Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Computers

  • TED Talk: After your final status update

    The idea of preserving social media after our deaths seems creepy to me. But then I do “You can imagine what something like this will look like 5, 10, 20 years from now as our technical capabilities improve.” It seems like a ENORMOUS claim that a social media company will last 20 years. Today’s top…

  • The Cause

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    Found I develop free software because of CUNY and Blackboard following the Blackboard security issues story. It is a really good blog post. This conclusion made me smile. I am certain there are plenty of people in the system I support who strongly agree. I just wish there was an easier way of finding and…

  • Blackboard Security

    Interesting articles accusing Blackboard of being lax about security. A Black Eye for Blackboard Over Its Response to Major Security Flaws which is about Millions of student exams, tests and data exposed. I saw the security bulletins, but I was not aware of the back story leading to why it was announced. We run an unaffected…

  • Smaller Java Cache

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    One of our campus Blackboard Learning System Vista Enterprise administrators reported to have reduced the number of Java cache related issues (failed sessions) by changing the Disk Space Allotment from the 1,000 MB default down to 100 MB. This is found in the Java Control Panel > General tab > Temporary Internet Files: Settings. I…

  • TED Talk: Hire the hackers!

    As a freshman in college, I made… some poor choices involving computers. (As all such stories go there was a girl involved, but I was not interested in her. My friends were. There were plenty of other girls I was interested in tangentially involved though.) As a result of the poor choices, we were brought…

  • Chrome Task Manager

    A feature I love about Chrome is the Task Manager. Similar to Window’s Task Manager, the Chrome version shows the private memory, CPU use, and Network use for each window, tab, and extension. This morning on my Linux laptop it was fine. After lunch, Chrome became unresponsive to the point it asked whether I wanted…

  • Google Needs a -1

    Did a search for “behavioral economics phd” and looked at a site that put some for-profit Master’s at the top of the list. Going through its “Perfect School Match”, it does not have behavioral economics PhD listed. The closest is applied economics at all for-profits. Lame. Useless. Went back to the list and noticed the…

  • Ctrl+F

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    From Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don’t Know How to Use CTRL+F: This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don’t know how to use…

  • Real Names

    Google+ suspends accounts who supposedly violate their real name policy. Google+ then restores accounts of those mistakenly suspended. There are naturally advocates for those seeking to be online under a pseudonym. There do seem to be legitimate reasons to communicate online under a less than real name. Harassment by bullies, stalkers, criminals is just one. Employers are…