Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Month: September 2011

  • 3/4 Done?

    Today is the 273rd day of the year, so at the three-quarters point, here is an update on my resolution progress. Complete unfinished novel series. The Harry Potter series was finished at the first-quarter update. The Sword of Truth series  was finished at the half update. The Ender series is now done. That is all thirteen books from […]

  • Banned Books Week

    I started reading Native Son because it is Banned Books Week (last week of September). The Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association asked people to read their favorite banned book. I’d rather take a chance on finding a banned book I already have and want to read than go back and read […]

  • TED Talk: Doodlers, unite!

    Hm. Maybe no longer doodling in meetings is why they seem hard to remember? Studies show that sketching and doodling improve our comprehension — and our creative thinking. So why do we still feel embarrassed when we’re caught doodling in a meeting? Sunni Brown says: Doodlers, unite! She makes the case for unlocking your brain […]

  • TED Talk: After your final status update

    The idea of preserving social media after our deaths seems creepy to me. But then I do “You can imagine what something like this will look like 5, 10, 20 years from now as our technical capabilities improve.” It seems like a ENORMOUS claim that a social media company will last 20 years. Today’s top […]

  • The Cause

    Found I develop free software because of CUNY and Blackboard following the Blackboard security issues story. It is a really good blog post. This conclusion made me smile. I am certain there are plenty of people in the system I support who strongly agree. I just wish there was an easier way of finding and […]

  • Blackboard Security

    Interesting articles accusing Blackboard of being lax about security. A Black Eye for Blackboard Over Its Response to Major Security Flaws which is about Millions of student exams, tests and data exposed. I saw the security bulletins, but I was not aware of the back story leading to why it was announced. We run an unaffected […]

  • Smaller Java Cache

    One of our campus Blackboard Learning System Vista Enterprise administrators reported to have reduced the number of Java cache related issues (failed sessions) by changing the Disk Space Allotment from the 1,000 MB default down to 100 MB. This is found in the Java Control Panel > General tab > Temporary Internet Files: Settings. I […]

  • Conditional Thinking

    My mind made a leap past something blocking it for a while now. This post, If This, Then That (ifttt): Teaching Conditional Thinking laid the groundwork I needed. The post describes a new simpler version of Yahoo Pipes called ifttt. The idea of both is to take data generated at one or many places and output […]

  • TED Talk: Hire the hackers!

    As a freshman in college, I made… some poor choices involving computers. (As all such stories go there was a girl involved, but I was not interested in her. My friends were. There were plenty of other girls I was interested in tangentially involved though.) As a result of the poor choices, we were brought […]

  • For 9/11

    This seemed appropropriate to re-post today, the tenth anniversary of the event which inspired its need. The problems we are to overcome seem more prevalent and prominent today. This statement was issued by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States in December 2001 as a response to the terror attacks of […]