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Asterisks in the sky

November 26, 2009 in Photography by Ezra S F | No comments


Happy (Con)trails

Originally uploaded by Ezra S F

Flickr member Zack Sheppard did me a huge favor yesterday picking this picture for a Flickr blog about Asterisks in the sky. So in one day this picture was exposed to 5,931 people.

Several of those looked at the adjacent picture and others for a total of 10,640 hits yesterday. Lots of comments on many of my photos.

Wow. Just wow.

2nd Blackboard Blog

June 11, 2009 in Blackboard Vista, Corporations by Ezra S F | No comments

A blog without comments to me isn’t a blog. Blog posts are about stimulating discussion, so the comments are most important feature. Content without feedback is a publicity or news story not a blog. So Blackboard Blogs at educateinnovate.com isn’t really a blog.

Steve Feldman, Bb performance engineer, had the first Blackboard Inc blog with Seven Seconds. He mysteriously stopped last fall. :(

Ray Henderson, new Bb President for Learn, has a blog. Read this introduction post. He specifically wants discussion and dialog. Someone at Blackboard who understands The Cluetrain Manifesto? I am hopeful this is a sign of positive change.

Torchwood Returns

May 29, 2009 in Movies / Films / TV by Ezra S F | No comments

This is a test of the George blog watching system. If George in facts reads my blog, then he will see this trailer for a show he likes. If George actually had read my blog, then he would have made comments on previous posts. Thank you.

The Twitter Timesink

May 6, 2009 in Twitter by Ezra S F | No comments

Glenn asked: “What is it about Twitter that makes it more of a time sink than Facebook?”

I consider a time sink something where I invest a high value of time for boring and poor value.

My contacts mostly duplicate in Twitter what they provide in Facebook. The time I spend reading Twitter posts I’ve already read in Facebook is a waste of my time. My Twitter contacts respond about a 1/5th as much as Facebook users (it used to be higher in Twitter). So I get more out of Facebook.

Twitter Replies suck. The Replies system makes it look like my contacts reply much more to me than others which I find highly unlikely. More likely the Replies implementation stifles conversation by requiring either everyone to be public or to allow all the participants to follow each other for there to be one conversation. Instead its many different (sometimes hidden) duplicate conversations. Facebook comments are attached to the status update so following a conversation is significantly easier.

Twitter Apps suck. Last Friday, I looked at Facebook Connect for AIR. My complaint about it was my interactions with Facebook would be as limited as Twitter. The promise of Twitter apps is to do more than the Twitter.com web UI provides. Many just provide easier ways to do the same thing: see your Twitter timeline. Others let you see quantification of your usage. Facebook apps by contrast provide access to content not within Facebook, so more of the web because part of my Facebook access so I can actually do more.

Except Socialthing and Tweetdeck. They are exemplary implementations of Twitter Apps. They extend the functionality of just Twitter by itself and are primary reasons I kept at it for so long. Socialthing unofficially died a while ago and official stoppage of support was announced last week while I wasn’t using it. Tweetdeck probably will stick around for a while.

Twitter lacks granular privacy. In Twitter, either you are private or public or ban specific users. I’m torn between public and not. So I opted for private with sneezypb where I mostly subscribe to friends. My other account, ezrasf, was where I subscribed to Blackboard community members, educational technologists, etc. Facebook could improve some in privacy as well. Compared to Twitter, Facebook makes a great attempt at granular privacy. Plurk, another microblogging / status update site, represents the privacy  Holy Grail for me. It allows for making specific posts public, private, available to groups, or individuals.

Gravatars in Blue Zinfindel Theme

September 11, 2008 in Wordpress by Big Eazy | 1 comment

For a while I have meant to do this. Here I am with insomnia, so here goes… I have implemented Gravatars for the this Blue Zinfindel theme.

Here is coding I used to implement it to this theme’s comments.php (WP Design > Theme Editor > Comments). Normal text is for context. Bold is what I added.

<li class=”<?php echo $oddcomment; ?>” id=”comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>”>
<?php echo get_avatar(get_comment_author_email(), ‘32′); ?>
<?php comment_author_link() ?>

The first place I saw to provide a function rather than a variable is the weblog tools collection post on gravatars. The above is their recommendation with size 32 image. I picked this size because it is the size of the icon inside the WP admin (tested 64, 48, and 30 with 30 seeming about right).

Once I decided to do it, it took me about an hour to find an example using get_comment_author_email() instead of $comments or $id_or_email. It’s easy to implement.

What does a CIO do?

August 3, 2008 in University by Ezra S F | No comments

I guess it depends on who you ask.

Well, the CIO’s thought they were most effective as classic IT-support providers. That’s basically putting PC’s on desktops. But their managers thought that CIO’s were most effective in explaining and determining the college’s technology course into the future. Managers really want their CIO’s to be “informaticists.” Wayne A. Brown, Johnson County Community College Are College CIOs Thinking What Their Bosses Are Thinking?

Self-reporting is a notoriously bad means of measuring behavior. So I take these sorts of things with a grain of salt.

I have read many times the view CIOs need to educate higher education administrators about technology to help shape the vision of where higher education is headed. When Joe Newton at Valdosta State took over as CIO, he found Ronald Zaccari, expected more than just “putting PCs on desks”. Ron also expected seamless services, a data warehouse, IT to work with every facet of the university, and even to help the cabinet shape its direction by providing how technology can help. The previous president didn’t even check his own email. So to have one who better understood technology meant having to step up to a higher standard.

