Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Computers

  • Odd Tracking File Recording

    Every time a Vista 3 node is shut down without going through the initiated shut down process, there is a chance of incorrect data written to the tracking files (in NodeA/tracking/). Normally it leaves strange characters or partial lines at the end of the file. This is the first time I have seen it write…

  • Comment Spam Resumes

    Have spammers figured out how to pick reCAPTCHA‘s lock? All of a sudden I am getting hundreds of comment spam blocked by Akismet. When I added reCAPTCHA, it dropped to a few a month. Now 409 in a week. Guess this is why layers of security are good. UPDATE: Scanned through for false positives. The…

  • Microsoft Outlook 2007 Wishlist

    From 2001 to 2006, Microsoft Outlook was the email client I used for work (and on my home computer to access work stuff). Back then, Exchange was not available, so a number of the features were more hacks than reality. However, it worked pretty well. When I changed jobs, Netscape and Thunderbird were the pre-installed…

  • Blackborg Teeshirt

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    Blackborg Teeshirt Originally uploaded by Ezra F Mike LeSombre posted the Blackborg picture and teeshirt. I got one! tag: photography

  • TED Talk: Brewster Kahle builds a free digital library

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    I’ve heard the Library of Congress analogy previously. The question I had then was, “What about the diagrams and pictures which make the books useful. Books are not just letters, numbers, and symbols.”

  • Expression Costs

    (This started out as a blog comment for Sania’s post Facebook Killed Your Blog. I’m posting it here first.) We share blogs with the whole world. So our blogs get lost in the noise, bolstering the need for a whole industry optimizing getting found in search engines. Its a concerted effort just get noticed. That’s…

  • The LMS is So Web 1.5

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    The claims Blackboard’s Learn 9 provides a Web 2.0 experience has bothered me for a while now. First, it was the drag-n-drop. While cool, that isn’t Web 2.0 in my opinion. A little more on track is the claim: The all-new Web 2.0 experience in Release 9 makes it easy to meaningfully combine information from…

  • VistaSWAT

    Do you run one of these versions of the former WebCT products? CE4.x CE6.x CE8.x Vista 3.x Vista 4.x Vista 8.x If so, then you should join us for the next Vista SWAT web conference call Thursday, May 14th (and every other Thursday). We help each other solve issues and better understand how to use / run the product.…

  • Preserving CE/Vista Settings

    I’ve been asked for notes about this a few times. So here’s a blog post instead. 🙂 A coworker is working on scripting our updates. We lost the Luminis Message Adapter settings in applying the patch to the environment we provide to our clients. Fortunately, those settings are maintained by us not our clients. So…