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I seem to be the only person on the planet not getting into the whole Talk Like a Pirate thing. I’ve got a problem glorifying piracy. The world has enough pirates right now.

I know I’m overreacting, and being overly sensitive about this. But, what’s next? Talk like a rapist day? Talk like a murderer? Kidnapper? I mean, those are all pirate-related activities. How about Talk Like a Decent Human Being Day? I’d be up for that one…

btw, I’m not totally humorless about this - Evan’s upcoming birthday party is pirate themed. But, without swords. Arrrrrr.

Ronald Moore and his crew have been consistently doing amazing, high quality work. They’ve “gotten it” in a whole bunch of ways, from podcasting show commentaries as episodes air, to blogging, to video blogging behind-the-scenes stuff. I’m so totally, perhaps unhealthily, hooked on this show.

But they totally dropped the ball on the Season 3 webisodes. There are 10 mini-episodes leading up to the season 3 premier, viewable on the scifi.com website.

But, only if you have an IP address located in the USA.

Fans in Canada should be able to go to spacecast.com to view the webisodes, but apparently scifi.com wants the scoop. Meaning everyone outside the States is shut out.

Someone posted a copy of the first webisode to YouTube - an obvious copyright infringement - and that was promptly pulled down at the request of NBC.

I’m looking forward to BSG season 3 - more than I’ve ever anticipated any show. More than Lost. But, because I live North Of The Border, I can’t view the free, ad-sponsored webisodes. I don’t understand that.

Ron, please kick the studio’s ass for us non-US fans. They’re being really stupid about this.

I’m doing a couple of projects that involve writing some custom code and deploying it on Other People’s Servers. The code works great locally and on my server. I can run through the entire thing, and it works great.

Then, I move it to Client’s Colocated Server That Is Managed By A Third Party. It’s completely locked down. Like I can’t even use which to find commands in bash. Like I had to grovel for MySQL command line access (and was eventually granted mysql - but not mysqladmin access). Want a text editor? Yeah… We haven’t enabled your account to see any of those. Want to run your custom code? Yeah… It’ll fail for some unknown reason. Access to the error log so you can debug it? Nah…

I don’t know if I’m just a total control freak, or have been totally spoiled by having my own servers for so long (or both) but I feel like I’m hobbled. I can still do the project, but every little task takes at least an order of magnitude longer as I have to find workarounds or wait for things to be “enabled” for our use. Frustrating.

I could install the entire frakking project on my Dreamhost account with more than enough bandwidth, disk space and bandwidth to spare. And it would run perfectly without these silly and arbitrary “security” precautions getting in the way. But the terms of the project won’t allow that.

If Dreamhost can let me hammer away on a shared server with full access to any service and command that I can think of, why on earth is it acceptable for this other server to be so locked down? If I had the cash, I’d pick up an XServe or a Blade or something and just host the damned thing myself. It’d be easier and more efficient in the long run.

</rant>

I’ve gotten absolutely sick of hearing about how wealthy Albertans are. On the news tonight, every other story was about how we’re so stinking rich. We’re buying everything in BC. We’re buying new cars. We’re buying so many new mansions that there aren’t enough tradespeople to build them.

Janice and I walked through the showhomes in our neighbourhood on the weekend to see what’s up. These are the same builders we used when we built our house in 2000. Except, now the price of the lots are higher than what we paid for our whole house package. The “starter” homes in our community now begin at $450,000 - almost 3x what ours cost just 6 years ago. That’s absolutely insane. We fell in love with one of the homes - but at $650,000 it’s not bloody likely. But someone’s buying this stuff.

But, here’s the thing. I don’t know anyone that’s gotten rich off of oil. An old family friend spent decades in the oilpatch, and did OK, but he retired before things got insane. My closest connection to the oilpatch is through my brother, but he’s living in Asia, not Alberta. He did help start an oil company, and sold it a few years ago. He had a nice Porsche and house, but he left the province for greener pastures. Most of his small personal fortune was made in the insurance industry, not the oilpatch.

So, now there’s a majority of the population being affected by the few who struck Texas Tea, driving up the prices of everything. And making the rest of the country envious of the “wealthy Albertan” - but I’d like to meet one of those.

I obviously move in the wrong circles. Someone’s obviously able to afford all of the irrationally extravagant stuff. Escalades and Hummers are rolling off city lots. These McMansions are being sold faster than they can be built.

Our provincial government was able to pay off the debt due to unbudgeted and unpredicted revenue surpluses of billions of dollars every fiscal quarter. Something like $20B per year that just falls into their lap. A trained chimp could balance a budget with these surpluses. And yet we don’t have enough schools, or hospitals, or public transportation. They’re building new super-ring-roads like they’re going out of style, though. Gotta have someplace to drive those Escalades…

I’ve been biting my tongue on this whole Blackboard-patents-the-LMS brouhaha that’s going around. I did add my 2 cents to the Wikipedia VLE Prior Art page, with a link to one of the two LMSes I’ve been involved in building before Blackboard applied for this patent.

What follows is a largely stream-of-consciousness rant about some of the issues involved.

I find it completely unfathomable that such a basic and well established classification of software could be summarily handed to a single company. I’m planning on taking some time to actually read the patent, to see if it’s as general as everyone says, or is it really (hopefully) a vaguely worded description of their particular implementation. A cursory glance at it suggests that they’ve managed to throw in utilities ranging from online storage of user data, to storing files on a server…

However, the greater problem isn’t this particular case, but rather the more general issue of software patents as a whole. These intentionally vaguely worded litigation factories only benefit one group of people - shareholders in the patent holding company.

