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Reading

August 27, 2010 in by Ezra S F | 1 comment

Titles in bold-italics are the ones I recommend.

My library:

Previous:

2010 Resolution Reading List

(2010 resolutions)


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Book Club

August 7, 2010 in Books / Novels / Writing by Ezra S F | No comments

Joined a book club. Oddly enough for being an avid reader, I’ve never really done well discussing them in groups. In high school, there was a group of authors who would discuss manuscripts each other had written. The difference between this and a book club being openly critical of something hurts can hurt the author’s feelings. Saying you don’t like someone’s favorite book doesn’t have the same personalization.

Guess I turned a corner when Chelsea and I planned to get together and discuss The Tipping Point about 9 months ago. In the actual book club, I enjoyed hearing other’s takes and responding to them. Better understood some areas I guess I glossed over when reading on my own. Not too much like Lit class like I expected. (Was also able to overcome the nausea of going off to meet strangers.)

Wondering if perhaps the best approach is to discuss while reading … instead of … reading then discussing? Guess people’s differences in pacing make that hard. Plus they’d have to be around each other more like daily than once a month.

By the way, in my introduction, I claimed these as the three “books” I like.

  1. Piers Anthony’s A Spell for Chameleon (the Xanth series) started my obsession with getting a hold of new books. One of my aunts gave me the first three books. I then had to buy the rest of the books the day they dropped in bookstores. That was before Amazon existed.
  2. George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series (first book is A Game of Thrones) Ended my obsession of getting a hold of new books. After all, I spent months checking in with a certain bookstore asking when Storm would drop. Feast spent a year on pre-order through several slipped drop dates. I no longer pre-order books.
  3. Not sure why I named Lincoln’s Melancholy except the other books which came to mind were about physical sciences. I less than stellarly try to be more partial to behavioral sciences.

Naturally quantum mechanics came up. For the life of me, I could not remember name Michio Kaku. His book Hyperspace was where I learned the about the concept of using worm holes to travel massive distances or even time travel. (Actually I read that one at the request of another aunt so I could explain it to her.)

Now… Off to read Ender’s Game again.


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New Year’s Resolutions 2010

January 1, 2010 in Personal / Relationships by Ezra S F | 3 comments

My resolutions for 2009 involved reading good stuff and being more social. More or less they were successful. I read fulfilled the reading goal by October. To fulfill the social goal, I attended most of the BrunchBunch, Athens Flickr Meetups, Athens Strobist Meetups, and even lunches with coworkers. These were by and large successful.

So, in thinking about 2010, my intentions for this year are:

  1. Read 12,000 pages. Unlike last year, I am not going to restrict the type of content except to say it must be in a book. Magazines, blogs, and news do not count. If they did, then I’d make the goal in a couple months.
  2. Learn to cook 20 new dishes. Considering I don’t cook, this is by far the most ambitious resolution. I’ll need to buy a cookbook.
  3. Participate in Project 365. (tips to get started) I considered 365 Days, but I don’t think I am up to daily self portraits. This is a Flickr group where people post daily submissions for every day of the year. I’ve previously failed this one, but I made it to 99 photos. Will be interesting with just an SLR and a bad phone camera.
  4. Have fun now not later. I haven’t visited the local state parks or much in Atlanta or even taken a personal trip. I keep procrastinating expecting it to be better later, making me an exemplar of Procrastination of Enjoyable Experiences. (Also Carpe Diem? Maybe Tomorrow in NYT)

There lots of other things in the back of my mind for things I ought to accomplish this year.

  • I only went out on one date for all of 2009, which is actually more than 2007 and 2008 combined. Assuming I don’t chicken out, I may equal that in January 2010?
  • I need to cull the blog list down from 403 subscriptions to around 200.
  • No flying at all for 2009? The furthest I drove was to Panama City, FL? Obviously I should travel more.

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    Weblogic Diagnostics

    August 19, 2009 in Blackboard Vista by Ezra S F | 1 comment

    I noticed one the nodes in a development cluster was down. So I started it again. The second start failed, so I ended up looking at logs to figure out why. The error in the WebCTServer.000000000.log said:

    weblogic.diagnostics.lifecycle.DiagnosticComponentLifecycleException: weblogic.store.PersistentStoreException: java.io.IOException: [Store:280036]Missing the file store file “WLS_DIAGNOSTICS000001.DAT” in the directory “$VISTAHOME/./servers/$NODENAME/data/store/diagnostics”

    So I looked to see if the file was there. It wasn’t.

    I tried touching a file at the right location and starting it. Another failed start with a new error:

    There was an error while reading from the log file.

    So I tried copying to WLS_DIAGNOSTICS000002.DAT to WLS_DIAGNOSTICS000001.DAT and starting again. This got me a successful startup. Examination of the WLS files revealed the the 0 and 1 files have updated time stamps while the 2 file hasn’t changed since the first occurance of the error.

    That suggests to me Weblogic is unaware of the 2 file and only aware of the 0 and 1 files. Weird.

    At least I tricked the software into running again.

    Some interesting discussion about these files.

