Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: Adobe AIR

  • Melungeon

    Mom dropped me a note last night. She ran across the word melungeon while doing some genealogy research. It describes someone who is of European, African, and Native American descent. It was popular in the Appalachian Mountains and similar in use to Mulatto in being a negative term. I haven’t talked about this much on…

  • BbWorld Presentation Redux Part II – Monitoring

    Much of what I might write in these posts about Vista is knowledge accumulated from the efforts of my coworkers. This is part two in a series of blog posts on our presentation at BbWorld ’07, on the behalf of the Georgia VIEW project, Maintaining Large Vista Installations (2MB PPT). Part one covered automation of…

  • Generalization

    . A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, com a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer,…

  • Its 10:34 Do You Know Where Your Tracking Files Are?

    One of my co-workers says about tracking, “One of the big selling points to [Blackboard] Vista is the wealth of tracking data for auditing, grade challenges, and catching cheaters.” Certainly, Reports and Tracking in Blackboard’s Vista 3 is one of the more favorite tools. So making sure the data gets there is critically important. The…

  • Who Is Lurking In the Shadows?

    Since you readers seem not to comment much, I took it upon myself to check on you by other means. 😀 More of my visitors come from Washington, DC, than any other US locale. Interesting…. All of them are from a certain publicly traded company. \Why would I be surprised, considering I mentioned them and…

  • RIP Yahoo! Photos

    Yahoo To Shut Down Yahoo Photos In Favor Of Flickr You have until September to move all your photos. UPDATE 17-JUN-2007: I have imported 511 pictures at Yahoo! Photos to my Flickr account. The migration tool was kind enough to mark all of them as private. However, though untagged. 🙁 I’m working through them, updating…

  • False Positives

    It’s often argued that the high false positive rate proves the system is poorly run or even useless. This is not necessarily the case. In running a system like this, we necessarily trade off false positives against false negatives. We can lower either kind of error, but doing so will increase the other kind. The…

  • Waste Not

    Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of forwarded or group invites for kinds of things about not buying gas for a day, not buying gas from the two largest oil companies, or even everyone not using electricity for an hour (One Hour NO Power). These are ambitious endeavors for problems I agree are present. My…

  • What is a Super Speeder?

    There is a bill in the GA legislature to additionally fine people for excessive speeding. Fine. Good even. However, it disturbs me that people quote the wrong statistics as rationale and tie it to emotional cues. Slowing down ‘super speeders’ on Georgia highways is a super idea – gainesvilletimes.com: Last year in Georgia, 1,700 people…