Author: Ezra S F


  • Wow, not sure why I have not posted this one yet. In college, I was one of four students who showed up to the showing of a video of Pinker talking about his book How the Mind Works. It reinforced for me Psychology was a good choice for me. So this talk on decline in…

  • Google Labs’ Ngram Viewer lets us look at the use of phrases over time. For example, my name, Ezra, appears to have been most popular usage peaks back in the 1600s and 1700s, but has been more consistently used since the 1800s. This kind of thing can get me lost for hours at a time.…

  • My main page on quotes is Quotes to Make You Think. Additional ones can be found under the Quotes tag. I read like a wolf eats. I read myself to sleep every night. — Gary Paulsen There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship. — Saint Thomas Aquinas If you surrender completely to the moments…

  • Nina’s book Skin was a great read. It was the first time I understood melanin and vitamin D. And cancer. If the video below does not work, then try Nina Jablonski breaks the illusion of skin color.

  • We encountered a vexing issue where sections did not appear for the class list for students. We confirmed the students were properly enrolled. We confirmed the current date was between the dates for learning contexts and terms. We confirmed the access was granted to the students. Still, the sections were not showing, but the usual…

  • In the beginning I used TOTAL=`ls /d2lmig/*/*/bak/*/* | wc -l` to get a total count. All was good. Until at around 55,000 files I got: -bash: /bin/ls: Argument list too long. Then I used TOTAL=`find /d2lmig/*/*/bak/*/* -name *.bak | wc -l` to get a total count. All was good. Until at around 90,000 files I got: -bash: /usr/bin/find: Argument…

  • As a Valdosta State University student, we nicknamed the student paper the Speculator. Incorrectly reading between the lines were their specialty. Grammatical errors and spelling mistakes were part of their standard. But it was amusing to see them go after the administration. Not so much to be reported on when I made big mistakes. As…

  • Context Menu

    Almost everyone using a computer to access the Internet uses the left click on a link to go to its location. Exceptions might be left handers who switch the buttons on a mouse, those using screen readers, or similar small niche users of the Internet. I tend to multi-task, so I will scan a page…

  • Several years ago, while I worked at a medium-sized university, there was a very similar incident like what happened in Student Is Sanctioned for Creating Class-Registration Web Site. A student wanted into a full class. So he built an application to routinely check for whether a seat was available in the Student Information System. The database…