Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: port

  • Supported

    (This is an post I wrote back in November but didn’t publish…. Until now. Have fun!) Mitigated speech gets a lot of use by people trying not to offend. All too often, people who have been hurt because of mitigated speech question what isn’t being told as though the omission or gaps are intentionally deceptive. […]

  • xmllint

    This Linux tool is my new best friend. We get thousands of XML files from our clients for loading user, class, and enrollment information. Some of these clients customize our software or write their own software for generating the XML. This means we frequently get oddities in the files which cause problems. Thankfully I am […]

  • 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. […]

  • Integrating With Facebook

    At least a couple years ago, I set up the Facebook Notes app to import this blog’s posts as notes. By setting this up, a number of friends have taking to commenting on my posts. I get far more comments on Facebook than I do here. However, this was a horrible way to get traffic to […]

  • 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 […]

  • Tracking Specific File Use

    CE/Vista Reports and Tracking displays summaries of activity. If an instructor seeks to know who clicked on a specific file, then Reports and Tracking falls down on the job. Course Instructor can produce a report of the raw tracking data. However, access to the role falls under the Administration tab so people running the system […]

  • 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 […]

  • Booing at Beckham

    Sports are entertainment. Some watch it for the feats. Some like discussing tactics. Some just want to see scores. Some love the bloopers (aka mistakes). The second you feel a sports player seen on television wronged you by a decision on or off the field (or court), it is time to turn off said TV. […]

  • Racial Profiling

    Walking home from the bus in high school, I saw police cars and officers in front of my house. Their presence made me extremely apprehensive. The only little assurance was my father talking to the officers. Someone broke into the house and stole some of our stuff. We felt violated. Our own home was unsafe. […]