Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Author: Ezra S F

  • Counting

    In the beginning I used TOTAL=`ls /d2lmig/*/*/bak/*/* | wc -l` to get a total count. All was good. Until at around 55,000 files I got: -bash: /bin/ls: Argument list too long. Then I used TOTAL=`find /d2lmig/*/*/bak/*/* -name *.bak | wc -l` to get a total count. All was good. Until at around 90,000 files I got: -bash: /usr/bin/find: Argument…

  • Students Out PR Professionals

    As a Valdosta State University student, we nicknamed the student paper the Speculator. Incorrectly reading between the lines were their specialty. Grammatical errors and spelling mistakes were part of their standard. But it was amusing to see them go after the administration. Not so much to be reported on when I made big mistakes. As…

  • Context Menu

    Almost everyone using a computer to access the Internet uses the left click on a link to go to its location. Exceptions might be left handers who switch the buttons on a mouse, those using screen readers, or similar small niche users of the Internet. I tend to multi-task, so I will scan a page…

  • Universities and SIS “Innovation”

    Several years ago, while I worked at a medium-sized university, there was a very similar incident like what happened in Student Is Sanctioned for Creating Class-Registration Web Site. A student wanted into a full class. So he built an application to routinely check for whether a seat was available in the Student Information System. The database…

  • Metaphors and Plot

    Shortly after yesterday’s Spoilers post, I ran across this on Tumblr. In case the photo below disappears or gets blocked, it says: I’m more interested in the symbols and metaphors in a novel than the actual plot. Maybe this is why I am so bad at spoiling things. The events are not so important as…

  • Spoilers

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    Sports: I bought my first DVR specifically to record the 2006 World Cup games while at work. I was in my first few months and did not feel like I could afford to take off work to catch all the games I desired. For the 2010, I tuned out of Facebook because I knew lots of…

  • TED Talk: The riddle of experience vs. memory

    We tend to think of memory the same as an audio-visual recording of the events in our life. Unfortunately, it is not. Memory captures snapshots which influence what we recall later. So a relatively good experience with a particularly bad ending can bias memory to recall the whole as bad. If the below video does not…

  • Twexports

    Data portability is good both for users and systems. But I like being able to export my data for another reason: search. Some times I want to build on an old conversation. It would be easier with an eidetic memory. Lacking that, knowing the terms I would have used, searching for it should yield that conversation.…

  • Content Migration Progress Tracking

    When moving hundreds of thousands of courses between WebCT Vista and Desire2Learn, keeping track of what made it through which stage seems like an obvious hindsight thing to do. I added that last bit because we started to notice where things fell between the cracks starting to pile up. The basic process… Through Oracle SQL…