The author's blog offers some code to embed a search form in your own sites.

Here's a comparison search for something I am familiar with....

More frivolity (blog tip of the hat to Kottke) for HTTP in tha House. You submit a URL, and the web site extracts the text, combines them into 16 lines, uses a rhyming dictionary, and pops out a series of random rap-like lyrics.

Real word use? minimal. Fun and randomness? priceless.

Here is the new CDB rap....

HTTP in tha House

lyrics by: http://cogdogblog.com/alan/



barrett a nestor martinez

http jade mcli dist maricopa says

href http

http jade mcli dist maricopa free

karan johar simply rock and

wrench and a grease gun band

accessible this form publishes no

comments php aglow



flickr related tag

solid c border right snag

coffee shop which

maricopa edu twitch

his aa degree in computer

spam for neuter

solid pad

edu alan archives php march bad

JADE DOT MCLI DOT DIST DOT MARICOPA DOT EDU IN THA HOUSE

JADE DOT MCLI DOT DIST DOT MARICOPA DOT EDU IN THA HOUSE

JADE DOT MCLI DOT DIST DOT MARICOPA DOT EDU IN THA HOUSE

JADE DOT MCLI DOT DIST DOT MARICOPA DOT EDU

Apparently, NBT takes a look at the small worlds of sub-cultures weaving everything from th eMesa Frozen Entrée Enthusiasts Club, collectors of frozen food (more value for items never thawed, hence the name) to a punk rock turned Christian rock band (they changed every f-word to "pray") to a pregnancy telephone counselor at the "Bill Clinton Crises Center" to a barbershop run by clowns to the No Choice coffee shop which serves anti-abortion protestors... well that's what I've gleaned from the previews/reviews.

It looks pretty irreverent and extremely sarcastic, so NBT is looking good to me. Dig up some more reviews, ask your local movie house to bring in NBT, or heck, take a flight to Phoenix and check out the movie.

Yeah, Never Been Thawed... an Arizona export?

This would not have been possible had not Audree, our eportfolio programming genius, been gracious enough to help with the cryptic perl installs of the GD.pm and GD perl libraries. Thanks Aud!

Some notes:

(*) Yes, D'Arcy, I know that captchas are a total barrier for the visually impaired. My plan (not fully implemented) is to provide a link to our standard feedback form which is accessible. This form publishes no content online so is useless for spammers (though they try, fools).

(*) The captcha takes away my previous restriction that all comments had to be previewed; again D'Arcy, I agree it was a PITA, but gone now. This might be the tradeoff for the first point?

(*) My individual entries can now include the comment for rather than putting them all in pop-up windows.

(*) I'll be testing this to see how effective it is, not just on CDN but the Low Threshold Applications site as well. Out LTA authors need not be bothered by phenterminegamblingbeastiality link foisting.

(*) It may not be perfect as folks are already working on breaking visual captchas.

I still plan to try maybe later this month a migration to WordPress. It really seems to have more flexibility (after doing an MT rebuild of 800+ entries I see the value of a dynamic publishing WP blog) and to be honest it feels like it did in 2003 when I looked at blogs- the blogs I liked reading and looking at were published in MT2.x-- but these days, the ones looking and feeling cool are Word Press (and Drupal). While MT3.x has some desirable features, it hardly feels much more evolutionary than what I have now, and really feels, well stale and dated.

Plus I understand there are a number of very effective WP spam fightinh tools. MT has 1- the MT-Blacklist plugin (yes, Cheryl told me about Brad Choate's new antiSpam plug-in... requires MT3, so fugggedaboddit).

Of course it is subjective! It's my blog.

FYI, James Seng has ported his MT captcha plug-in to his new Drupal run blog.

So cya, "Absinth452" and pals. Go crap on someone elses blog.

I met face to face with the head of our server team and their top Linux tech, and they were both helpful, supportive, and we came up with some interim and long term solutions that can take me out of the hassle of being a server admin (of which I do poorly). Essentially, an aging server we currently use for our main site ( as well as hosting about 10 other major web sites in the system), is going to be getting a colossal upgrade, moving from what now feels like a moped to a new Maserati, and eventually an array of development servers on retired PCs will merge to the big box upstairs.

Anyhow, the guys were helpful face to face.

We'd published internally before on RSS (Fall 2003) and wikis (Fall 2004) without much of a measurable ripple. But already in a few days:

(1) Our Blackboard admin has seen how Feed2JS and RSS feeds from the Maricopa Learning eXchange can be used to pipe content from our Blackboard Support materials MLX collection into a Bb site for the staff around our system that use/support Blackboard:

Yeah, this is not exactly new or earth shattering, but they went and did it on their own.

(2) Another group is using a new open wiki (unspecified, sorry) for creating a place for their People Soft Portal team to do some brainstorming.

(3) We convinced a few folks who attended this week's NMC Online oCnference on Visual Literacy to use a wiki to declare which sections they would review and to post some notes. We were able to send up to 10 people from our system to this conference, and at our first suggestion to use a wiki to collaborate, there was silence and an offer from one leader to have everyone "email their notes so he can blog them". I snuck ahead and created the wiki site, and that turned the bulbs on for the group. Maybe-- it appears that only 3 of the 10 actually got their fingers in the wiki. But we'll take any bits of progress we can get.

(4) And emails like this:

Dave _______ has been looking at the MLX section of the mcli site and had incorporated some of it for Blackboard.

He had an idea of possible doing something similar and harnessing the power of RSS for our Peoplesoft SIS Project web site.

Where can I find out more about how this works, what we would need to do to get it going, and some ideas on how to implement this?
 

We might be getting some traction finally in these technologies that to me, have budded passed "emerging".

So if you are struggling in your system to get some adoption, bring in a Canadian!

