From AlterNet: Teaching In America: The Impossible Dream. Tagline:
Many public school teachers today must work two jobs to survive, and can’t afford to buy homes or raise families. Why do we treat our teachers so poorly?
[[pageindex]] About “Blogging” typically connotes short-form writing that needs little internal structure, but that’s no reason to cramp your style. As people start to explore WordPress‘s Pages feature, it seems likely that we’ll need a way to structure content within posts or pages sooner or later. That’s why I’m working on bsuite_innerindex. It’s a WordPress […] » about 300 words
Matt says my attempts to analogize online roleplaying games to more familiar contests like chess or automobile racing are “just silly.” But his response appears to reinforce my point rather than refute it. It is the responsibility of the gamers and gaming organizations to create and enforce rules. People violating those rules are subject to […] » about 300 words
From AlterNet: Teaching In America: The Impossible Dream. Tagline:
Many public school teachers today must work two jobs to survive, and can’t afford to buy homes or raise families. Why do we treat our teachers so poorly?
Here’s an interesting GeoPlace.com article on open source GIS tools, including GIS extensions to PosgreSQL and MySQL. Via The Map Room.
My Olympus C4000 is hard to beat. Steve’s Digicams reviewed it well, and many friends with newer cameras find features or capabilities in it they miss on theirs. So, despite my schoolboy giddiness at the arrival of new gadgets, I’m waiting to be convinced that my new C7000 will replace it. It too was well […] » about 200 words
I’m a big fan of the WP Geo plugin, but I want more. My biggest complaint is that I want to insert coordinates using Google Maps or MultiMap URLs, rather than insert them in the modified story editor. So I wrote a bit of code that reads through the URLs in a post, finds the […] » about 400 words
I have a sort of guilt complex about looking at home theater issues. Nonetheless, I’ve been building one piecemeal ever since I found an incredible deal on a video projector. Now I’m working on assembling a video jukebox of sorts and I need to face the remote control stumbling block. That’s why I like the […] » about 100 words
The following pages from the WordPress Codex were surprisingly helpful recently:
Matt and I have been talking about online role playing games lately. He’s more than interested in the new challenges they pose to our legal system, the new media opportunities they offer, the ways they’re altering culture. We got into a conversation about how companies are taking advantage of them in marketing campaigns, so I […] » about 300 words
They say “Zimbra is a community for building and maintaining next generation collaboration technology.” What I’d like to know, however, is whether Zmbra is a community driven, social software answer to the problems of groupware — typically driven by management’s needs.
I think this is Dave. Apparently they keep him in a cell at the server farm. tags: eyeballs, funny, long hours, server farm, slavery, sleep, sleepy, staying awake, textdrive » about 100 words
I actually like the look of a broken panorama, where the borders of each photo are clearly visible — even emphasized. But last night I got the notion of doing a seamless pano and found DoubleTake, a $12 shareware app that makes the process pretty darn easy. The sunrise shot above (larger sizes) was my […] » about 200 words
I’m only just getting into Peter Morville‘s Ambient Findability, but I’m eating it up. In trying to prep the reader to understand his thesis — summed up on the front cover as “what we find changes who we become” — Morville relates his difficulty in finding authoritative, non-marketing information about his daughter’s newly diagnosed peanut […] » about 500 words
WordPress‘s Pages open the door to using WP as a content management system. Unfortunately, Pages can’t be edited via XML-RPC blogging apps like Ecto. This might be a good thing, but I’m foolhardy enough to try working around it. Here’s how: Find a text editor you like and open up the wp-includes/functions-post.php file. in the […] » about 300 words
Along with the energy saving and water saving tips previously, our physical plant folks have sent out these recycling tips: Recycling of Aluminum Cans — saves 95% of the Energy required to make the same amount of Aluminum from its virgin source. One ton of recycled Aluminum saves 14,000 KWH of Energy, 40 barrels of […] » about 300 words
Earnings reports from car makers seemed to suggest SUV sales were down last spring, and with gas prices near $3 per gallon in some parts of the country still, nobody should be surprised that Yahoo! is saying interest in SUVs is down — way down — now:
If the Buzz is any indication, then yes. Searches on “hybrids” outrank “SUVs” by a tremendous margin, and it’s the same story with individual models. By far the most popular hybrid is the Prius (not to be confused with “pious,” which is how many owners feel, and can lead to blathering about saving the planet). Interest in Toyota’s gas-miser is more than double that of Search’s most popular SUV, the Hummer H3. Also, the Prius garners nearly 10 times the searches as Toyota’s SUV, the 4Runner. Indeed, it appears the bell is tolling for the 15 mpg club.
