Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: name

  • Ornamental Reflection

    Ornamental Reflection Originally uploaded by Ezra S F Downtown Valdosta outside Bleu Cafe.

  • TED Talk: Taryn Simon

    My favorite quote from Taryn is, “Photography threatens fantasy.” Disney uses intricate interior design, photography, and video to construct fantasy. Advertisements, magazines, weddings, and portraits are about showing others the ideal instead of the reality. Have you seen the Dove Evolution video? (This one has music and singing by a Baha’i musician Devon Gundry.) What about…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Turnitin.com

    I’m surprised I have not blogged here about the student lawsuit against Turnitin.com? An anti-plagiarism service, Turnitin has students or faculty members upload papers into the database. By comparing new papers to the database, it gives ratings as to whether it is likely a student plagiarized. Now the search goes out for any student who…

  • TED Talk: Dangers of Serotonin

    He’s associated damage to the temporal lobe with psychopathic killers. The epigenetic effects, brain damage, and environments appears to be an MAOA variant on the X chromosome with experiencing violence around 3 years old. Males only get the X from their mother. Men are much more likely. Girls get one X from mother and one from…

  • BBworld From Afar

    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…

  • Stalking Students

    On the BLKBRD-L email list is a discussion about proving students are cheating. Any time the topic comes up, someone says a human in a room is the only way to be sure. Naturally, someone else responds with the latest and greatest technology to detect cheating. In this case, Acxiom offers identity verification: By matching…