Here’s what’s driving the whole patent engine - public companies are held legally responsible to maximize profit for their shareholders. To the extent that if they fail to generate profit (or acceptably sufficient profit) they can be sued by shareholders. The board of directors is liable. Which drives public companies to squeeze every possible gram of cash out of any possible revenue stream. If they failed to get the patent for a product, and someone else managed to get it - and then came after the company - shareholders would be pissed. So, software patents are conceptually an arms race. Companies are filing patent applications for anything they can think of in order to both protect themselves from others doing the same thing, and to maximize profit by handing the patent to their lawyers and owning a market segment as a result.

But - the patent office should be acting as a filter, preventing these blatant patent grabs as being invalid before getting rubber-stamped. If the patent office can’t properly vet applications, the office should be closed as ineffective or worse.

If Blackboard wants to recoup some karma, they should sign the patent(s) over to an impartial body, ensuring that the patent is used only as a first strike protection to prevent evildoers from obtaining said patent and obliterating an entire marketplace.

So… Who’s the best candidate to be handed the patent? IMS? IEEE? Creative Commons? UN?

I participated in a meeting on campus today that wound up dealing with politics more than anything else. I was having a really hard time trying to figure out why the problem being defined was worth such extreme polarization and strategy worthy of a Pentagon scenario, or at least an episode of Survivor. Actually, I still haven’t figured that part out, but will do my best to contribute to the group as appropriate.
Oy.

I’m so sick and tired of people and companies slapping “Web 2.0″ stickers on their websites/products/blogs/resumes to show how kewl and innovative they are. I saw a website for a design company that mentions “Web 2.0″ a whopping 5 times on their home page alone, and once more in the title of the page. I get it. You’re innovative. I should worship you.

Here’s an idea. Just do cool stuff. Be innovative. Stop trying to brag your ass off by buzzwordifying everything. It’s starting to come across like some kind of high school clique - jocks, preps, bangers, and the “Web 2.0″ gang. If you’re not in the Web 2.0 Gang, you suck. Whatever. I was an outcast then, and I’m happy to be one now.

Yes, I know “Web 2.0″ is shorthand for a whole suite/syndrome of stuff, and it’s faster to just say three syllables that are buzzword compliant than to have to explain innovation. And “Web 1.0″ is a handy shorthand for the “old web”. But, really, who do these shorthand terms help - other than “Web 2.0″ consultants and design firms?

I think everyone that will be “presenting” to a group should have to be familiar with Levine’s Law before they take the podium.

Start with the demo

- Alan Levine, 2006

I tuned into what promised to be an excellent session on flexible, organic, dynamic ePortfolios using social software, only to find myself holding back from screaming “Levine’s law! For the love of God, Levine’s Law!!!” as bullet point after bullet point was dutifully addressed.

The session wasn’t bad, and the back channel discussion in the Elluminate chat room provided some interesting opinions, but a demo (or two) would have brought everyone onto the same page in under a minute, leaving time to discuss implementations, issues, and practical details rather than hashing over bullet points. I would have been much happier to see screenshots (or live demos) of these social-software-driven ePortfolios.

I may be co-presenting a session at Interface 2006, on our ePortfolio project being used by our Faculty of Education, but if the session is accepted, I plan on using exactly 0 bullet points. Probably no PowerPoint either. If I do wind up using a PPT, it will be in the modified-Lessigian style, with no bullets and lots and lots of images to support what I’m saying (rather than just providing a script for me to follow).

Start with the demo. Stay with the demo. Think on your feet. To borrow a quote from D.M. Shaftoe in The Cryptonomicon: “Show some damned adaptability.”

wiki.ucalgary.ca has been under a sustained spam attack all day. What started out as a minor irritation has grown into something that is impossible to ignore. The spammer is somehow getting around both Bad Behavior and Spam Blacklist extensions (I’ve blacklisted their URLs, but they keep getting edits into the system). This is one of the more frustrating aspects of trying to do things in an open manner. If there is the slightest possibility that something will be subverted for spamilicious purposes, it will be. And most likely it will happen before more than a handful of legitimate users are able to take advantage of a service.

These cretins are being rather clever (or, they’ve gotten some good Script Kiddie l337 tools) because they’re coming from many different (and changing) IP addresses, and each edit is accompanied by its very own account creation. So I can’t just block IPs, or roll back all edits by a user. So, I’ve had to disable account creation for now until I can figure out wtf to do about this.

To the spammer(s): may you rot in the most insidious inner circle of hell, reserved for parasites like yourself who find it necessary to suck energy and resources from (otherwise) free and open educational resources.

wiki.ucalgary.ca got hammered by a vindictive wiki spammer last night. But, here’s the thing - the spam prevention blacklist worked perfectly. The spammer wasn’t able to add any of their own links to the wiki. So, they decided to punish me by vandalizing 50 of the most popular pages on the wiki with an apparently random (and invalid) spam URL.

The software they used to do this evil deed automatically created a new account for each edit, and the whole thing took them less than 10 minutes to do. It took me 45 minutes to undo, even with rollbacks etc… because of their insidious creation of 50 separate accounts for 50 separate edits. I would have just reverted back to a nightly database backup to blow them all away in one fell swoop, but we had actual valid users making actual valid edits, and I won’t blow any of that away. Better to manually remove the detritus than to lose a single valid edit.

I’ll be installing Bad Behavior today, when I get a chance It’s not like I have anything better to do than to play a game of Wiki Detente with a cretin who would vandalize an open academic resource because I wouldn’t let them add their link to their ViagraCasinoPenisEnlargement Google Juicer website factory…

The signature used by this roach shows up on a few sites on a quick Google. This is insane.

Update: I just installed Bad Behavior for MediaWiki - took a whopping 60 seconds to install and configure. I’d tried a previous version, but it got a bit, well, overeager about blocking stuff. To the point that even I couldn’t view or edit anything. Had to kill it last time. Hopefully this time will be better…

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