CogBlogged from ‘July, 2006’

flickr foto 2 p.m. monday commuteavailable on flickr downtown dallas straight ahead, obscured by fog. Ugh. Arrive in Dallas a few hours ago, and its about 106 and 90 percent humidity. I… can….. barely….. breathe….. I…. am….. swimming…. in sweat. And what a nice chatty cab drivery I had. I was almost at the hotel when I noticed he had every a/c vent pointed towards the driver!

I had a bad feeling about the loud clickity fan noises coming from my MacBookPro. With the heat this laptops put out, loosing its cooling mechanism would be big bad karma for my work machine. Since the laptop was still under warranty, I trundled off to the Apple Store in Phoenix, knowing it would likely need a week plus stay, possible shipped off somewhere for repair. I do enjoy the vibe of the Apple Store, but this was a work day, and not a fun browse day. It did not look too crowded at the “Genius Bar”, where from past experiences I know you have to check in via a browser. Previously I had waited perhaps 15-25 minutes to drop off a machine for repair. This was odd- it was 2:00 PM in the afternoon, and the time slots coming up when I could talk to someone about a machine [...]

I’m just getting my feet wet with customizing MediaWiki for several NMC projects- sure it is easy to set up and install out of the box, dump the flower logo for your own, but there is sure a lot of stuff under the hood. There are a lot of flexible editing codes if you can dive into them. While Tim notes some new WikiPedia RSS feeds, and there are RSS out form Mediawiki powered sites to update on changes, I found nothing to render RSS content inside Mediawiki, which I have seen on some other wiki sites. So it was off to scrounge, and I found an extension hot off the press called GISWiki/RSS– te nice thing for me is that it is based on the good old MagpieRSS parser, something I have played with quite a bit. So I dropped the script into my Mediawiki extensions folder, created a [...]

Yesterday was just one of those reverse Midas touch days where every piece of technology I touched, so matter how trivial, seemed to up in flames. It would have been advisable to close the laptop, grab a book, and go outside to sit under a tree… but it was 115 degrees in the shade yesterday, so there went that option. It started with some loud, metallic clicking fan-like noise emanating from the left side of my MacBookPro. This was more noisy than the “hum” or “mooing” noises often reported, and it grew in intensity as I hit my most heavy CPU usage app, the Second Life client. On restart, it would settle down to a lower steady noise, but it does not sound healthy. First step, run a backup on everything. Check the Apple Support forums. Nothing there comparable. Run the extensive hardware tests. All passed. So this means, I [...]

The feed cat is coming out of the bag. A few weeks ago I bought a domain, and with some hosting donated by Aaron at Modevia Web Services, the Feed2JS service that lives now at http://feed2js.org/ has its own home at http://feed2js.org/. All I’ve done is more or less move the current site in whole, made a few edits, and set it up for some stress test. What does it mean? If you want to give it a try, this new server is going to be watched over and given technical support if needed. All you need to do is to either rebuild your cut and paste feed code or simply edit your JavaScript to replace the 2 occurrences of http://feed2js.org/ with http://feed2js.org/ I am not making any changes yet at the Maricopa server, but likely within a week or so, my access to it will vanish. If all goes [...]

It just goes to show that on the net, someone is always finding things out for you. Doug H was kind enough to let me know that he spotted on the Chronicle an announcement for the Instructional Technologist position at Maricopa I vacated in April. They must have scooped it from the local newspaper ad, as from what I was told, it opens to external applicants next week. So if you are in the hunt for a great position, and can take the heat (the heat of Phoenix, meaning that you can restrain your self when someone reflexively utters, “it’s a dryyyyyyyyy heat”), then sharpen up your resumes. I am glad for my old office that they have started the HR wheels in motion, but I am not vested in the details, so please do not write me asking questions about the job. Do your research, prime your materials, and [...]

flickr foto Rain, Finallyavailable on flickr I hear in other parts of the world they have this word for when "water falls from the sky"…. Here in the Arizona desert, the first rare bits of summer rain are quite magical, and well worth stopping doing whatever you think is important, and go outside and just soak it in. Back when listened to radio in my car (pre-iPod), oner of local Phoenix DJs nicknamed “Bone Mama” would sometimes alert us to “an outbreak of weather”– a freakish event where the sky was not brilliant blue and the sun not even visible. The first real rain of summer is happening right now, the build up of the summer “Monsoon” patterns, when the winds shift their regular pattern to bring moisture from the Sea of Cortez, and when this hits the strong thermals rizing over the desert– kaboom! a perfect recipe for a [...]

Judge for yourself…. http://aralbalkan.com/ :-0 thought there is cool stuff here like FlashAid

While mulling over how to move Feed2JS to a more stable, friendly, supported home, especially sparked by the comments by David, I am thinking a whole new framework is in order. Don;t worry, I will leave the legacy… er, curent code as is. My own prime directive is not to break anyone’s previously constructed pasted JavaScript, so no parameters have changed name or purpose since 2004, or whenever it was I rolled this out. But David’s comments hit home, that having a handful, 10, 20, 50 other sites one could use to generate a feed, were not really “mirrors” as I called them, suggesting if one doesn’t work, the code would tried the next… they are more like dumb clones. I re-called that I had done some test cases, and got working, a time out script, so if a server did not respond (e.g. like when the Maricopa site blinks [...]

flickr foto Rocket’s Readyavailable on flickr Today was NASA’s third time this week hoping on good weather for the liftoff of the Space Shuttle. How cool it went smoothly on July 4! I was among 70 avatars watching the coverage live from the International Space Flight Museum in Second Life (they capped the attendance at 70). You can catch some of it via snapshots I loaded into a flickr slide show, and if you like, you can listen to the audio that came from NASA during the 20 minutes or so I was there (I turned on my WireTap Pro to record all sound coming into my computer, there might be some background ‘tap-tap’ from Second Life’s chat interface). The whole experience was unlike any other I can remember in terms of the communal excitement. Sure, there was the Apollo 11 lift off and moon landing I watched on black [...]