior, stop reading this, run, out and buy one. Shouldn’t you have: … the most highly decorated Mac disk repair utility ever. It repairs disks that no other program can repair… DiskWarrior is the safest, the most technologically advanced, and the most powerful utility to eliminate directory damage available for any computer… Instead of patching the original directory, it uses a patent-pending technology to quickly build a new replacement directory using data recovered from the original directory, thereby recovering files and folders that you thought were lost and that no other program could recover. What are you still doing reading this? Yesterday was the second time this year the Warrior has saved my digital life… I was saving a file to my portable Firewire drive (I maintain all my work content here, and [...]

Hmm, the last slew of things written here have been rather snippy. It might be time to see the doctor and get some more blue pills.

I’ve never taken a business class and come to my own conclusions on business practice based on my own direct experience. But shee-ooot, what do the folks in Harvard have in mind? A few months ago, I got a letter from Northwest Airlines– I used them about 4 years ago for a flight to Michigan, and picked up a few thousand frequent flyer miles. But I’ve not flown them since, and see little chance of using them again, so I took up their offer to trade in my miles for a pile of magazine subscriptions. I got PCMagazine, Outside, Time, a nature magazine, something for my wife, and for some forgotten reason, the Harvard Business Review. HBR was a stretch, but maybe I was thinking about a recent article I read online about “Crap Circles” (Don’t bother clicking if you are not a subscriber, another brilliant business decision) about the [...]

First, of all, the answer is “no”. The question is what Will at Work Learning poses in Are Wiki’s Inherently Flawed?. While it provides a provoacative blog post title, the question is aimed wrong, and not really even answered. The underlying belief about wikis is that “all of us are smarter than a few of us.” This is comforting illusion in theory, but is just plain wrong in practice. The mediocre don’t always understand enough to judge an expert’s pronouncements. Groups of people often tend toward groupthink or mob psychosis. Powerful interests often control the public conversation and thus become the final arbiters of what is fact. Conspiracy theories often have ninety-nine lives. Hmmm, big, strong words, but what data, evidence is this assertion based upon? CogDogBlog’s rule is to be skeptical of any sweeping generalization made about something on the internet, because it is too vast, to deep, to [...]

I was pretty sure I had seen it before in quick passing, by Michael Feldstein’s recent mention of Instructables led me back for a slight deeper scan: Here’s a nice little tool, community, and design pattern for creating and sharing how-to learning objects. Basically, it provides a wizard for inputting text step descriptions and illustrative images. Mix in some Flickr-style usability principles and some folksonomic tagging goodness, and you have a nice little instructional confection. Following a long line of resources for the Do It Your Self Type leading up and through MakeZine, Istructables provides both a collection of information for those interested and a platfom for building illustrated guides on how to build stuff. What can you learn to make? A bike rack made of PVC pipe, Computer-controlled music-synchronized Flashing Christmas Tree Lights, 3D chocolate printer made from LEGO, Patternmakiing tips for Bras, and my favorite, How to turn [...]

It’s wonderful when real people can utter statements that go beyond what someone’s imagination can conjure up. I live in Scottsdale, Arizona, a city known for its luxury resorts, endless seas of golf courses, ritzy art galleries, giant mansions (who truly requires 15,000 square feet of living space), monster SUVs, etc. The money increases as one heads north through the city; our home (1200 square feet) in a south working class neighborhood helps keep the median income from going to far into the stratosphere. In today’s paper was a story on a rash of break-ins of luxury SUVs, how thieves are cleverly disabling car alarms by cutting battery cables, and drilling into panels to sever door releases. A police spokesperson described one woman whose vehicle was broken into twice in two weeks since it was not parked in the garage (I would guess this is a place with a 4 [...]

Thanks to an email nudge from “Jamie”, I’ve added Yahoo My Web 2.0 to the set of social bookmark tools you can combine into one browser tool via the Make Your Own Multipost Bookmarklet Tool. For those not even sure what all this means, I built a page that allows you to pick all the bookmark tools you might use (del.icio.us, furl, simpy, and like another 12 more), and combine their JavaScript add site browser buttons into one… This means, while viewing a site you want to add, you can populate several sites via one click. This was done solely in my own interest at a time when I was using more than one. It was about 2 minutes of work to add Yahoo as it is a pretty clean JavaScript. The only thing it lacks that others have, is the ability to also submit the chunk of text currently [...]

We announced to Maricopa today the availability of our MCLI iForum at http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/iforum/ This is the first online version of the print publication we’ve run for many years. This is all built in WordPress. Our hope for upcoming issues is to have people submit drafts remotely, but with a time press, we had folks send drafts as email and word docs. However, internally, we used WP to do the cleanup editing, and that worked out well. As much as possible, we tried to get away from the tone of third person dry reporting, and aimed for some more reflective type articles. We are encouraging with some leading questions (ahem, outsiders welcome too) comments/feedback via the comment box. I’ve used the subscribe to comments plugin to make sure all authors get notification. Features include: Student Success and the Building of Involving Educational Communities by Dr. Vincent Tinto – this was a [...]

PT Barnum’s rule lives alive and well that the buggiest, most inexplicable, frustrating (tabless) Web browser in terns of its refusal to follow Web Standards has the most users. Again, I have found that my time in web design is spent: * 30% developing a solid design in a web-standard browser such as FireFox * 70% testing and coding in hacks and fixes for things Internet Explorer does for no sane reason The latest is that applying a solid 20px border on the left side of a blockquote class causes all content following to be shifted left, out of view, by 20px, as if I applied a negative margin. Removing the border clears the problem. Putting the border on the top, right, or bottom, clears the problem. A browser with voodoo.

Some people may pay heed to the title of Glen Campbell songs (who is a local, and has even taken tours of the Phoenix Jail) and give me a call or email before landing at Sky Harbor Airport. Micheal Roy, from Wesleyan, and I have exchanged emails for a few years but have always missed crossing paths at conferences. He emailed a few weeks back that he was coming this week for the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) meeting, and we set up a breakfast meeting time (which I managed to enter on the wrong datem, but we managed to chat over coffee this morning in the lobby of the Hyatt hotel). He arrived last weekend, and since I was out of town, I provided some recommendations for some desert hiking in the Superstition Wilderness area. I described my favorite, an intense hike with about 3800 ft of elevation gain [...]