CogBlogged from ‘January, 2006’

Okay, D’Arcy, what have you inflicted on me? I was getting a lot done this week, and with compassion and empathy read of his hard drive and server failures. Now I am having that day, almost the same. Our office G4 Apple server has been flaking out, getting hung, all week long. Staff report files gone missing, errors on damaged files, etc. I had some luck with fixing file permissions, but with it happening again today, it was time to copy the data to an external drive (and the server settings), and rebuild it from scratch. Like our XServer, I am now partioning the 40 Gb internal drive into a 10 Gb partiion for the OS and the rest for data. This way, if the OS goes down, I can re-install in the smaller partition. But alas, my SmartDisk 40 Gb FireWire drive started making clunky noises, the yellow access [...]

Is it just me or is it lately that del.icio.us is getting wonky? My links pictured below are…. not so…. tasty. Hasn’t the infusion of Yahoo bucks had an effect? Maybe it has gotten too popular. Maybe it is the time of day, phases of the moon.The free love the net gives can get testy when the great services we grow to love used to become more like the crashing bloatware we curse on our desktops. Hello furl?

For the last few months (going back to August 2005), I’ve taken a self-induced hiatus for educational conference travel, but that is now changing quickly with three planned trips on the books in about a month’s span. Plans are now posted up on my IndyJunior map (and good to see Bryan Boyer’s source web site is back up- it had blinked out a few months ago), but the travel stickers between now and the end of February include: January 29-31: San Diego, EDUCAUSE ELI Annual Conference. The real reason for the trip to San Diego is the continued search for the best fish taco. Always an adventurous honor, I’ll be co-presenting with Brian Lamb on “Beyond Blogging- Ready For Prime Time”, which is intended to be a look at blogging’s evolution to something more mainstream in education and its fit into the larger stew of social software. We are cooking [...]

Double the buzzword fun! I’ve only glazingly-eyed scanned some things people are writing about “Personal Learning Environments”, but I just wonder if you create a TLA (Three Letter Acronym) on something, does that mean it really exists? But I understand, embrace, and cheer the notion that the tapestry of free, loosely connected, highly personal technologies (and so many of them are like, “Web 2.0″) that have the nice viral growth of use tat is running smack up and against the philosophy, structure, rigidness, lethargym fees, of our “established” educational technologies. I like the tension. Bring it on. Like Leigh and to an extent James, I feel like, “so what? the whole dang ‘net is my PLE”. What is it if you give it a name? I am more than open to being wrong, and guess I should read a bit more on the work being done, but at this point, [...]

1. Validate 2. Validate 3. Validate If you are doing anything in terms of publishing RSS feeds, from blogs, for podcasts, etc, keep posted in front of you a reminder to start and continually running your published feeds through a feed validator. Problems may not be visible, as many News Readers are forgiving on RSS miscues (like web browsers are with sloppy HTML), but with more and more “services” built on content shared by RSS, we might keep forgetting that this is XML under the hood, and XML is pretty specific (for good reason) on structure. At least 85% of the problems people write to me about Feed2JS are problems where RSS feeds fail validation. This is critical, since RSS feeds are parsed by MagpieRSS library and it will bonk out quite often if a feed is not valid (tight structure is needed to parse feeds). Common problems are weird [...]

This Friday, January 27, 2006, Maricopa is welcoming Alice Bedard-Vorhees (Colorado Community Colleges Online) for a workshop on Bringing Guests to your Courses with a Virtual Speaker Bureau. This is a concept she developed at CCCOnline and has been nicely expanded as a service offfered in MERLOT. Simply, it means creating a directory of people and their subject matter expertise who are willing to participate as virtual guess “discussants” for classes with online discussion boards. It’s a great way to bring expertise into a class, w/o much effort and no travel needed. I’ve done this a handful of times, and with good up front structure, it can be a very valuable activity. Alice will be leading a hands-on session here with about 40 Maricopa faculty and staff, and she is bringing in two more remote colleagues so our participants can see how these are set up and carried out. It [...]

Upgrading to Flash Player 8 for Mac OSX– follow these instructions: Among the billions of reasons I primarily use a Mac is that I do not need to go ask some IT department to give me permission to do something to my computer. In fact it is usually the reverse- when something wants to run on my Mac, it usually asks me for permission. To me it looks like some web proofreader at Macrodobe was sleeping at the keys.

One of the social software sites I wish I had more time to delve into is 43Things. It is insanely social (in a good way), with all the pieces running. You have a personalized space, tags, rss, post to blogs, subscribing to flickr feeds, some sort of social FOAFing. If you have not been there before, it is a place you can list 43 goals, click and see others with the same goals. You can mark off ones achieved, and all of these can be posted to with blog like entries. Once a goal is completed, your entry goes in with the others who have done the same goal. The goals are listed on a tag cloud map. For example, last yuear I had posted I wanted to run a half marathon. So as of Sunday, I was able to mark this one done, and the individual entry I wrote [...]

Leave it to Zeldman to cut Web 2.0 hype to the bone. I relish the bite and fury of the words (plus the beautiful, elegant, Web Standard layout of A List Apart): To you who are toiling over an AJAX- and Ruby-powered social software product, good luck, God bless, and have fun. Remember that 20 other people are working on the same idea. So keep it simple, and ship it before they do, and maintain your sense of humor whether you get rich or go broke. Especially if you get rich. Nothing is more unsightly than a solemn multi-millionaire. To you who feel like failures because you spent last year honing your web skills and serving clients, or running a business, or perhaps publishing content, you are special and lovely, so hold that pretty head high, and never let them see the tears. As for me, I’m cutting out the [...]

Flickr Backuppr Originally uploaded by cogdogblog. I received my flickr DVD backup created by emblaze and while I like having this backup of the pictures, I think about the best part is the priting of the label. Some things I find underwhelming are: The format of the disk is a few folders for my image sets, and a folder of “uncategorized images”: Viewing them means loading an HTML file called “All_Photos.html” which is one ever long scrolling list with just photo titles and thumbnails. The order is screwy too- it list the photos in my sets first, than all the other ones. It is completely unmanageable. The icons then just link to a summary page with the title, embedded photo, and caption, and the tags. Nothing is linked, not even to the original URL on flickr. There is not even a navigation link to get back to the index With [...]