Category: Computers


  • You’ve read my previous posts on Dunbar‘s Number, right? Go on…. I’ll wait. Remember the one on Scoble and Facebook? Good. For a while, I fastidiously ensured my number of friends stayed below 150 because I took the idea of Dunbar’s number as a life strategy. Then I let it slip to 200 which I pared back down…

  • Apparently designers are embedding video from external sources in our Vista 8 environment. Internet Explorer complains when elements of a secure page reference non-secure elements. In this case, CE/Vista has the secure page. The embedded video is a non-secure element. At best the IE complaint is to prompt the user to pick whether to view…

  • The CE/Vista error “Unable to locate the page you requested” is supposed to be a more user friendly error than the HTTP 404 Page Not Found. Okay, sure between the two, more users would understand the CE/Vista one than the generic HTTP one. The only suggestion for dealing with these is to contact the server…

  • The people I know on Facebook post fascinating things. [1] The people I count as my “Facebook friends” have something interesting to say. I enjoy reading the partisan politics, science, recipes, web comics, and even the celebrity gossip my contacts post. The status updates are one way. Links are another way. Since Facebook copied the…

  • Found this gem called The Great Google Coverup about Google changing their minds about continuing to filter searches following a Chinese supported cyber-attack. Whether the attack origin was by Chinese government employees, corporate thieves, or kids living in their parent’s basement, accounts were compromised. Personal data fell into the hands of people who didn’t own it. This…

  • Supported

    (This is an post I wrote back in November but didn’t publish…. Until now. Have fun!) Mitigated speech gets a lot of use by people trying not to offend. All too often, people who have been hurt because of mitigated speech question what isn’t being told as though the omission or gaps are intentionally deceptive.…

  • I imported all my LiveJournal posts here. Other than posting pictures to there from Flickr, I don’t really use LJ anymore. I rarely even read my friends’ blogs there. Too bad. I still have the teeshirt. Most of my LJ posts are protected. For this site, I’d rather have them set to private. So the…

  • A couple issues I encountered yesterday loading XML files on Blackboard Vista 8. siapi output says: error invoking method in adapter, message is: cvc-complex-type.2.3: Element ‘extension’ cannot have character [children], because the type’s content type is element-only. Means the wrong type between luminis and ims was used. I created a files.properties file which sets the…

  • xmllint

    This Linux tool is my new best friend. We get thousands of XML files from our clients for loading user, class, and enrollment information. Some of these clients customize our software or write their own software for generating the XML. This means we frequently get oddities in the files which cause problems. Thankfully I am…