MaisonBisson

By the end of it, all the wrapping paper and other material affects of the holidays really do take on air of violence. Well, at least they do in PES‘s Kaboom.

And if you’re amused by that, you might want to see how it was made.

Harry Shearer and Judith Owen are performing their holiday sing-a-long at the concert hall at the Society for Ethical Culture in NYC with guests TMBG and others. It’s a go on Friday, but why can’t these things happen closer to me? Actually, maybe they should all come to Warren afterwards.

Ryan Boren wrote about using memcached with WordPress almost a year ago:

Memcached is a distributed memory object caching system. WordPress 2.0 can make use of memcached by dropping in a special backend for the WP object cache. The memcached backend replaces the default backend and directs all cache requests to one or more memcached daemons. You must have a memcached daemon running somewhere for this to work. Unless you’re managing the server on which your blog is running, you probably can’t run a memcached daemon, making this backend useless to you. The memcached backend is targeted at ISPs and those running WPMU. If you are using WPMU and distributing DB requests across multiple servers, memcached will come in very handy. Using memcached for a single blog isn’t really worth it. In my tests, it was sometimes slower than using the default object cache backend.

The plugin is here, a bug-fix note is here.

I’ve been following WP2.1 development, but Aaron Brazell’s post in the development blog wrapped up a lot of questions all at once.

The short story is that 2.1 is going to bring some really good changes that will allow more flexibility and better optimization of WPopac. Of the four changes Brazell names, the last two, the addition of the post_type column and a change in usage of the post_status column, are where the money is.

I’m awaiting the final release of 2.1 before building the necessary changes into WPopac, but the benefits will be worth it.

Perhaps it’s just because I’m in the air again today, but I’m fascinated by Aaron Koblin‘s animation of aircraft activity, illustrating the pulsing, throbbing movements of aircraft over North America. Nah, this is hot. You’ll love it too.

Also worth checking out: Koblin’s other works.

It’s old news (Boing Boing and Slashdot covered it a month ago), but Flickr’s patent application is a bit troublesome. It’s not that they’re trying to patent tagging (they’re not), it’s that they’re trying to patent the things library folks have been wanting to do (and in some cases actually doing) for some time.

Media objects, such as images or soundtracks, may be ranked according to a new class of metrics known as ”interestingness.“ These rankings may be based at least in part on the quantity of user-entered metadata concerning the media object, the number of users who have assigned metadata to the media object, access patterns related to the media object, and/or a lapse of time related to the media object.

See, interestingness is what you get when you link two or more metrics — think $interestingness = ($circulation * $comments * $rating); — together to get a number you can rank items by. I’d been playing with that sort of thing with bsuite, does that mean I might be subject to a lawsuit?

Thank Jon for pointing out the above. Actually, you should go read his post on the matter because, well, it gave me a chuckle and it’s certainly better than going shopping today.

Via a friend who coordinated a program I presented at not long ago I received this message about difficulty accessing my blog post with notes from the presentation:

Do you have the notes electronically that you could send? Believe it or not our federal government internet filter is blocking access to the blog site below…..big brother is truly at work these days…..

Jessamyn has been dealing with this for a while now, but this is the first I’d learned that I’d been blocked.

It’s good to know that my site has joined the ranks of those like Jessamyn’s and MySpace and probably thousands (millions?) of others that are blocked but shouldn’t be. Thinking of that, I wanted to find a list of those websites, but Google came up short. Any suggestions?

What I did find, however, amused me: <a href=“http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_can_i_connect_to_myspace_at_school.html” title=““How can I connect to MySpace at school?” from the Ask Dave Taylor! Tech Support Blog”>How can I connect to MySpace at school?, What are YOU looking at?, and Elementary Student Threatened With Psychiatric Evaluation After Visiting 9/11 Websites.

Go now to willitblend.com and offer your suggestion for something new. Want to see a bacon cheeseburger with pickles and grilled onions? Go for it.

Rebecca Nesson, speaking via Skype and appearing before us as her avatar in Second Life, offered her experiences as a co-instructor of Harvard Law School‘s CyberOne, a course being held jointly in a meatspace classroom and in Second Life, and open to students via Harvard Law, the Harvard Extension School, and to the public that shows up in Second Life.

Nesson has an interesting blog post about how it all works, but she also answered questions from the audience about why it works:

As a distance learning environment it’s head and shoulders above anything else because of levels and types of interactions possible versus any previous tool.

It’s a poor format for lectures, but a great format for discussions, so it really encourages conversation and discourse.

It’s a community that exists independent of the class meeting. In here we have much more of those liminal times when people are just hanging out. …We have more opportunities for interaction.

They don’t want to engage in chat with their professors in the classroom space, they want to chat with other students in their own space.

— from Eric Gordon’s presentation this morning.

Hey, isn’t that the lesson that smart folks have been offering for a while now: “Nobody cares about you or your site. Really.” How could learning environments not be subject to the same cluetrain forces affecting the rest of the world?

Students love IM. They love Google. They love FaceBook. What does your courseware matter to them?

It’s really titled Social Software for Teaching & Learning, and I’m here with John Martin, who’s deeply involved with our learning management system and portfolio efforts (especially as both of these are subject to change real soon now).

Aside: CMS = content management system, LMS = learning management system. Let’s please never call an LMS a CMS…please?

On the schedule is…

• Social Software in the Classroom: Happy Marriage or Clash of Cultures? (Eric Gordon, Emerson)
• Teaching and Learning in a Virtual World (Rebecca Nesson, Harvard)
• Electronic Constructivism: Inspiring and Motivating Students with Thought Provoking Questions and Emerging Technologies (Dr. Maureen Brown Yoder, Lesley University)
• Social Computing Tools in the Curriculum (Katie Livingston Vale, MIT)

PHP iCalendar solves a couple problems I’m working on, but I needed a solution to fix the duration display for Gcal-managed ICS calendars.

As it turns out, a fix can be found in the forums, and the trick is to insert the following code in functions/ical_parser.php.

case 'DURATION':
	if (($first_duration == TRUE) && (!stristr($field, '=DURATION'))) {
		ereg ('^P([0-9]{1,2}[W])?([0-9]{1,2}[D])?([T]{0,1})?([0-9]{1,2}[H])?([0-9]{1,2}[M])?([0-9]{1,}[S])?', $data, $duration); 
	
		$weeks = str_replace('W', '', $duration[1]);
		$days = str_replace('D', '', $duration[2]);
		$hours = str_replace('H', '', $duration[4]);
		$minutes = str_replace('M', '', $duration[5]);
		$seconds = str_replace('S', '', $duration[6]);
		
		// Convert seconds to hours, minutes, and seconds
		if ($seconds > 60) {
			$rem_seconds = $seconds % 60;
			$minutes = $minutes + (($seconds - $rem_seconds) / 60);
			$seconds = $rem_seconds;
		}
		if ($minutes > 60) {
			$rem_minutes = $minutes % 60;
			$hours = $hours + (($minutes - $rem_minutes) / 60);
			$minutes = $rem_minutes;
		}
		
		$the_duration = ($weeks * 60 * 60 * 24 * 7) + ($days * 60 * 60 * 24) + ($hours * 60 * 60) + ($minutes * 60) + ($seconds);
		$first_duration = FALSE;
	}
	break;

Hopefully this gets worked into the baseline with the next release.

Props to Tim for offering linking me to a remix of Feist’s Mushaboom. I like the original better, but, well, I’m also a fan of remixes.