Another aspect I found interesting was about degrees. Wayne suggested a positive direction was CIOs having degrees in technology management. A commenter preferred CIOs having a Ph.D. in an academic discipline and secondarily “technology qualifications” so they would understand teaching and learning. I find this hilarious because all too often I hear complaints Ph.D. programs teach people how to do research and present… not teach.

Also, the comments make a distinction between presidents and provosts versus deans and department heads. The latter are the “academic administrators”.

All that said, I just want a CIO to figure out what management wants done, prevent them from having too high expectations, and provide the resources for me to do it.

Tumblr

July 26, 2008 in Interweb by Ezra S F | 3 comments

I’m not a fan of Tumblr. At the moment I use it for a partial life stream (a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline – thanks Krynsky). It is just publishing a feed of several of my blogs. It a very limited public view.

The one main thing I dislike about Tumblr is the lack of comments. While my blog doesn’t have a lot of comments, I like that it offers the opportunity. Tumblr not having the opportunity means publishing in a vacuum. Which I think defeats the purpose. So I’d never use Tumblr to replace this or any other blog unless comments appear or comments become less important to me.

A confusing aspect of their service is the “Re-blog”. It wasn’t clear to me for some time items re-blogged were not created by the person doing so. Unlike most other services making life streams, there is not an indicator an item did not originate from another site other than in many cases they are abbreviated and have a link to the source.

I probably will continue to use it for some time to come. It just is not something I use. Stuff just flows there from the places I do use.

Gravatars

June 11, 2008 in Wordpress by Ezra S F | 2 comments

Probably I missed or didn’t understand the announcement.

For the past month or so, I’ve noticed all these comments with the poster’s picture next to it on various blogs. I knew them to be Wordpress blogs. I noticed my own WP had some default icon in the admin user interface. Today I finally put it all together.

A recent Wordpress version incorporated Globally Recognized Avatars into the main code. (They are also known as GRAvatars) Using a hash on the email address, it locates a Wordpress commenter’s 96×96 picture for including in the comment. Naturally, you need to register your email account with the gravatar service.

So, now many of you get to see my ugly mug!

Zemanta Pixie

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

April 13, 2008 in Wordpress by Ezra S F | No comments

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. ‘);

RRRv302 REPOST: Did A Stupid Thing

December 29, 2007 in About Me by Ezra S F | No comments

Originally posted January 15, 2004.

v4 means its the fourth incarnation of this blog. This post was in v3. Thankfully, MovableType writes the content to files meaning there is a lasting archive. That reminds me… Need to put on the calendar to do regular backups of this blog.

Back to the post:

Did A Stupid Thing

No, really stupid. About the stupidest thing I have done in years. So stupid that it proves my idea that I am the luckiest person ever. No, really!

Soft sand cannot support weight. Small Japanese cars do not have the traction or capability of getting out of it. So even to attempt to turn around on a dirt road where there is a gate and soft sand between is about the dumbest thing ever. I knew it before I tried it. However, I had just spend 1/2 an hour driving around the middle of nowhere to find a friend’s house using only my recollection of the directions and map from several days earlier.

So my car was stuck and my efforts to get it out probably were only making it worse. This is the worst part in terms of my abject stupidity. Decided to ask for help. Walked down the dirt road to the first house and knocked on the rail leading to the mobile home. The people inside obviously did not hear so I stomped on the step and yelled an inquiry as to whether anyone was home. The lady of the house turned on the light, saw me, and freaked. Her husband was not quite as skittish, but still pretty nervous as he asked me to show him my hands and inquired about the availablity of weapons on my person and car. His dad next door had a tractor that might be able to help so he went to ask. While waiting for his dad, he asked all kinds of more questions.

I did lie here. Told him that I was visiting my friend earlier. On my way home, I realized I left something at the house and was going to turn around to go back over there. Because of the hills and speeds of cars on the highway, I didn’t want to turn around in the middle of the road (this sentence is true). Didn’t want to let these people know that I was out here essentially kind of lost and helpless.

The dad came, asked more grilling questions and asking for specifics. Stuff like my name, where I live, where I work, what I do. Turns out he has a web site. They pushed the car enough back with it in reverse that it was able to get traction. I turned around in their driveway and went home.

Called my friend to let him know what happened and that I am okay.

In talking with one of my assistants this morning, I found out that someone had used a ploy of asking for help to murder a family not all that far from there. Their timidity was certainly understandable. Their bravery in assisting me seems so much more impressive. The guy could have seen me there, killed me and probably not gone to prison. That is why I am still the luckiest guy walking on this planet.

Posted by Ezra at January 15, 2004 11:27 AM

Comments

Good story, though. Why didn’t you go to their front door and knock?

Posted by: lacey at January 15, 2004 05:58 PM
Knocked on the railing because I didn’t want to be extremely close to the door. As a black male, I know that white people tend to be a little skittish around “my type”. Them looking out the window and seeing me right there might have been a little nerve wracking.

I did notice that the husband stayed in his truck quite a bit with his right hand on the seat. I really think he might have had something there to take care of me should I have been a threat.

Posted by: ez at January 15, 2004 06:15 PM

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