Category: Computers


  • It started with a tweet on Saturday morning. @MsIngalls: When I go to the Checklist in @Desire2Learn -when I am logged in – I get an error message that says my log in has expired – ideas? #d2l This sounded like an issue we had in WebCT Vista product I called Failed Sessions. FSes occur when…

  • Background: We got a notice a few minutes before last week’s maintenance window that side work to configure a tool ran into a snap. Today we found out that the server intended to be used did not have the right .NET version. Why did they not just install it? Good question. This made me curious…

  • Parents of young children posts lots and lots of photos on Facebook. Tags in the photos of their children are of either or both parents. Children under thirteen are not allowed on the site. Babies lack the motor control to operate a camera or computer. So expecting children to have their own identities on Facebook…

  • A mini project is to hand over the course packages for the prior product to each of our clients. A good idea was to include a list of the files so down the road, if something is missing then, we can say this list in the ticket has what they received. So I wrote this…

  • James Fallows has an interesting piece in the Atlantic called Why NSA Surveillance Will Be More Damaging Than You Think discussing trust in the US for the info-infrastructure of the Internet is part of why we have Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. As that trust gets eroded by the behavior of the US government, users may…

  • Image Search

    Google has a cool tool, Google Images, which can search images. Provide it text, and the images returned will have related metadata or page information to your search. Now, for the really cool part, you can search based on another image. Click the camera icon in the search bar and another box appear. Enter a…

  • This deadtroll video has been around for quite a long time… Last week I heard how Youtube does automatic closed captioning. So I was curious and turned it on for this video. How terrible!

  • If you are out on the Internet or around academics long enough, then you will run across the rant about random designed by humans not being really random. It might be the iTunes shuffle. It might be random sampling of an experiment. It might be a complaint of you using the word for how you…

  • Bad Guesses

    Usually the best way to guess which technology product will be successful is to bet against the one I like. Betamax, Apple, Linux, Picasa. So it surprises me Barnes & Noble are giving up on the Nook since I went Kindle. I’m not usually in this position. Then again, I was on the brink of going…