Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Computers

  • TED Talk: Web as random

    In the first video, The Web as random acts of kindness, the characterization of the founding of the Internet here is a group of high school teenagers working in their garage to altruistically to benefit the world because that is what high functioning nerds do and the world behaves kindly on the Internet because of it.…

  • Online Intimacy

    All too often I follow the breadcrumbs wherever they lead me online. So I stumble across some pretty random stuff. Thus why my RSS reader contains way too much stuff to reasonably read. (That reminds me, I need to cull a couple hundred subscriptions again.) Well, I found the anonymous blog of a woman in…

  • LMS in a Pandemic

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    As we head into the new school year across the United States, medical officals are warning about higher than normal numbers of young people with the flu. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) says this about H1N1, “Current visits to doctors for influenza-like illness are down from April, but are higher than what is expected in…

  • State of the LMS

    Watched an informative WebEx about The State of the LMS: An Insitution Perspective presented jointly by Delta Initiative and California State University. An true innovator in this market could become the leader. Market share numbers annoy me. These are always self-reported numbers from a survey. The sample sizes are almost always not very impressive and when…

  • Name Collisions

    Blackboard has a conference they call BbWorld. I noticed there are some odd tweets with the same #bbworld hashtag lately. These appear to be about a Blackberry conference to be held next month. Collisions on names are common enough. For example, here are a couple names our clients use to brand their sites which other…

  • Computer Metaphors

    An effective way to explain something is to use a metaphor. This can be especially effective by picking an metaphorical object or behavior with which the audience is already familiar. The one I see most often is comparing computers to a car. This morning I saw this on an email list describing a person’s experience…

  • Weblogic Diagnostics

    I noticed one the nodes in a development cluster was down. So I started it again. The second start failed, so I ended up looking at logs to figure out why. The error in the WebCTServer.000000000.log said: weblogic.diagnostics.lifecycle.DiagnosticComponentLifecycleException: weblogic.store.PersistentStoreException: java.io.IOException: [Store:280036]Missing the file store file “WLS_DIAGNOSTICS000001.DAT” in the directory “$VISTAHOME/./servers/$NODENAME/data/store/diagnostics” So I looked to see…

  • DDoS of Social Media

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    Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and other sites all admitted to suffering from a DDoS attack. It seem to me the purpose of a Denial-of-Service attack (DoS) against a web site is to flood it with so much traffic the site becomes unusable. The DDoS is where multiple other computers are coordinated into launching the attack. All…

  • Open Schema

    If Blackboard opens up the schema for Vista 8, then maybe I’ll feel more comfortable sharing the reporting SQL I use. Ron Santos has a good PowerPoint on SQL for reports at Simon Frasier University.