Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Month: February 2012

  • TEDxCaltech Michelle Feynman and Christopher Sykes

    Christopher Sykes is known for his Richard Feynman documentaries such as The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Youtube has a wealth of Richard Feynman videos. Well, there goes my free time for the next week.

  • An All Year Sport

    Some of my sports fan friends are a single game fan.When the season is over, they have nothing else about which to talk until recruits are chosen for the next. Over the past week, I saw a couple countdowns for certain baseball players to report to spring training. Since October they waited for this. Football,…

  • Weekly Roundup for Feb 17, 2012

    Making this easy: LMS Evaluations — Laura makes a good point that a product selection is more about identifying something that fits your institution’s culture. If it does not fit, then somethinge has to bend or break: a corporation who has other clients who picked the company who fit, a open source group whose members voluntarily…

  • Paste Formatting

    Ideally every email I send would be plain text. Many of the people I email send to me HTML-based email For a decade an annoyance I had with Outlook was when pasting text from the clipboard, it would include source formatting. So, if I copied the title of a blog post to make it “Paste…

  • Project Gutenberg Lorem Ipsum

    There is a Java vulnerability where an attacker can exploit the hash predictability. The exploit is apparently easier when the content is larger. So the workaround is to limit the size of HTTP POST requests. Weblogic’s 10.3 config.xml has a max-post-size which does this. The handling of when the condition is reached is pathetic. It closes…

  • Weekly Roundup for Feb 10, 2012

    Why I believe in technology – Chronicle for Higher Education: Casting Out Nines Years ago, my cousin and her husband brought her first born to my grandmother’s house. They took photos and uploaded them to be printed in an hour at Walgreens. These photos would center in my grandmother’s conversations for years. Dozens of other…

  • Want to Work With Me?

    There are a bunch of new positions which were just posted. We need analysts, database administrators, and an operating system / hardware specialist. The list: Database Administrator SQL Server for us Desire2Learn, an eLearning system. We have other projects needing Oracle DBAs too. System Support Specialist Linux, Windows, VMWare. Includes Desires2Learn but also other projects. Business Systems…

  • Square Peg, Round Hole Outlook

    Requirement: Boss wants an email on the 14th of the month and day before last weekday of the month with a status update. This is so the boss can combine and submit the information on the 15th and last weekday of the month. Reoccurring Outlook calendar entries can apparently take only one pattern. There is no way…

  • Off the Wagon

    Just a month into a year of wanting to blog more, I missed a whole week. Like most resolution failures, I just got busy. Thankfully this was not a daily or weekly resolution. I have time to catch up. Maybe like my reading goals, I should push to get ahead so I can not worry…