From the monthly archives:

July 2009

on principals abusing their position for fun and fortune

July 24, 2009 · 5 comments

in general

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 [...]

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how to fix Java WebStart on MacOSX 10.5.7 - July 23, 2009

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.

Neil Postman on Technology and Society - July 21, 2009

PostmanAtCarverFrom 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].”

on openness, walled gardens, community, and ownership

July 15, 2009 · 14 comments

in general

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 [...]

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cleaning up my Aperture library

July 14, 2009 · 3 comments

in photography

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 [...]

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one million views

July 10, 2009 · 5 comments

in general

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” [...]

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testing geotagging

July 8, 2009 · 8 comments

in general

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?)
[gmap zoom='18']

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