Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: issues

  • Me Social Media

    Dan Schultz doesn’t like Facebook or Twitter because they are too focussed on individual expression rather than the community. That may be because he is using them wrong. I liked photography as a kid, but I didn’t know any photographers. Flickr happened to come into my life just after I bought my first digital camera.…

  • Useful User Agents

    Rather than depend on end users to accurately report the browser used, I look for the user-agent in the web server logs. (Yes, I know it can be spoofed. Power users would be trying different things to resolve their own issues not coming to us.) Followers of this blog may recall I changed the Weblogic…

  • DDoS of Social Media

    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…

  • 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.…

  • LMS Security

    This morning there was a flurry of effort to locate an article called “Hacking WebCT.” My coworker was able to locate it. We were disappointed.  The main points of the article were: Lazy administrators make compromising user accounts easy. Lazy instructors make getting questions for assessments easy. These apply to any LMS. So, here is some…

  • The Digital Switch

    The Long Tail claims consumers, given more options, will reflect their widely varied interests. Physical stores cannot fill all of the demand, so bytes stored on disk are the fastest, cheapest method for getting stuff to consumers. We see a mostly example of this shift in the shift to digital music. Vinyl records were the…

  • Course Management Systems are Dead!

    Heh. Blackboard Vista is headed for a brick wall? Who knew? 7. Course Management Systems are Dead! Long Live Course Management Systems! Proprietary course management systems are heading for a brick wall. The combination of economic pressures combined with saturated markets and the maturing stage of the life cycle of these once innovative platforms means…

  • reCAPTCHA and Chrome

    Was using this RSVP form with Google Chrome and found the reCAPTCHA was telling me I repeatedly failed the Turing test. After the sixth time, I decided it might be my browser, so I tried it in Firefox which worked fine. Curious, I went looking for a possible problem between reCAPTCHA and Chrome. According to…

  • Thankful

    Family, especially gaining a new member in a few weeks My dart team members and their significant others Friends Having a job, especially my team at work No health issues this year My cameras and accessories Car Google Reader Flickr video Technorati : Thanksgiving Day, thanks Del.icio.us : Thanksgiving Day, thanks Flickr : Thanksgiving Day,…