    1. Apparently I could have just renamed the files. CONFIRMED
    2. The files capture JDBC diagnostic data. Maybe I need to look at the JDBC pool settings. DONE (See comment below)
    3. Apparently these files grow and add a new file when it reaches 2GB. Sounds to me like we should purge these files like we do logs. CONFIRMED
    4. There was a bug in a similar version causing these to be on by default.

    Guess that gives me some work for tomorrow.
    :(


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    Stalking Students

    July 13, 2009 in Education, Privacy by Ezra S F | 2 comments

    On the BLKBRD-L email list is a discussion about proving students are cheating. Any time the topic comes up, someone says a human in a room is the only way to be sure. Naturally, someone else responds with the latest and greatest technology to detect cheating.

    In this case, Acxiom offers identity verification:

    By matching a student’s directory information (name, address, phone) to our database, we match the student to our database. The student then must answer questions to verify their identity, which may include name, address and date of birth.

    …
    The institution never releases directory information so there are no Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) violations.

    However, to complete the course work the student is forced to hand over the information to Acxiom, an unknown and potentially untrusted party. Why should students trust Acxiom when institutions cannot be trusted?

    Due to the decentralized nature of IT departments, higher education leads all industries in numbers data breach events. Acxiom’s verification capabilities were designed so that student and instructor privacy is a critical feature of our solution. Institutions never receive the data Acxiom uses in this process. They are simply made aware of the pass/fail rates.

    In other words, high education institutions cannot be trusted to handle this information. No reason was provided as to why Acxiom can be better trusted. Guess the people reading this would never check to see whether Acxiom has also had data breaches.

    This Electronic Freedom Foundation response to Acxiom’s claims their method is more secure was interesting:

    True facts about your life are, by definition, pre-compromised. If the bio question is about something already in the consumer file, arguably the best kind of question is about something that is highly unlikely to be in one’s consumer file and even useless commercially–like my pet’s name.

    Answering these kinds of questions feels like more of violation of than a preservation of privacy.


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    The Bahá’í Seven

    July 11, 2009 in Religion / Baha'i Faith by Ezra S F | No comments

    In only hours the government of Iran plans to put on trial seven Bahá’í leaders for “spying for Israel, spreading propaganda against the Islamic Republic and religious offenses”. Yesterday the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom called for the release of these Bahá’ís. Similarly the German parlimentary groups have produced similar condemnations.

    For over 160 years Persia/Iran has not had a good relationship either Badis or Bahá’ís. Thousands have been executed for following the wrong religion.

    I was hopeful for more government pressure on Iran from many countries. Instead, we’ll rely on prayers for the well being of these poor souls.


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    Worldwide Photo Walk

    June 20, 2009 in Photography by Ezra S F | 3 comments

    Flickrite Shadows I’m looking forward to this Athens part of the Worldwide Photo Walk in four weeks. I’m even more impressed it filled to the 50 person capacity. We have been having meetups for Athens Flickr users since September. I don’t think any have approached half that number. (There are only 32 members in the Flickr group.) I attribute this success to Steven Skelton‘s efforts spreading the word.


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    Expression Costs

    May 16, 2009 in Interweb by Ezra S F | No comments

    (This started out as a blog comment for Sania’s post Facebook Killed Your Blog. I’m posting it here first.)

    We share blogs with the whole world. So our blogs get lost in the noise, bolstering the need for a whole industry optimizing getting found in search engines. Its a concerted effort just get noticed. That’s because blog readers have to seek out blogs to follow, subscribe to the feed, and follow. Finding the best blogs to read is sometimes difficult and more from word of mouth than anything search engines provide.

    Blogs also tend to have a lot of information to digest. Social networks have just a line or two with maybe a link to more information. Blog readers typically are designed around the idea of collecting all the posts and letting the user pick which to read. Social networks typically are designed around the idea of just showing recent posts and letting the users choose how far back in time to read.

    As technologies lower the costs to express ideas (aka get easier), blogs will get left behind as they have become upside down in value. The costs of writings, reading, subscribing, and commenting on blogs are more expensive compared to micro-blogging or status updates.

    Why blog when hanging out on social networks are so much easier? Blogs can only survive as long as they have information worthy.

    Why blog when readers are no longer reading? Posting blog entries on social networks does help keep traffic levels somewhat by getting exposure.

    As bloggers providing valuable expression leave blogging, the value of blogs decrease. People will still blog. It just won’t be the popular thing to do.


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    No Hiding From Blackboard

    May 6, 2009 in Blackboard Vista by Ezra S F | 2 comments

    Some former WebCT (bought by Blackboard) customers switched to ANGEL rather than move to Blackboard products. PDF Apr 14, 2009 Today, Blackboard announced it is buying ANGEL. You can run, but you cannot hide from Blackboard.

    Some light reading for you…

    1. Learning, Together ANGEL Learning and Blackboard® have decided to join forces.
    2. Blackboard Plans to Buy Another Rival, Angel Learning | Chronicle.com
    3. Why HigherEd is rejecting Blackboard … | Laura Gekeler
    4. Open Thread on Blackboard/ANGEL Merger | mfeldstein.com

    So the options left are…

    1. Blackboard-WebCT-ANGEL
    2. Moodle
    3. Desire2Learn (currently in patent troubles with Bb)
    4. Pearson eCollege
    5. Sakai

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    The Twitter Timesink

    May 6, 2009 in Social / IM / Chat 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.


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