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I spent a few minutes rearranging apps in the shiny new iTunes 9. This home screen holds all of my must-have apps. Screen 2 is my set of game addictions. Screen 3 is music apps. The rest is largely a jumble of stuff.

I just removed 49 splogs, and at least as many spam accounts from UCalgaryBlogs.ca – the funny/annoying part is that the scripts used by these cretins doesn’t grok the private/public checkbox on the registration form, so they were all marked as Private and Google hadn’t crawled a single one of them.

UCalgaryBlogs.ca now requires a valid ucalgary.ca email address to create a blog site. Once a site is created, you can add anyone to it, with any email address. But the spam blogs should hopefully be gone.

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].”

this makes me smile.

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:

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

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…

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…

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?

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