Since we are running smoothly, and Al needs his drive back, CCC made creating a local OS a snap.

Our XServe has two internal drives, one with most of the content, the other with the OS. The advice was to move all data off of the Volume that houses the OS, including the web directory (already done), the QuickTime streaming movies directory, and the location of the mysql database files (that required command line creating a symbolic link so the files could be found on the secondary drive.)

So it was time to put a clean OS back on the internal drive. Since the system hardly needed a full 60 Gb, I partitioned it generously in half (use the blank half for something else later), and used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the full volume from the external drive to the new clean one. The clone was done by the time I had refilled my coffee and answered a phone call.

Reboot, and the new system was live. I can see cloning on a regular basis from now on.

Check out the chronology:

* 08:53:24 AM : email announcement sent
* 09:03:22 AM : first registrant signs up
* 11:03:24 AM : 12th registrant signs up

2 hours and 10 minutes to fill a workshop. And here I thought people in our system were ignoring system-wide messages.

Amaztype is using Amazon web services. Created by Keita Kitamura & Yugo Nakamura for Tha Ltd.

Well that does not exactly explain it. You type in a keyword search for Amazon (US, Japan, UK, Canada) for books or music by either title or author. So what's the big deal? Well the results pop up as the graphics icons of the book/album cover. So what? Well as the icons appear, the are laid out to form the letters of your search. For example, I did a US book title search for "Dog" and get this result:

That's cute, right? But then click on any cover, and you get a zoom in and some meta-data:

And the "more info" leads you to one of the more classic works of fiction ;-)

Well, it is just plain neat...

FurlDeliciousFrassleConnoteaBagCiteULikeSimpyLinkrollBlogmarksopenBMSpurl Bookmarklet Tool

Spurl looks pretty good at a quick glance-- it plays well with del.icio.us in that your tasty del.ici.ous sites can be imported/synched with Spurl, and anything you "Spurl" can be tossed back at del.icio.us. Holy RipMixFeeding! I'm getting dizzy.

On another front, it hasn't been the greatest day back from vacation. Our Ocotillo web server was compromised over the weekend and is offline as we re-assemble it from scratch. I had a great Skyperview with Amy Gahran, and my G4 laptop went into a total freeze (like the first time in 5 months) locking up Skype, WireTap, the whole OS... all was trashed. Fortunately, Amy is willing to repeat her remarks tomorrow.

Another day...

Today I was doing a CSV (comma separated value) export for a recent survey, somthing I had yet to use. This was so I could put the data in Excel for a project manager at one of our coleges. I was disappointed to find that in the open response questions, any RETURN characters entered in the text area input fields was NOT stripped out on the CSV export. this cause major havoc, as on import to Excel, the RETURN indicates the end of a data row.

As an end around, I resorted to a series of BBEdit search and replaces. The data first record was easy to spot as it was always a number that began with a "1" after a new line. So first I did a search on "\r1" and replaced the newline with a characteristic string, or "|%*%|1". This makes a place holder for the RETURNs I wanted to keep. Then I could replace all remaining "\r" with a " " to remove the errant newlines in the middle of data fields. Lastly, I do a search back replacing all "|%*%|" with a "\r".

Then I completed an email error report on the Chumpsoft site, and in less than 30 minutes "Hoyoul" responded with a fixed set of code to replace a PHP function library. And it worked perfectly.

Now that is service, can you hear me now, Qwest? As a sad reminder last month I detailed How Not To do e-Customer Service: "Call Us" where an online web support form request about customer service complaint resulted in an email response "Call us on the phone". WShen I responded (by email) and said that was stupid, the response was a manager would now call me.

A whole month went by.

So I forwarded the message back to Qwest, and merely said, "It has been a month and no one has called me".

So what did they do?

They dispatched a repair technician to my house, who later called and said there was no problem with our lines. Well duh, I never requested a technician. Stupid.

This is way past the point of even dealing with an organization seemingly full of knuckle walking bumpkins that are several bulbs short of a full pack. Well at least it appears tat way in customer service.

I thus offer a loud Phhhhhftttttttttt in their general direction.

I will take a ChumpSoft any day over the clowns at Qwest.

Thanks Seb!

We encourage the MIT community and the public to submit images or designs for the MIT home page. Like open source software, the MIT home page improves with each individual's contribution. The designer of each day's image is credited on the home page itself.We encourage the MIT community and the public to submit images or designs for the MIT home page. Like open source software, the MIT home page improves with each individual's contribution. The designer of each day's image is credited on the home page itself.

Today's design featured a 'corny' theme:

The tag line reads:

MIT "open source" cafe: because students can't live on Linux kernels alone

Nicely done! Check out the rest...

The following Friday (March 4, 2005), our Ocotillo Online Learning Group (OLG) convened a panel discussion with 12 Maricopa students, from 4 different colleges, to share their Student Voices about learning in online or hybrid courses.

Unfortunately we did not get our request for recording in on time (no podcasts, sorry), but thanks to the detailed notes of Randi in our office, we have a nice set of student quotes and suggestions in our meeting notes.

Online courses [produce better learning environments]. You have to teach yourself to learn what you need to know. You pay more attention and are more focused.

Content, online vs. in class, is there more material online or do you lose something? Does the textbook enrich the learning experience?

"The textbook becomes like a third learning tool, not the best tool. As an extrovert, one night a week in person is good, but the discussion board is great."

"There are some classes where I have never used the book. Feedback from the instructors in important."

How many feel like they have lost something in hybrid and online courses?

No students indicated that they had lost anything by not being in the classroom. One student thought that the add in material was excessive. If the instructor does not use the discussion board than the students miss out.

See the rest of the notes and quotes...

These student voices were fresh, honest, and clear that they want flexible learning, and are willing to put extra effort in.