Jul

9

Causal Stupidity

Filed Under Books / Novels / Writing, Computers, Science | Leave a Comment

Everything Bad Is Good for You
Image via Wikipedia

I remember as a kid, my parents restricting television and video game use because they would both make me stupid and violent. They worked too hard, so I had plenty unsupervised time to violate the rules. Plus no force would make me do homework.

The past half decade has seen a resurgence of blame on making kids dumber: the Internet. If I were a kid today, then certainly my parents would be trying to limit my time on it. Comics and radio were also accused of making kids dumb during my parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

What I don’t understand is… If we are becoming so dumb from the current media sources, then how is it possible we can invent new technology to make us even dumber? Perhaps Mark Bauerlein and Lee Drutman should read Everything Bad Is Good For You? (a review) Mike Wesch has an engaging video regarding how kids use these technologies called A Vision of Students Today.

These “dumb” kids know something as despite their involvement with media as they still significantly outperform their parents on IQ tests to the degree the grandparents would qualify for the “special class” taking the same tests. These gains are centered in our ability to create better expansive and interconnecting cognitive maps. I suggest What is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect for more about this.

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Jul

6

Firefox 3 and SSL Certificates

Filed Under Computers, Interweb | Leave a Comment

Apparently LinkedIn.com let their SSL certificate expire this morning. Assuming they really let it expire, this is a big oops. Hopefully, someone in their Production Operations Group has been alerted to the problem and is working on getting a new one.

The screenshot is from Firefox 3. In the old days, Firefox or Netscape used a frustrating pop-up for the user to choose how to handle security certificates which were not properly signed or expired. My first time, it took three readings to make sure I was doing the right thing. Even on my hundredth time, I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing.

It’s a new day, I guess. Now, a page similar to the handling of HTTP error codes is shown. Useful facts? Good. Plain language? Excellent.

Jun

14

Lost in Communication

Filed Under Computers, Corporations | Leave a Comment

Would you believe United States employees cost their employers $650 billion in productivity costs in the seconds it takes for them to return attention back to the task at hand? The time spans lost are the same amount of time required to interpret a CAPTCHA. E-mail, instant messaging, Twitter, etc. are all distractions from getting the work done. Those who choose to disconnect or limit the distractions improve their productivity. At least that is what the technology corporations studying the problem have decided. I have my doubts. This sounds like a restating of “all employees with access to the Internet just surf all day and get nothing done.”

What I like about instant messengers is they are more efficient than email but cheaper than a long distance phone call. By marking availability status, employees alert others not to contact them. Employees also may ignore messages until they have are done concentrating on the task at hand. Another article, also from the New York Times, supports this view employees using instant messengers effectively are not distracting.

Looking at an alert just to decide whether to respond would “waste time.” Then again, so would talking about a cool movie, the family, or any of the standard means of bonding which establish trust between individuals (without which far more time would be wasted in mistrust).

Guess there will be more research to debate what is really the problem.
:)

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Jun

11

Eduyawn

Filed Under Computers, Education | Leave a Comment

Edupunk is “Do It Yourself” in education or instruction technology. Free or at least cheap tools suitable for classroom use are so ubiquitous, the faculty have plenty of alternatives to the monolithic “enterprise” LMS.

If edupunk was a boat, then what would it be? A bamboo raft?

Kid at an Apple IIeThis is not something new. My mom conned her principal into letting her have an Apple IIe for her classroom where she refused the computer teacher’s help. Instead, Mom found and installed programs herself for what she wanted to do. She was not going to become an extension of the computer teacher’s classroom. She maintained this DIY approach throughout her career. She was always annoyed with technology in education classes because she already knew about most of the technology they taught teachers to use and offered her experiences in not only how to make it work better but more recent technology which looked more promising.

Her approach was simple but methodical.

  1. Try something.
  2. Covertly pay attention to what the students are doing.
  3. Evaluate the effectiveness.
  4. Keep successful approaches and ditch failures.

This was her method in both K-12 and higher education. If she were faced with using something like Blackboard Vista or Academic Suite, then I have no doubt she would be looking for greener pastures. At the same time, she is proud of me for having the job that I do: running the monolithic “enterprise” LMS.

* Picture by Greg G. It was licensed Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.

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Jun

7

Anthropomorphism

Filed Under Computers | Leave a Comment

Do you talk about computers, software, or web sites as manifesting human-like behaviors? Personally, I have.

