I lugged my camera and Flip on the Ride to Conquer Cancer, to document some of the ride. It was a pretty epic bike ride – the hardest thing I’ve ever done – but was well worth it.
Thank you to everyone that supported me in any way – it definitely made the pain of the ride easier to push through.
Full resolution photos are available on Flickr, and I apologize for my severe lack of video production skills…
I’ve been trying to get BuddyPress working on my WPMU installation that uses MultiDB for database partitioning. It’s been cranky, but I just realized I’m a complete idiot because I was overlooking the obvious (and drop dead simple) fix.
BuddyPress was acting up because it was creating tables in each blog’s database tableset. But MultiDB makes it easy to declare tables as belonging to a shared global database, so they don’t get recreated for each blog and are common across the entire service.
Thanks to a reminder by Andrew on the premium.wpmudev.org forum!
I edited my db-config.php file to declare the BuddyPress tables as being global, and copied the tables from the database where they had been collecting, into the global database.
// BuddyPress
add_global_table(’bp_activity_sitewide’);
add_global_table(’bp_activity_user_activity’);
add_global_table(’bp_activity_user_activity_cached’);
add_global_table(’bp_friends’);
add_global_table(’bp_groups’);
add_global_table(’bp_groups_groupmeta’);
add_global_table(’bp_groups_members’);
add_global_table(’bp_groups_wire’);
add_global_table(’bp_messages_messages’);
add_global_table(’bp_messages_notices’);
add_global_table(’bp_messages_recipients’);
add_global_table(’bp_messages_threads’);
add_global_table(’bp_notifications’);
add_global_table(’bp_user_blogs’);
add_global_table(’bp_user_blogs_blogmeta’);
add_global_table(’bp_user_blogs_comments’);
add_global_table(’bp_user_blogs_posts’);
add_global_table(’bp_xprofile_data’);
add_global_table(’bp_xprofile_fields’);
add_global_table(’bp_xprofile_groups’);
add_global_table(’bp_xprofile_wire’);
It seems to be working fine. I’ll do some more testing, but it’s looking promising. If it’s really working, I’ll be spending some time to BuddyPress-enable the main theme for the WPMU service, and roll it out properly.
One of the interesting new things in iPod/iPhone OS 3.0 is the new “find my iPod” feature. It’s probably most useful for an iPhone, which could be easily left on a bus or something, and has an always-on 3G connection, but it works just fine for iPods over WIFI as well.
It’s close – I’m just on the edge of the blue circle as I’m typing this – but it’s good enough to tell me that I haven’t left it at home. The map updates in nearly realtime, so you could, in theory, track the device as it walks away.
The location is only visible to the owner of the MobileMe (nee .Mac) account, and, I suppose, The Authorities™. It’s intended to provide a way to find a lost or stolen iPhone. It could also provide a creepy way of tracking someone, but you’d need to know their MobileMe login.
You can also send messages to the iPod from the MobileMe web interface:
The message is customizable, and you get an email after the “OK” button has been clicked to confirm that the message was received.
One of the things I do when working with students and faculty, is to show them how to find great free resources shared online via the Creative Commons license, and to provide proper attribution. It’s really easy. It can be as simple as “Photograph by “, and maybe a link to the photo page.
The Tekzilla podcast (and TV show?) used a photo of mine in a recent episode (Episode 93: “Netbook Buyer’s Guide”, June 18 2009). I’m fine with that – I release every photo I publish under a simple Creative Commons attribution license to make that kind of thing easy to do.
Here’s how Tekzilla handles attribution:
Oops. Nope. They didn’t put it there. There was plenty of room for their network logo badge, though.
Maybe in the credits for the show? Nope. But there was room for about 2 minutes of super-funny blooper out-takes.
They had used many photographs throughout the show, likely all from Flickr, without providing any attribution for any of them. Without even a lame “Photo from Flickr” – the way the photos were used, it appeared as though they (or someone on their crew) had taken all of them. Maybe they had taken some of them, but it was completely unclear.
