Jan

28

Misunderstanding Links?

Filed Under Interweb | Leave a Comment

In running an online class system, we encounter situations where we have to gather data and present to the best of our ability past events. We thoroughly comb through the evidence and carefully present our findings with an admission as to how certain we can be about the evidence. Often the stories about events as told to us sound implausible. Every theory is debunked as best we can, leaving only the what could have happened. No decision of fact is sent along without us being as sure as we can. In many cases, our recommendation is not enough evidence exists to determine the events.

Based on what I have read, I have to wonder if the Gulf Middle School school officials and the Attorney General’s Office made the same careful deliberations for a police officer in Florida to be in trouble over the links on his friends’ page? He even had approval to create the profile on MySpace though run it on his own time. This story just smells. I bet there is more to the story. The story as it has been told doesn’t sound very plausible.

That said, I remember a case where helping a professor in 2005 (who had been teaching online for at least 5 years) asked me, “What is the URL Tool? While you are at it: What is a link?” So, just because people use technology does not mean they understand it.

Jan

27

Shooting on the Run

Filed Under Photography | Leave a Comment

Do you have a camera that you take everywhere? My Canon SD800 IS (Elph)

This digital point and click camera does well for every day use. In the winter, it fits in my coat pockets very easily. In the summer, it fits in my cargo or carpenter shorts’ pockets. I have it so often, others expect me to have and are disappointed the few times I fail to have it on my person.

I do have a great backpack for my Canon Rebel XT which also carries my work laptop. For periods, I do use it. Maybe the strap on the other backpack breaking is a sign?

Jan

26

Made Stumbleupon.com?

Filed Under Interweb | 2 Comments

Traffic to this web site “spiked” yesterday. It only tripled to about 300 page views in a day. Nothing compared to what we get at work.
:)

I was curious why the sudden burst almost exclusively to the Quotes to Make You Think page. The referrer for 108 of the 168 visitors that day was stumbleupon.com. Good visitors found other pages as they looked around a bit. Best I can figure, MochiMochii bookmarked my site and five others have indicated they like it.

Wow, if a single review and just a bookmark drives this much traffic, then maybe I am fortunate this page has not hit a top ranking? That could means thousands of hits daily.

UPDATE 2007-JAN-27: Today, the traffic from these… uh… Stumblers… is over 600 page views and we have over 6 hours left in the day. I am impressed people are coming. This quotes page has always been the most popular since I created it back in 2000 or 2001. Will it hit 1,200 Monday, 20,000 Friday? Where is the ceiling? I should have remembered the principles from work…

UPDATE 2007-JAN-27 b: Ha… Got another 1,600 page views in the last 3 hours. That’ll teach me to think maybe it will slow.

Jan

26

Safe From Falling Satellites?

Filed Under Humor / Weird | Leave a Comment

A U.S. military spy satellite the size of a school bus is falling. Without power, the controllers on the ground no longer can ensure it comes down in a controlled manner into the ocean. It could hit the ground in a month. At present, its unknown when or where it might hit.

The largest uncontrolled re-entry by a NASA spacecraft was Skylab, the 78-ton abandoned space station that fell from orbit in 1979. Its debris dropped harmlessly into the Indian Ocean and across a remote section of western Australia.

This quote got me thinking… Assuming this object comes down anywhere on the surface of the Earth, what are the odds of it hitting 1) a major city, 2) a populated area, 3) anyone, or 4) harmless to any human life? It seems to me the highest odds are on #4. Consider: 71% of the surface of the Earth is covered by water. So the only risk is it hitting a ship. The odds of #4 would be at the lowest 65-70%. People tend to congregate in groups up to tens of millions. Even farmland makes up only 40% of the land. Probably populated areas would not even get us to 50% of the land surface area.

Probably since the odds are so low anyone will be hit is the reason for the lack of “OMG we’re going to die!”

Jan

26

Naked on the Net

Filed Under Privacy, Social | Leave a Comment

The typical response to a “OMG Users Don’t Have the Privacy They Think They Do” article is to never post anything online or just never visit web sites where you would post something.

