Month: July 2012
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TED Talk: The riddle of experience vs. memory
We tend to think of memory the same as an audio-visual recording of the events in our life. Unfortunately, it is not. Memory captures snapshots which influence what we recall later. So a relatively good experience with a particularly bad ending can bias memory to recall the whole as bad. If the below video does not […]
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Content Migration Progress Tracking
When moving hundreds of thousands of courses between WebCT Vista and Desire2Learn, keeping track of what made it through which stage seems like an obvious hindsight thing to do. I added that last bit because we started to notice where things fell between the cracks starting to pile up. The basic process… Through Oracle SQL […]
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New World
Here is an attempt at a positive post with our new vendor, Desire2Learn. In the Old World, WebCT/Blackboard, my role was to develop install the application / databases, monitor for problems, automate systems to run without the need of humans, or to make it simple for humans to do. In the New World, Desire2Learn, my […]
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Mail Delivery Background Jobs
Only 8 years into running this product and I still learn something new about it. Monday there was an event. Two nodes became responsive at about the same time. The other ten nodes did their jobs and transferred session information to the nodes taking on the sessions. Most were so busy they did not respond […]
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TED Talk: Advice to young scientists
E.O. Wilson on inspiring people to get into science. If the below video does not display, then try E.O. Wilson: Advice to young scientists
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OrgCode Duplicate Filter
I was asked to work my “Unix magic”. The problem? Duplicate courses were spooled and converted from the WebCT format to the Desire2Learn. The conversion process creates an import file using the WebCT SourcedId.Id as the OrgCode. The first time the OrgCode is used, it creates a course. The next and subsequent times, it duplicates […]
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Scrambls
Scrambls encrypts social media posts and lets users specify exactly who can see them, across all social media sites. The user can form groups from friends and family, going as broad as everyone with a Gmail account down to a specific colleague or even those who know a certain password. Everyone else (including the social […]
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Happy Independence Day!
Hope you have a great day!