D'Arcy Norman dot net » aside

8 hours

dnorman — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:18:35 +0000

this makes me smile.

embedding web-based citations with sni.ps

dnorman — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:58:10 +0000

I’d tried sni.ps before – it’s a very cool clip management and embedding service by the Project Opus folks. It’s gotten REALLY nice. Let’s see if I can embed a citation:

Partitioning of Data

Partitioning of Data

This involves moving different tables or different parts of the database into different databases, and normally on different servers. This allows you to scale an application by adding more database servers, so your data could be spread across several servers.

HyperDB allows you to specify which data resides on which servers.

codex.wordpress.org

And Jim will love this – it’s powered by a Drupal website…

constant curmudgeoning

dnorman — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:21:57 +0000

Dewey on educative power

dnorman — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:40:07 +0000

All communication is like art. It may fairly be said, therefore, that any social arrangement that remains vitally social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who participate in it. Only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a routine way does it lose its educative power.

- John Dewey, Democracy and Education

I wonder what Dewey would have thought of the LMS…

Dewey on society

dnorman — Mon, 25 May 2009 17:09:37 +0000

Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity, any more than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so many feet or miles removed from others. A book or a letter may institute a more intimate association between human beings separated thousands of miles from each other than exists between dwellers under the same roof.

- John Dewey, 1916, Democracy and Education

The quote is almost 100 years old. I wonder what Dewey would have thought about the Internet, email, IM, blogs, and tweets…

testing wp-spamfree

dnorman — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:27:42 +0000

I’d tried WP-SpamFree before as the antispam system here, but something was wonky (I think Apache wasn’t properly serving the javascript file or something). I’ve tweaked, and updated, and it appears to be working now. Testing much?

99 cents at a time

dnorman — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 22:23:16 +0000

I just upgraded a bunch of tracks to iTunes+ DRM-free files. At the bottom of my “Purchased” album, I noticed the stats:

So that’s why she complains about the stream of iTunes charges on the Visa… Oops.

it gets better

dnorman — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:19:41 +0000

I’ll happily put up with a bit of snow, when the forecast for the rest of the week looks like this

differences in mass media messages on twitter

dnorman — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 19:20:59 +0000

it’s pretty easy to compare messages sent by various mass media outlets via twitter. it’s also pretty surprising how they spin the same information in different ways.

update: mainstream media never fails to disappoint. an hour after posting this, CBC went live with the actual story, in line with how the Herald spun it on their first try. sigh.

dnorman — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 13:19:51 +0000

now THIS is more like it