October 2008

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Legacy

October 14, 2008 in About Me by Big Eazy | No comments

Our digital legacy distracted me from the real topic…. My real legacy. What will I hand down to the future?

I don’t really have any property from the past other than some digital photographs. I don’t have any property whether buildings, land, or mineral. Those things belong to my parents. To be fair, they did ask me to take some of them when I left (and continue to suggest I do so).

Maybe there is some intangible something?

  • Expertise?
  • Values?
  • Accomplishments like a technique or a discovery?

Nothing yet.


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Frustrations

October 13, 2008 in Personal / Relationships by Ezra S F | 1 comment

American politics frustrates me. Little of it is genuine. People are being tricked into believing obvious lies. Positions are veiled in marketing speak to make them sound better than the reality. Maybe there is an honest candidate? I just don’t have faith in the integrity in the American political system. In any case, I have already voted. I recommend that if you can, then get it done ASAP and prior to the actual election day.

Apparently there are lots of car accidents on Election Day? I’ll hopefully be teleworking that day.

I turned down an offer to work a web site called Real World Painting. The kid doing the web site let it get suspended (back up now). So the owner wanted my advice. He really needs the most help with search engine optimization. He’s interested in reading up on it. Anyone have suggestions?

A friend has turned up with lymphoma. So I will probably set up a web site to accept donations to help this family with the expenses.

Been talking with Mom about the economy. I did a quick calculation. Add $700 billion to the $10.3 trillion national debt to get $11 trillion. The employed U.S. work force is about 145,255,000. That puts the burden of this debt at 75,728.89 per worker. Add in those on employment or not in the labor force to get 234 million people. We share a $46,936.33 burden. Last I did this calculation it was only around $30 thousand.

That is enough for now.


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Obama and McCain

October 11, 2008 in Gov't / Law / Politics, Photography, from LiveJournal by Big Eazy | No comments


Obama and McCain, originally uploaded by Ezra F.

Politics ruin a good meal.


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Open Response To Bb ACSS

October 8, 2008 in Blackboard Vista by Ezra S F | No comments

17. What is the single most important thing Blackboard can do to create a better client experience for your institution?

Provide successful workarounds or bug fixes to the identified issues in a timely manner. A timely manner means within 5 days to the user and 180 days to me. By the end of 5 days, the affected users have given up on ever getting a solution. We know we have lost that user ever giving us the benefit of the doubt about our service again. We only keep the ticket open in hopes of preventing the same issue from happening to another user and losing them as well.

All you other Blackboard customers out there. What did you put here? Or any of the other freeform answers. If you didn’t get to do the survey, then what would you have liked to put there?


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Blind Not Insane

October 5, 2008 in Music / Audio by Ezra S F | No comments

The National Federation of the Blind is upset about a movie portraying people who are blind as behaving badly.

Pyyhkala, 36, of Boston, said he has read the book and seen parts of the film. He said his grievances stem from the film’s potential to sway public attitude about blindness. He said the movie exacerbates stereotypes and gives false information to uninformed viewers. [Link] (Since starting this post now requires a login?)

I haven’t seen the film or read the book, but the trailer for the films shows the people being put into quarrantine for a medical epidemic where people go blind. Stories generally portray people as acting incompetent and fearful when they are trapped in an unfamiliar situation. The whole point is to create an environment whereby a person, the hero or heroine, who is the bright light of reason and to whom everyone else appeals can rise to the challenge.

Blindness happens to use people who are blind, most likely because a the author was trying to be creative and use something readers would find new. Jose Saramago: ”Stupidity doesn’t choose between the blind and the non-blind.” [Link]

Chris Danielsen, a national federation spokesman, said while he understands that the film plays on the public’s fear of sudden blindness, the idea that loss of sight is equal to incompetence and immorality is “outrageous” and “vicious.” Everyday tasks like getting dressed and using the bathroom do not become impossible if a person loses their sight, Danielsen said.

Works of fiction do not depict reality. Otherwise… they would not be fiction. Stop giving movies more meaning than they actually have. Otherwise, you give them power they didn’t already have.

The Catholic Church’s opposition to the Golden Compass made me read the book and go see the movie (latter was awful). I wouldn’t have cared otherwise. Denouncing it made me wonder what they had to fear from something so silly as a book and movie. After seeing the trailer, I wasn’t interested in Blindness. After reading about the opposition, I am interested. I don’t have much luck with movies from books lately, so I may go book first.


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What Makes You Happy?

October 4, 2008 in Science by Ezra S F | 2 comments

Apparently singing to females makes male birds happy by triggering certain parts of their brains. Video games, chocolate, and some drugs like cocaine are associated with similarly creating happiness.

How are you stimulating your VTA?


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Zeroed In

October 4, 2008 in Fun, Photography by Big Eazy | No comments


Zeroed In, originally uploaded by Ezra F.

I took this picture by reducing the amount of light in camera because the one with a normal level got washed out. Interesting effect.


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Water

October 3, 2008 in Quotes by Ezra S F | No comments

From George…

You can lead a horse to water, but he will just drown.


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Propaganda

October 3, 2008 in Humor / Weird by Ezra S F | No comments

Wow… I have been ignoring a lot of propaganda lately.

Work will often send email to all the employees. A filter sends those to my propaganda folder. I only have 5 for the first three days of September and 11 for the first three days of October. Not a promising start.

Of course, it is election season, so both the DNC and GOP are asking for my vote.

Meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings.

Event invitations from all corners.

Need to hit reset in my brain and boot from ROM.


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Forcing Weblogic’s Config.xml

October 2, 2008 in Blackboard Vista by Ezra S F | 1 comment

Let’s nevermind why I am working on this in the first place. Namely…

  1. the Blackboard Learning Environment Connector introduced using the hostname and port for applet URLs in Vista 8 Blackboard,
  2. Blackboard dropped WebCT’s support for using a different port for an application when behind a load balancer.
So we found out we could use port 443 as the SSL listen port because we terminate SSL on the load balancer, Weblogic would not bind to port 443, but the Vista application would be tricked into displaying to the end user what we wish.
In the past week, we have put the correct config.xml in place multiple times and found it reverts back to an older version with the port we don’t want. The first time, I was lazy and did not shut down the Weblogic admin server because… well… that was the lazy practice I had used in Weblogic 8.1 and had not had a problem. My shell record shows it was correct then. Within hours it wasn’t correct anymore.
So, we found a few things…
  1. a copy of the config.xml is stored WEBCTDOMAIN/servers/domain_bak/config_prev/,
  2. all files in WEBCTDOMAIN/config/ are pushed to the nodes,
  3. to change this value in the Weblogic console requires turning on a feature to bind to the SSL listen port.
Additionally, we think research into this would show Weblogic stores this information in memory. It will then write changes it makes to the file back to disk on the admin node (destroying our change). Managed nodes will then pick up the change.
The latest shot at this is to purge the #1 and #2 on both the admin server and managed nodes, put the right file in place on the admin nodes, and see if it reverts again.
So now I’ve got to write a script to periodically check if the nodes have the wrong listen port and email us should it change.

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