Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Computers

  • 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.

  • Trusting Social Networks

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    Sunday at brunch we had an interesting conversation about Facebook. Establishing the appropriate privacy levels to the various constituents see appropriate material is hard. So hard it takes a long pages of text and screenshots to just paint a picture of what to review for the top 10 Facebook privacy settings. We were discussing how…

  • BBworld From Afar

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    Staying true to tradition, Blackboard found a great speaker, Seth Godin, with a positive message. Notes people took… Scott Kodai Paty Savage Peggy Collins Laura Gekeler Scott found the best point, I think. Compliance doesn’t work to create value. Compliant work will always go to the lowest bidder. We can always find someone cheaper to…

  • The Ares Imperative

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    A friend of mine, Steve Ekstrom, is the writer of this comic which I enjoyed for the this first 8 pages. I’m looking forward to the next installments. Check out The Ares Imperative! (And vote for it if you like it. The winner gets published by DC Comics.) Interview: Synopsis: It’s the early 21st Century…

  • Tell Michael Chasen

    From a January 13, 2009 email from Michael Chasen to the customers: Please share any feedback with me directly at a Web site created for just that purpose called Tell Michael Chasen.  I will personally read every message I get, so please let me know what you think. That page in the email is no…

  • Diff and Spaces

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    Amy’s dump of the CE/Vista settings table ended up with a slightly different format than mine. I was able to use sed to rejoin the correct lines. This resulted in two files with spaces on about half of the lines in the file. Ouch. Thankfully diff has a -b flag to ignore the spaces. Really…