Author: Ezra S F


  • Acad sounds alarm about fragility of digital prod’n – Sadly I had this conversation with my mother back when I bought my first digital camera in 2002. One of my reservations about going digital is the fragility of formats. Of course, a few years earlier I worked in Government Documents and file formats created a…

  • The EFF posted an article with screenshots on how to remove your Google web/search history. This is because their new privacy policy exposes what you have searched for in the past to your connections. They say to use the Remove all Web History button. Instead, I am using this as an opportunity to learn about…

  • Posts From Non-Friends

    Facebook seems hell bent on making itself no longer just a place for interacting with friends. Facebook prefers the Top Stories sorting of the Newsfeed. I prefer the Most Recent sort.  So naturally I end up changing the setting back to Most Recent a few times a week. Lately, even while sorted by Most Recent, I…

  • Fifty years ago today, John Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth. For some reason, Alan Shepard, Jr. being the first American in space did not impress me as a kid. Going up and coming back down did not count. Achieving orbit was realer space. Glenn was the American response to Yuri Gagarin being the first human…

  • Christopher Sykes is known for his Richard Feynman documentaries such as The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Youtube has a wealth of Richard Feynman videos. Well, there goes my free time for the next week.

  • An All Year Sport

    Some of my sports fan friends are a single game fan.When the season is over, they have nothing else about which to talk until recruits are chosen for the next. Over the past week, I saw a couple countdowns for certain baseball players to report to spring training. Since October they waited for this. Football,…

  • Making this easy: LMS Evaluations — Laura makes a good point that a product selection is more about identifying something that fits your institution’s culture. If it does not fit, then somethinge has to bend or break: a corporation who has other clients who picked the company who fit, a open source group whose members voluntarily…

  • Paste Formatting

    Ideally every email I send would be plain text. Many of the people I email send to me HTML-based email For a decade an annoyance I had with Outlook was when pasting text from the clipboard, it would include source formatting. So, if I copied the title of a blog post to make it “Paste…

  • There is a Java vulnerability where an attacker can exploit the hash predictability. The exploit is apparently easier when the content is larger. So the workaround is to limit the size of HTTP POST requests. Weblogic’s 10.3 config.xml has a max-post-size which does this. The handling of when the condition is reached is pathetic. It closes…