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Update: Converge Magazine refuses to publish any of my comments on their blog, so I’m putting enough info here so that it will show up in google queries: The magazine is “ConvergeMag”, aka “Converge Magazine”, and the principal is Michael Smith, blogger at PrincipalsPage.com – and he is apparently not a principal any more, but is a Superintendent of Oakland CUSD #5 School Board. The article in question is Chocolate Milk Tastes Better When I am Not Being Violated – posted July 23, 2009.

I read a blog post yesterday, by an elementary school principal who described an incident that happened to him. He was trying (very, very hard) to be funny, but the language and his reaction were not what I would have expected from a principal, or of anyone in a position of power and authority in the care of children.

I tried to post a comment on the principal’s blog entry, but the editors of the site apparently decided not to approve it for public consumption. No problem. I have my own blog. Here’s the comment I posted.

You didn’t do a spectacular job of describing exactly what happened, as you were trying so hard to be funny. I don’t know the full details, and I’ve never been a Principal, nor “Mr. Guy Who Always Wears a Tie.”

I have been around children. A lot. Mine. Other peoples’. Lots of kids. Kids are sometimes a bit clueless about what exactly they’re doing. Sometimes, they think they’re being funny, or cool. Sometimes, they’re just being plain old clumsy and awkward. Sometimes, they combine for full effect.

Without knowing if the kid intended to punch you in the nads, I can’t speak to exactly what happened. I’d guess it wasn’t an intentional nut-punch. If it was, then deal with the kid rather than ranting on a blog about it. If it wasn’t, then let it go. You’re the principal, for crying out loud. Grow up.

And calling this incident “violation”? Seriously? Do you even know what that word implies? Do you know anyone that has truly been violated? I’d bet there are a significant number of people, including the parents of the kids at your school, who would be super-pissed to hear their principal describe what was likely an accident (or at worst, a clumsy attempt to be funny or cool) as violation. You devalue the word, and belittle those who have been violated.

Not cool. Not funny.

Now, I realize that I may have had more success in having the comment published if I’d used honey rather than vinegar. But sometimes you just need to pour a tall glass of vinegar.

I don’t know when this broke – maybe around the time Safari 4 was released? Anyway, Java WebStart stopped working. Downloading a .jnlp file and doubleclicking it brought up an editor (Dashcode) rather than the application launched via Java WebStart. I tried using Spotlight to find “Java WebStart” so I could manually launch the app. But nothing was found. WTF?

Apparently, the solution, of course, is to navigate in the Finder to /System/Library/CoreServices and click on Java WebStart.app – an entirely intuitive and obvious solution. This triggers some hidden magic to somehow restore access to JWS. Who knows. It works after doing this.

From a presentation on 1998/02/07 at Calvin College, via YouTube (thanks to George Siemens for pointing this video out!)

when looking at any technology, (at least) 6 questions are important:

1. “What is the problem to which this is the solution?”
2. “Whose problem is it?”
3. “Suppose we solve this problem, and solve it decisively. What new problems might be created because we have solved the problem?”
4. “Which people, and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?”
5. “What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies, and what is being gained and lost by such changes?”
   • (eg. “community” and “conversation” have changed meaning wrt internet)
   • “conversation” – “email isn’t a conversation, it’s just 2 guys typing messages to each other.”
   • “community” – on internet, people of similar interests. traditionally, people who do not necessarily have similar interests, but who must negotiate and accommodate their differences for the sake of social harmony.
6. “What sort of people and institutions acquire special economic and political power because of technological change?”
   • the transformation of a technology into a medium – the exploitation of a technology – always results in a realignment of power.
   • eg. television gives power to some, while depriving others.
   • media entrepreneurs are the most radical force in culture.

“The answers one gives may have an ideological cast, but the questions [are universal].”

I left a comment over on Andre’s great post on social media training wheels. Rereading the comment, I wanted to post it here as a fully-fledged blog entry.

We’re at a point where the exact tool selected really doesn’t matter very much anymore. Any of these communities can be built in pretty much any open source web platform. The key is that it’s open source, so it’s easily modifiable (or at least modification is _possible_), and the ownership of the software and community is located within the institution, rather than at a corporate headquarters.

That said, most of the most active communities on UCalgaryBlogs.ca are closed to outsiders – walled gardens for use by the class. And I’m fine with that. The goal isn’t to publish content to the open internet. The goal is to engage students, in creation, discussion, and reflection. If they need a walled garden to do that effectively (and there are several excellent reasons for needing privacy for a community) then so be it. If they’d like to do it in the open, that’s just a checkbox on a settings page.

That option isn’t available for users of The Big Commercial LMS Platform. If it’s in an LMS, it’s closed. End of discussion. And people only gain experience in using the LMS, in farming for Maggie.

My Aperture library tends to grow much larger than it should. It seems as though Aperture does not delete the thumbnails for photographs even when deleting the originals, leaving several gigabytes of orphaned kruft behind, accumulating bits, filling up volumes. I delete most of the photos I shoot, so the majority of thumbnails in my library are orphaned. But there’s a quick and easy way to clean it up. After backing up the entire library, I did this (after a blog post by Brett Gross):

First, find out how many petabytes of space have been sucked up on your drive by thumbnails:

find ~/Pictures -name "AP.Thumbnails" -print0 | xargs -0 du -ch
find ~/Pictures -name "AP.Minis" -print0 | xargs -0 du -ch
find ~/Pictures -name "AP.Tinies" -print0 | xargs -0 du -ch

Then, after backing stuff up, this’ll clean out the kruft:

find ~/Pictures -name "AP.Thumbnails" -delete
find ~/Pictures -name "AP.Minis" -delete
find ~/Pictures -name "AP.Tinies" -delete

After running it, Aperture will have to generate new thumbnails for all of the photos in the library – but it won’t generate thumbnails for the photos that were deleted, obviously. On my desktop box at work (with only 4535 photos), this cleared up a couple of GB of space. Thumbnail regeneration took almost an hour. I’ll try it on my home laptop tonight, with over 30,00017,000 photos on it. It’ll probably take several hours to regenerate thumbnails.

Of course, it’d be nicer for Aperture to properly clean up after itself – the whole point of abstracting file management behind the library interface is to make this kind of mundane maintenance stuff unnecessary.

Update: I ran it on my main Aperture library, with 17,371 photos. After letting Aperture rebuild thumbnails overnight, I saved 2GB of disk space from orphaned thumbnails. That may not seem like a lot with today’s gigantor-sized drives, but that’s a LOT of kruft that could have been easily cleaned up by properly removing thumbnails when deleting photos from the library. Leaving them behind to fill up drive space is just lazy and sloppy.

Sometime this morning, while I was riding to work, someone viewed a photo of mine on Flickr, rolling the “total views” odometer over 1 million. That’s a lot of views. There aren’t many other venues where I could put my photos on display and have them seen a million times. Granted, there’s no “unique viewers” stat – so it could be 10 people clicking reload repeatedly. But still…

And I know there are LOTS of people with WAY more people viewing their stuff, but I still think this is pretty mindblowing. That’s a lot of exposure for, what? $30 a year?

ignore this post. I’m playing with a plugin, to see if I can add geotagging of posts and pages. It appears to work perfectly under standalone WP, but seems to fall over under WPMU (or, perhaps, under Multi-DB?)

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