Apr

28

Free Star Wars eBook

Filed Under Books / Novels / Writing | Leave a Comment

Book One of the Legacy of the Force series will be offered for free in electronic form starting tomorrow at 9am through the release of the last book on May 13th (two weeks).

Star Wars novels fell into a distant third place to compared to my consumption of Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance novels. The Pern novels fell just behind Star Wars. These are all series I tended to read at least twice. For me, I stopped reading at the fall of Chewie. It pissed me off so much, I stopped R. A. Salvatore entirely.

I am impressed Del Rey is willing to offer this book for free and in electronic form. It has been 9 years…. Maybe I can get over it and download this book?

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

26

Boredom Correlates to Mistakes

Filed Under Humor / Weird | Leave a Comment

We never get to stay bored at work for very long. Every day has an emergency from something caused by a user of the institutions we host, the admins at the institution, or even people who work for our project. Wait…. Maybe it is the boredom which is the cause of the mistakes which keeps the rest of us from really getting bored. So eliminating the boredom in one part of the system would cause boredom in other parts.

Thankfully our philosophy is to automate monotonous activities as much as possible. Computer brains do not get bored to make mistakes.

According to Dr Eichele of Norway and Dr Stefan Debener of the UK, when the brain switches to autopilot is when we are likely to start making mistakes. The brain economizes by shifting electrical activity from the prefrontal cortex (attention) to the default mode network.

I can’t want for them to figure out brains which sit in the default mode network are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s or dementia. :)

Of course, the worst mistake you could possibly make is to get bored enough to get involved in social networks.

Apr

24

Usablenet Mobile

Filed Under Blackboard Vista | Leave a Comment

Are any of you readers out there familiar with Usablenet Mobile for Education, specifically with Blackboard/WebCT Vista? We have questions…

  1. How well it navigates with Vista’s frames and wide variety of views.
  2. How well it handles the sessions.

The University of Florida has a good look at how Usablenet LIFT works and mentions Vista in it. However, this is a different animal though, from what UN has said similar in approach.

Apr

22

Happy Earth Day

Filed Under Humor / Weird | 1 Comment

The Earth is an amazing place.

Apr

21

Exclusion Groups

Filed Under Gov't & Politics, Race / Racism | 1 Comment

This is America! Equality! Liberty! Democracy!

Arizona has a bill S.B. 1108 to legislate the forbidding of student groups who are against the principles of America. Specifically democracy, capitalism, pluralism, and religious tolerance must be upheld by all.

A founding principle of the United States was dissent. Disagreeing with King George III, British Parliament, and mercantile oppression led to the colonies banding together and seceding. In Georgia, “The South will rise again” refers to states disagreeing with moves in Washington DC and electing to form their own country rather than continue to be oppressed.

The First Amendment to the US Constitution establishes the right to free speech. Student groups in K-12 and higher education allow students to talk in private, refine the message into a few coherent ideas, and then present that message in public. Restricting such groups to topics government deems acceptable sounds contrary to American values to me.

This bill came to my attention because of an amendment to the bill which would prohibit student groups based around race. The member of the committee wants schools to return to “melting pot” approaches for the student experience. Every student group I’ve seen based on race has a focus of helping minority students better adapt to operate within the culture of America. So banning the groups bans people doing the “melting pot” approach work.

“This bill basically says, ‘You’re here. Adopt American values,’ ” said Kavanagh, a Fountain Hills Republican. “If you want a different culture, then fine, go back to that culture.” Plan targets anti-Western lessons

Is the culture reflecting the values of the Founding Fathers? If so, then it may get a significant boom in population….

Apr

13

Wordpress Error: This file cannot be used on its own.

Filed Under Wordpress | Leave a Comment

In posting a comment to a friend’s Wordpress blog, it came up with the error:

Error: This file cannot be used on its own.

I was responding to a comment, so I doubted that he broke his blog between making a comment and my response. So I went looking though my own install. Essentially, at a shell I used

find . -exec grep -l "This file cannot be used on its own." {} \;

to locate the file involved is wp-comments-popup.php. This file contains code which checks for the HTTP_REFERER variable has specific values equal to the path and file name for the comments page. If this is not the case, then it should throw this error. The file mentioned in the error is wp-comments.php.

Its seems that I had configured my web browser not to pass the HTTP referrer to web servers, so the check failed and threw this error.

Maybe the Wordpress developer who designed this has no idea about the ability of web browsers not to send a referrer. Searching for the error on the WP site yielded nothing. From the tons of comments about people hitting this error, lots of people turn off sending referrers.

Solution for those leaving comments: If you attempt to leave a comment and see this error, then enable referrers. Wordpress actually has a decent article on enabling HTTP referrers for a number of different pieces of software.

More friendly error for WP blog owners: Edit wp-comments-popup.php. Change

die (’Error: This file cannot be used on its own.’);

to

die (’Learn how to <a href=”http://codex.wordpress.org/Enable_Sending_Referrers”>enable HTTP referrers</a> to fix this. ‘);

Apr

7

Has Anything Changed?

Filed Under Race / Racism | 2 Comments

The previous post regarding the FBI checking on whether a photographer was Middle Eastern reminded me….

The Civil Rights Movement occurred before I was born. However, my parents were afflicted by blatantly racist laws which continued for decades. State anti-miscegenation law [1] at the time prohibited White females from marrying outside of their race. Since my mother qualified as a White female and my father did not qualify as a White male, they could not get married in the state. They had to get married in another state.

Jim Crow laws were designed to discriminate against anyone not of Caucasian descent and make them uncomfortable enough to go live elsewhere. Since these laws have mostly been purged, some say discrimination is done. Others say the discrimination is just less blatant. For brevity, I won’t go into all the examples.

Store employees who follow me around the store. Sixty year old men who pretend to read SAT prep books while peeking around the corner.

Getting placed in all “average” classes despite scoring in the 97th to 99th percentile on all but a single sub-test.

Being told, “No offense, but it is morally wrong for Whites and Blacks to have children together.”

Lately, though, except going through airport security, I don’t feel oppressed. In looking for why, I wonder: Is Bill Cosby right? Does behaving less Black mean more acceptance?

TSA seems to think I look more like a potential threat than African American so I get extra screening. So my new conflict is, I need to look Black to TSA and act White for everyone else. It would be easier to just be me. Ya’ know?

Apr

7

FBI Investigates Legal Activity Also

Filed Under Gov't & Politics, Photography | 1 Comment

One of the reasons my photos sets are more full of flowers than buildings is people don’t call the FBI over pictures of flowers. While it is perfectly legal to take pictures of buildings from public spaces, it makes “victims” nervous. No one cares about flowers. I can take all the pictures I want without uncomfortable encounters.

Of course, unless my airline ticket is purchased by a government, I consistently get extra screening. It is a fact of life of neither looking African American, Native American, Caucasian, Asian, or Hispanic. Because look like an other, people put me in the extra screening list just in case.

A local student had to sit down with an FBI agent to “prove” he did not look Middle Eastern after photographing chicken rendering plants. Security of the plants called the local police who called the FBI. What would have happened to Jim if he had looked Middle Eastern? Would he have been arrested for doing something perfectly legal?

This is choice from the article:

Filson told Diffly that this is America and he should do what he wants, but when someone looks different in a post-Sept. 11, 2001 world, police may be called.

By the way, police officers arrest photographers who take pictures of them in the middle of an arrest.

Abuse?

EDIT: I almost forgot. A Georgia Tech student from Pakistan was detained for taking video of a building. This student also visited Pakistan and made statements which could easily sound threatening.

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.

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