CogBlogged from ‘May, 2006’

I have oft professed my deep love for flickr. I have been a user of it since March 2004, when it had that hokey black flash interface. I have uploaded almost 1400 photos, not nearly prolific as some. But recently I was slapped by one of their policies regarding a new way I was using it (under another account), and have gotten non-replies to my appeals. Is there a Supreme Court level I can take my case too? Has the Yahoo-ization taken away their spirit? Who knows? But let’s back track. For our Second Life Project at NMC, I have been working on the NMC Campus Observer, a blog-published site that aims to be the news source for the project, modeled after a campus newspaper, or sorts. As an associated adjunct, I created a new flickr account to load pictures taken within Second Life and to syndicate back to the [...]

RSS was the cutting bleeding edge in 2002, or at least it seemed to me. Few people knew what it was if you muttered it (well that has not changed), but very little of the things we are excited about now would have have their oomph without the underlying, humble glue, of RSS, ugly to the non techie eyes XML. Today I did a brief, light speed, un-rehearsed overview of RSS for a small group- done via online service iVolcalize– this was at the request of Steve Gilbert, from the TLTGroup, and I have dodged Steve for almost 8 months. But he’s persistent, and in that time, he has managed to get himself into podcasting, a bit of RSS thinking, etc. So today’s session was one of their “iVocalize Synchronous Sessions” on Feeds [RSS, et al.] & Aggregators Samples, Info, Tools, & Uses. I’ve not been i one of these, [...]

I don’t know the words, but am ready to make them up. Apple, grant me the serenity to accept the firmware I cannot change; courage to update the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Maybe not. This morning, I installed the latest firmware update for my MacBookPro, and worked through the morning. Over lunch, I began installation of a new copy of Adobe Creative Suite. Disk one went fine, but after inserting disk 2, the fan and disk spun, and then lapsed into silence. A long silence. No muse clicks would do a thing. So I forced a bard reboot (apple-contril-power), held down the mouse key to eject the Adobe disk. Still frozen. No clicks would do a thing. Insert the OSX Install DVD, another hard reboot, hold the “c” to boot from the CD. Whew, at least the system worked here. Ran the Disk Utilities and [...]

I am about shoulder deep in trying to learn Drupal as intended for a new platform to implement for the NMC web site- obviously since it can do so much, it lends itself for creating a multi-faceted site with customizable themes, separate domains for different projects, and all the 2.0-ish tools you’d hope are in the bucket. And it falls into my previously proven success at following the paths of others. I am not quite as ready as D’Arcy is to jump his blog from WordPress to Drupal (but my hat is off to him for doing so, and quickly). WordPress does all need for the blogging here. But the ideas I have for the NMC site call for much more than just blog tools and wrangling WordPress to other forms, and Drupal sure seems like a natural fit (I’ve spent a lot of time looking at features of other [...]

OR if at first you don’t succeed, search and search again? What started as a simple task chewed up a good hour of time today… Eager to start dabbling in Drupal, I decided to get the needed parts running locally on my MacBookPro. I got MySQL 5.x downloaded and installed. I mucked up my root passwords (typo) and spent 12 minutes in vain for the right way to reset it…. upscrolling my terminal window revealed the goof in my earlier set up of the root password (yup some of the time sink is my own fault). Next I got a copy of phpMyAdmin, to run locally to do basic database admin. It should be a pretty basic set up since it is behind my firewall, so my security can be, well, lax. Yikes. I keep getting all kinds of errors: MySQL said:#2002 – The server is not responding (or the [...]

There’s been more then enough sound and loud reverberations to the DOPA (or is it DOPE-A?) proposal hovering over Washington D.C. to do.. Tom Hoffman has summarized it better than I could under Being Unreasonably Reasonable (and here too): When it comes to dubious web filtering laws like DOPA, I think you should start with “there is no evidence that this is a problem beyond a few anecdotal reports.” Show me some real statistical evidence that students are being harmed in significant numbers because of strangers contacting them through the web while in school. If you want some federal money to study the situation, mazel tov, otherwise, you’re just fear-mongering. Come back when you’ve got some data. And Will Richardson has posted an open wiki version of a DOPA letter one can send to their elected reps. (Is it kind of ironic, weird, that the inserted banner ad is for [...]

It only took like 2+ years, a big Yahoo buy out, and finally they have gotten enough kinks out of flickr to drop the “beta” form the logo– now they are “gamma”: It caught my eye as soon as I loaded my photos. The changes are subtle (more previews per page, drop down menus to get to things more quickly than fumbling in the footers, slide sets on the right). For more, see “Alpha… Beta… Gamma!”. Need to dig more and find out what else is new. It’s about time flickr rolled out some new stuff. What’s after Gamma?

flickr foto New Tech Deviceavailable on flickr No, this is not another cool mini MP3 recorder– this is an insulin pump that is tethered to my belly. I am getting up to speed with the functionality before I put it in action. It’s a bit larger than the MP3 recorders I’ve been researching, but this unit has a radically different purpose, more personal. For 35 years I have been on insulin injections for management of diabetes, and after hearing the tales of other diabetic runners during my training last year, I am moving into the computer age. This insulin pump carries a resevoir of insulin, and is connected to a short tube that is inserted into my skin. It bleeps out tiny increments of insulin 24-7, and at meal time, I program in enough extra to compensate for the food I eat. I still need to carry another device for [...]

The clever blog post entry title not used here was “Museum People Have Great Assets”. Last week I was in Austin all week, not to soak up cool music or wander aimlessly down 6th Street, but holed up in an anonymous, freeway junction hotel for the first of several NMC training sessions in support a new project. The web site is yet to be done (ummm, that is in my court now). This project is supporting art museums from across the state of Texas to develop new online interactive pieces, built in Pachyderm — and tying in with the concepts of digital storytelling, with the aid of the Center for Digital Storytelling. So this was a 3 day ‘boot camp’– not only in technology, Pachyderm, digital video, photography, editing sound, lighting, but also sessions by the brilliant Joe Lambert on the notions of “Storymining” an approach for creating content that [...]

flickr foto Chain Of Entropyavailable on flickr It’s time to wax again on the sheer giddy glory of stumbling onto web gems by the serendipity of curious link clicking. It started in my RSS feeds, scanning an entry on Net Neutrality Comes Home to Haddam in Mike Roy’s new blog, Digital Incunabula. I actually didn’t even read the whole post (sorry Mike, hope you get to watch the Sox soon). But in the first paragraph, my eyebrow got raise at a link to Wiki in Eductaion — look at the URL www.ikiw.org — “ikiw” is wiki spelled backwards. This site by Stewart Mader (now del.icio.us-ized) looks like a great one for tracking wikis in education. I got distracted by a link to Stewart’s other site, the Science of Spectroscopy which sent me down a riff of memory lane when as an undergrad I had this great part-time job doing electorn [...]