CogBlogged from ‘June, 2006’

Remember the “S” in RSS standing for Simple? I’ve gone through several gyrations [1] [2] [3] in trying to leverage RSS-ified calendar data to push content to a blog. Calendar information is just not as neatly boxed like Title, Link, & Description. What I wanted is a web-based calendar tool (lots of them), that I could give others editing rights, went beyond the fill-out-forms-click-repeat process, and it would not only generate a normal calendar view, but also an events listing suitable for a blog side bar. What I really sought as something that would list both upcoming events and past events. Google calendar certainly fills out the needs for the front end. The closest for the sidebar publishing was the iCal-events plug-in for WordPress, which could use the iCal data format published by gCalendar. What’s nice is it bad built in caching scheme, so it was not hitting gCalendar for [...]

flickr foto Poster Presenteravailable on flickr Come meet me on July 12, 2006 to talk about our large format printing project at Hamilton College Like the conference session converged with a Second Life presence we ran at the NMC 2006 Conference in Cleveland, we are again playing with that intersection of real and virtual. We have taken high res photos of the poster presentations that were at the Real Life conference, and brought them into the NMC Campus in Second Life. Attached to each is a notecard with some information on the poster, and a number of them have attached links that will open relevant URLs in a web browser (I really want to build in a feedback mechanism…). You can zoom in really close on these and get a lot of detail, in fact, more than I can usually see by squinting my eyes at the real thing– see [...]

Following up yesterday’s mess, just getting rafts of emails from people (rightfully) worried Feed2JS makes me heave large sighs. This was a nice little project, that started as something to fill my own needs, that I lofted out on the net… and all of a sudden people around the world are riding on it, small lonely bloggers and a few corporate types. Scary. Bottom line- in less than a month, I will not even have access to the server at Maricopa where it sits. the folks there may look after it, but they do not even know much about it, and have other things to worry about. And despite some people’s “cute” attempts, it’s not part of my job at NMC to leap into action when the server borks, or help people figure out why their output is aligned left or… So in some sense I want to let it [...]

Right now the server running Feed2JS is down and out. I have only the most limited, around the corner and snake up a pole access, but the server is toasted until someone on their IT staff can go in the server room and hard start the server. It’s just a humble XServe getting yanked and pulled form around the globe, and I can only imagine the anguish as folks who have the code on their site see their pages getting hung in the air. I am long gone from Maricopa, looking ahead, yet I have many regrets about not getting that software out onto an open source site before I jumped ship. It grew in scope and use at a crazy pace (something like 15,000 unique feeds cached per day), yet most of the external mirror sites have blinked out, and the way it is organized now puts too much [...]

flickr foto Geek!available on flickr Yes, he’s on holiday. Yes, he’s in a garden. Yes, he’s checking his email. Yes, he wanted to "work from home" the following week. It never fails when someone asks me about working from home…. within seconds there is some snickering reference to, “working in your underwear….” So funny. Why does that thought leap at neuron speed to someone’s mouth? I can almost see the question coming/ Yes I get dressed to work at home…. it may be in shorts, tanktop, barefoot, and I might wait until 5:30 PM or Thursday to take a shower, but I AM DRESSED. There are some rules of decorum here, ok? So why the questions? You don’t wear underwear at the office?

I thought I was on the road of redemption with my new found love for a multi-button mouse, a Kensington Bluetooth PilotMouse. The need for this came as a result of the lack of any way on the XP side of my MacBookPro to right click anything. The Kensington mouse I got had a great feel, not too monstrous, good movement, etc. But over time, I have grown more frustrated with all the effort needed to get this critter awake and working. On the Mac OS X side, any time I need to use it, I must go through the Bluetooth process of discovery and set up via the system tools. If I sit and think too long, or go outside to check on the dog, or just take a break, the mouse gets lonely, and decides to disconnect and go offline. On the Windows side, it got to the [...]

I am about 99999.9% sure (always leave room for doubt) I will never be among the digerati sitting in the plush red seats for a TED conference. No dogs allowed, eh? However, I did, a few months ago, happen to be at a home of someone who has, and got to see watch on DVD examples of some of the sessions, and wow, there are some great presentations done in those brief formats. And now, the velvet ropes are parted slightly to let those not in, near, or even heard of Monterey, savor some of the TED sessions on TEDTalks, where you can get them in audio, flash, quicktime, google video, itunes, podcast, vodcast, itunescast… heck, maybe even in morse code. And its free… well a wee bit of ads…. it is free thanks to some BMW sponsorship which whizzes by in the video openings. But you get the sessions [...]

I should have never left the TV on. Oh, How Could ??? How the ^#%$& Did the spirit of ever end up in an ad for freakin’ mini-vans? what kind of happened? Help me understand, !

I’ve seen those little world maps on other blogs that show where people are visiting from. Pffff, I may have said, what sidebar clutter fluff. Extra bandwidth ego churning. But recently, I was sharing some of my favorite ed-tech blog links with a colleague, one of them Josie Fraser’s EdTechUK, and my colleague was rather impressed with her blog’s ClustrMap. Holy smokes! The small map on your site is not even visible due to the red dots, and the bigger map has her readers’ located almost everywhere (well, Josie, to be honest, you are a bit thin up there in Siberia ;-) So being the curious type, and ignoring the curiosity and cat warnings, I checked out Clustr Maps — which says “beta” but heck, flickr was like 80 years old with a beta stamp and still wearing that after being munched up by Yahoo. It’s pretty easy to set [...]

Sigh. Maybe it is multiple personalty disorder given its Adoption of Macromedia, but my Adobe PhotoShop CS2 Updater does not allow me to choose itself, so it can update itself? Weird. Abort. Retry. Fail?