Options: SMART and Japanoid K-Cars.
Macsimum News did a story on satellite internet options a few weeks ago, but reader reports focused on fixed base station solutions for domestic use.
What about mobile data solutions for international use? That’s where companies like Outfitter Satellite come in. They’ve got Inmarsat solutions that can do 64kbps (or bonded to 128kbps) almost anywhere in the world. And, for customers in the Mid-East or Asia, they’ve got a 144kbps RBGAN solution that seems to offer much better throughput at far lower prices. So why don’t we have RBGAN coverage globally?
The Mozilla docs on JavaScript security give a hint of hope that signed scripts will work around the cross-domain script exclusions that all good browsers enforce. But an item at DevArticles.com throws water on the idea: Signed scripts are primarily useful in an intranet environment; they’re not so useful on the Web in general. To […] » about 300 words
David Rothman pointed me to Michael Lasky’s PC World review of the Pepper Pad. Lasky bangs on Pepper, saying he can’t recommend it. Too often, I think, technology reviewers approach a new product without understanding it. Lasky tells us how the Pepper performs when playing music or videos before comparing it to “notebook computers available […] » about 300 words
It looks like bstat has been localized for Japan! With that in mind, I’d love to hear from international users about what I can do to make localization easier. There will be some big changes in the transition to bsuite, and it might be a good time to make sure I’m properly supporting WP‘s translation tables and localization features.
I have plans to apply AJAX to our library catalog but I’m running into a problem where I can’t do XMLHttpRequest events to servers other than the one I loaded the main webpage from. Mozilla calls it the “same origin policy,” everyone else calls it a cross-domain script exclusion, or something like that.
Some Mozilla folks are working on a standard to address the problem, but it could be quite a while before browser support is common enough to build for it.
So Plan A was to use simple AJAX with XMLHTTPRequest. Plan B comes from this crazy suggestion at Apple’s developer site: Remote Scripting with IFRAME. It looks like different functions are subject to different restrictions, so the theory is that a JavaSctript loaded in a page in a hidden IFRAME can call functions from the parent page and do pretty much everything we’ve come to expect of XMLHTTPRequest. Here’s an example they offer.
Crazy as it is it works, and it gets around some cross-domain script exclusions for some browsers, but it still gets trapped by Mozilla.
Our physical plant folks sent out this list of water saving tips to followup on the energy savings tips they sent previously. Again, I think they should be blogging them, but what do I know? (It’s a rhetorical question, please don’t answer.) Limit the use of domestic hot water — use cold water whenever it […] » about 300 words
My friend Troy keeps a studio at Saltworks, a combined gallery and studio space in Atlanta where Prema Murthy just opened her deStructures show. I was in Atlanta to see Troy and family, so the opening was added sugar, and quite a pleasure. The image above comes from Troy’s Above and Below series. tags: above, […] » about 100 words
I might be overstating it, but Identity Management is the next big thing for the open source community to tackle. That’s why I like Sxip, even though I know so little about it.
There are a number of other solutions stewing, but most of those that I’m aware of are targeted at academic and enterprise users. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some federated system of identity management among blogs?
Yes, IdM is the next big thing, but as an infrastructural technology, it will be invisible when it works.
Here’s another link: The Identity Initiative : iname, FreeID, LID, SXIP, What’s Your Favorite Emerging Digital Identity?
I was never a very good graphic designer, but the part of me that thought I was still pays attention when I see software like Linotype’s free FontExplorer, described somewhere as “the iTunes for fonts.”