At work, we manage several machines who collectively provide the GeorgiaVIEW service. When a machine is completely unresponsive, then we refer to it as having died. When a machine stops a performance issue, we refer to it as happy. I call my car cranky when it fails to run well.

Besides, electronics and vehicles, are there other examples?

Apr

26

Upgrade, Upgrade, Upgrade

Filed Under Blackboard Vista, Computers | Leave a Comment

Be more secure! Upgrade today.

Want better functionality? Upgrade today.

Save a developer! Upgrade today.

The save a developer thing is the impetus for this post.

The upgrade today mantra annoys me.

  1. Software rarely spends enough time in alpha and beta cycles to to identify all the issues.
  2. People have been so burned by using software in alpha and beta cycles, they are hesitant to try upgrades and help determine the issues.
  3. This lack of attention to the problems ensure, versions 1.0, 2.0, n.0 typically have a ton of unknown problems or are even less secure at times.

Unfortunately, the vendor who makes the application platform we run, Blackboard, has a philosophy to look at new web browsers while they are in beta but not actually work towards fixes for the new browsers until after the products are released. With most releases of Java or supported web browsers (Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox), Blackboard heard the complaints by the early adopters and released within a couple months an update which resolved the reported issues.

The students and faculty members fail to understand the issue. I think I do. Blackboard (like WebCT prior) understands there are differences between beta and final. Some of us argue these differences are usually minor. However, this is all asking someone to predict the future which we know is haphazard at best.

Long alpha and beta cycles allow more users to get involved, give those back to the developers, have them fixed before the version release. Burning users with buggy software ensures their lack of faith.

Apr

7

Firefox Weirdness

Filed Under Computers | 2 Comments

Our Systems folks upgraded the code running Stats web site they let us use. This morning, was the first time I looked at it since the upgrade.

Naturally, it was not working for me. Figuring it was my Mozilla Firefox’s fault, I tried the same web page in Flock. (Firefox with some other apps but none of Add-Ons, formerly the Extensions really plug-ins, I use in Firefox.) Flock showed it fine, so I “knew” one of three Add-Ons Extensions had to be the culprit: Greasemonkey, NoScript, or FasterFox. I disabled all three and found the site worked as it should. So I enabled each in turn. The site still works.

Enabling one of the three should have rebroken the web site. That this failed to happen could mean:

  1. Add-Ons Extensions did not break it. Something out of my control did.
  2. Add-Ons Extensions did not break it. Something I don’t remember changing did.
  3. Disabling and enabling Add-Ons Extensions changes their configuration and their impact on pages.

Annoying.

Apr

6

Watermarks

Filed Under Computers, Photography | 3 Comments

So far I have either been oblivious or lucky. Some people like my pictures which could mean they are downloading them and even representing them as their own. No amount of HTML or JavaScript technology can prevent this. Even watermarks have questionable efficacy as people get better.

Google’s Picasa is my current image editor. With it, I am able to manipulate photographs easily prior to posting them online. For everything it does, Picasa does a fantastic job. One of two things* it lacks is adding a watermark. If it automatically did this at the time a photo was saved, then I would definitely be a happy user. Maybe it will hit the features of Picasa 3?

Years ago, I knew how to do add a nice watermark in seconds with Photoshop 6 and 7. Over the last hour or so I have been playing with GIMP to accomplish the same. This has been slow going. First, in GIMP 2.2.3, the software crashed each time I opened the text tool. Now that I am on 2.4.5, the text tool works. Second, I have not found anything similar to the hand tool.

I followed a GIMP watermarking tutorial for one as it was better detailed than another I attempted to follow and was frustrated at not being able to find what it told me to use.

So, I am curious…. What do you use for watermarking your images?

* The other is splicing together multiple images.

Mar

13

File Conversion

Filed Under Computers | Leave a Comment

Zamzar came in useful today. Someone sent a WordPerfect document. My Windows XP didn’t know what to do with it, so I found Zamzar off my del.icio.us bookmarks and sent the file for conversion.

I was able to open the file no problem.

Fantastic!

I can see lots of uses for this sort of thing. For instance, students submitting papers for assignments in various formats.

Mar

4

Why the Opposition to Year-Month-Day

Filed Under Computers, Philosophy | 1 Comment

When naming files, I would make a file with today’s time stamp 20080304. My brain was confused for a second when it saw 13012008. There are not thirteen months! Oh….

I have to use ls -latr to get the list in chronological order instead of just ls.

Month-day-year I can understand (old habits die hard). Any know a reason for day-month-year?

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