Month: January 2013
-
TED Talk: Re-engineering mosquitos to fight disease
Don’t be afraid of sharks or tigers. Well, you should fear the tiger mosquito. I love living this far north where one does not have to plan life around not getting bitten. What I hate about spraying to kill them because the insecticides kill off other good insects. When I was young, I could catch…
-
TED Talk: How common threats can make common (political) ground
Haidt writes and talks about Moral Psychology. This is third of his TED Talks I will post here. I liked this one because I agree we are capable of working together even when we have differences. Getting past those differences? There is the accomplishment. If the video below does not load, then try Jonathan Haidt:…
-
Rep John Lewis on Peaceful Protest
Apparently Rush Limbaugh made a statement that armed marchers of the Civil Rights Movement would have not been physically assaulted during “Bloody Sunday” on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He said African Americans, but if I recall my history correctly there were a Caucasian Americans there who were also assaulted. Perhaps armed marchers might not have been…
-
Book Review: Single & Happy: The Party of Ones
Single & Happy: The Party of Ones by J. Victoria Sanders My rating: 4 of 5 stars Back in late 2011, I ran across the Single & Happy blog. WordPress.com had drawn me in, but I started looking at various tags including dating. Lots were people talking about current dates and especially the horror that is online dating web sites.…
-
The Loss of Tech Support
I found a statement in Twitter is your IT support interesting: For reasons I won’t go in to, I haven’t been able to get [a WordPress install with the FeedWordPress plugin] done at the Open University, despite trying since last July. I’ve spoken to people at others unis and it isn’t isolated to the OU, it…
-
TED Talk: Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence
Another Tuesday, another Jonathon Haidt video. Locked cooperation can lead to success over free-riders. I am curious what is the next big thing where cooperation will overcome something deemed insurmountable. If the video below does not load, then try Jonathan Haidt: Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence.
-
Bulk User Management
The Desire2Learn conversion process strips our Blackboard Vista sections of students and instructors. Our clients naturally want instructors and designers enrolled in the migrated courses (BbVista sections are D2L courses). So obviously we had to enroll them. The options were the XML (Holding Tank) format or the CSV (Bulk User Management) format. I helped a…
-
Just Get Rid of Java
Apparently there are security flaws in the current version of Java allowing the installation of malicious software through web browsers unknown to the user. The known attacks using this flaw work on Windows, OSX, and Linux. According to Reuters: Java was responsible for 50 percent of all cyber attacks last year in which hackers broke…
-
Anatomy of a Mistaken Shut Down
We intensely monitor our servers. We want to know things before a work ticket reaches us. So a  month ago one morning I saw notifications where a couple servers failed login checks. (A process does a login and logout for each server multiple times an hour.) These go to the servers directly. Another check comes…