These seem…. Paranoid. People have an expectation of privacy. People also inherently trust web sites unless they have been burned enough in the past. I know a few people who have lost their trust. However, its less than a dozen out of a few 300 people.

My mother in particular, read an article about bad web browser cookies years ago, so she set Netscape 4.5 to tell her about every attempt to set a cookie and was appalled at how many web sites tried to set them. Eventually, she realized not every cookie is malicious. Similarly, not every web site or company is out to screw their users. By contrast, a friend of hers installed Zone Alarm at home and discovered a ton of blocked connections which made him paranoid about the dangers online.

The place to be online is, I think, somewhere between paranoid privacy and complete openness. We should be open enough to generate conversations. However, we should not be giving away the kitchen sink.

Jan

25

Solve Problems With a Prize

Filed Under Corporations | Leave a Comment

I wonder if maybe we could use the prize process to get a solution to some of our problems? Decide how much its worth and offer the money to whomever solves the problem. Right now we hire consultants.

The X-Prize uses this model. Are there others?

Jan

24

Fixed Blogroll

Filed Under Wordpress | Leave a Comment

Apparently this Wordpress template is ancient?

It was using a really old call to display the blogroll. Modified the template to use wp_list_bookmarks and suddenly you can see the categories again.

Jan

24

Programmers

Filed Under Blackboard Vista | Leave a Comment

Gave a former coworker, Stu, from my Valdosta State days a heads up about a complaint my brother heard from a close friend of his. Stu is working with Sakai these days at Georgia Institute of Technology. He made an interesting comment:

It would be great to have all the energy your team puts into Blackboard be put into Sakai instead.

One of the unknowns which always seems to come up in talking about Sakai or Moodle is hiring a development staff. How many programmers we need depends on how much customization we will need to implement. Certainly finding the programmers is another problem. A large fear is we’d need 10 programmers and years to implement all the features people insist are critical. People need to be told. “No, you will have to live without that feature,” which would be very cool… However, it would be like your ISP telling you, “Sorry, we turned off port 80. You will have to live without it.” Finding the balance between features we can abandon, features which would need to be created pre-go-live, and features we can post-go-live? Difficult enough when you have 15,000 users. It seems more than 10x harder with over 150,000 users.

Surely people have cracked this nut?

Jan

20

MLK Plan

Filed Under Personal / Relationships | Leave a Comment

Mom had not planned on having an operation. So she drove to the Atlanta airport last Monday. Her car is in long term parking up there.

Plan for getting Mom home from the plane tomorrow…

7:45am Arrive @ William’s house.

8:00am Leave for Atlanta.

11:00am Arrive @ Hartsfield-Jackson airport.

11:10am Park in Short Term parking.

12:25pm Mom’s plane arrives.

1:00pm Mom arrives in baggage claim in wheel chair.

1:15pm Eat lunch.

2:30pm Leave for cars.

3:00pm Depart airport.

4:30pm I arrive home in Athens.

7:00pm William and Mom arrive in Valdosta.

In the mean time, grandma is staying home. A friend of Mom’s will make sure grandma gets meds.

Jan

20

YouTube

Filed Under Computers, Interweb, Movies / Films / TV | Leave a Comment

Finally got over my YouTube issue….

Basically, the upload form said files were limited to 100MB. That’s like 1 minute for the default settings of my Canon Elph (640×480 @ 60 fps). So I end up not having to use longer videos I shot. Until I found Google Video had a downloadable tool to push larger than 100MB. Google doesn’t aggregate all my videos onto a single page. Nor can I import them to other sites. Arggh.

So I thought the free video editing might be the approach. I guess I need to go Linux or Mac to edit video. Windows Media Maker is solely a tool to place clips and transitions into a single video. WTF?

Finally I noticed last night “Upload files larger than 100MB or upload many files at once!” and clicked the button. Yay! I was able to push 12 videos all at once. So it was a non-intuitive interface which made Youtube seem unable to do it.

Check out the Nannie Interviews. ;)

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