That’s not cool. That’s not abiding by the terms of the Creative Commons license.
Speaking of attribution, thanks to Paul for the heads up on this. He recognized my photo while watching the podcast episode.
And here’s the original photograph on Flickr:
Photograph by D’Arcy Norman
Update: Turns out that it was a simple oversight, and will be rectified by Tekzilla providing attribution in a future episode.
Brian Lamb raves about the awesome Murder, Madness, Mayhem project that was run by Jon Beasley Murray – where students in his course worked to create and edit pages in Wikipedia to bring them up to “Featured Article” status. Brian talks about how wikis are powerful examples of collaborative editing, and that although the students’ work is in the open, that any errors or omissions (or worse) would be fixed by the wikipedia community very quickly.
I finally decided to test this out. Not that I didn’t believe Brian – I did – but I wanted to put it to the test. Does this REALLY happen? How quickly? Even on relatively obscure pages?
So, while watching Brian’s awesome TTIX 2009 keynote, I pulled up the wikipedia page that he was talking about, and proceeded to make my own contribution to it.
Seems like a pretty good edit, to me. It looked official, and linked to 2 other (albeit nonexistent) pages on wikipedia. I know I enjoyed the performance of the Saskatoon Prairie Theatre.
Then, I monitored the page.
13 hours later, this happened:
Some anonymous person in Brazil noticed the edit, correctly decided that it wasn’t a valid contribution to the article, and yanked it from the published version of El Señor Presidente.
Is that something that can be generalized? Can all wikipedia pages be trusted? Probably not. But, knowing that a relatively obscure page was monitored and corrected in 13 hours gives me more confidence to trust the rest of the wikipedia collection of articles.
I’ve been farting around with a Manfrotto Super Clamp to attach a camera to my bike to experiment with techniques to document the Ride to Conquer Cancer. I’ve got a bunch of stuff to try, but I’m getting closer to something that I’m happy with.
Here’s the first half of my ride home from UCalgary campus through the streets of NW Calgary – sped up about 3x. I was averaging between 30-40km/h for this portion of the ride.
(video doesn’t show up in RSS feed. grumble.)
I still have a few things to figure out – the clamp isn’t quite level, so I need to MacGuyver a way to level the thing so the footage isn’t all leaning to one side – but it’s getting close.
I was asked to give a presentation for the From Courses to Dis/Course online conference last week, and chose the topic of identity as it relates to openness. My session, Identity in the Open Classroom, was a fun (for me, anyway) exploration of the issues, and I think served the purpose of framing discussion.
Here’s the video of the recording from the session:
the full chat transcript for the session is available, as well as the full Elluminate session recording.
and the slide that wound up framing much of the question and answer portion:
I’ve been running a copy of WordPress MultiUser for over a year now. Comment spam hasn’t been much of a problem, thanks to Akismet, but if I leave site registration open (so students and faculty can create new accounts and blogs), the evil spammers find it and start sending their bots en masse.
I tried a few plugins, with varying levels of success. There’s an interesting one that attempts to limit registrations to a specific country, but it falsely reported some valid users as not being in Canada. Captchas work, but also block some valid users (and the signup captcha plugin I’d been using is possibly abandoned).
So, I did some quick googling, and came across the page on the WordPress Codex about using .htaccess files to stop comment spam. I made some modifications to the technique, and am now running it on UCalgaryBlogs.ca with apparent success. The apache logs show the bot attacks are still in full force, but not a single one has gotten through in order to register. And valid users have been able to get through. That’s pretty promising.
I guessed at the starting point before, and was wrong. Looks like the Alberta ride starts at the Deerfoot Casino, then must head down Deerfoot to 22X then west to 22 before shooting south.
Here’s the route, complete with the elevation profile:
Elevation Gain: 1555 meters
Elevation Loss: 1392 meters
