Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: software

  • Upgrade, Upgrade, Upgrade

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    Be more secure! Upgrade today. Want better functionality? Upgrade today. Save a developer! Upgrade today. The save a developer thing is the impetus for this post. The upgrade today mantra annoys me. Software rarely spends enough time in alpha and beta cycles to to identify all the issues. People have been so burned by using…

  • WordPress Error: This file cannot be used on its own.

    In posting a comment to a friend’s WordPress blog, it came up with the error: Error: This file cannot be used on its own. I was responding to a comment, so I doubted that he broke his blog between making a comment and my response. So I went looking though my own install. Essentially, at…

  • Watermarks

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    So far I have either been oblivious or lucky. Some people like my pictures which could mean they are downloading them and even representing them as their own. No amount of HTML or JavaScript technology can prevent this. Even watermarks have questionable efficacy as people get better. Google’s Picasa is my current image editor. With…

  • Anti-Malware and Blackboard Vista

    Tier1 support was contacted by a student to report a problem with a quiz. Some sort of anti-malware software complained about code in the quiz. Tier1 support replicated the issue. Their software identified it as belonging to MyWebSearch. Very bad news. Tier2 support suggested the student remove the MyWebSearch toolbar. Tier1 escalated to Tier3 who…

  • Step Back and Take a Deep Breath

    Chris Hambly is asking for thoughts and reflections on Blackboard. I deal with Blackboard nearly daily. We have one of the largest implementations of Vista. A choice to migrate to something else would affect around 180,000 people. So that choice will be very carefully maide. Of course, the longer we stay, the larger we grow…

  • Suck It Up And Pay the Price

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    Doesn’t it always look like this? User runs script against service. Script operates so quickly and sucks so much traffic its obvious its a script. Service’s automates systems detects the abuse. User gets automated notice about violation of Terms of Use and prevention from accessing the site. User pitches a fit because he is “famous”.…

  • Everything to Everyone

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    This is intended to be a more thoughtful response to Laura regarding Course Management Systems and the need for innovation. Currently, Course Management Systems are bloatware. They got this way by trying to provide everything to everyone. One instructor wants a feature, the university presses for this feature, the CMS programmers put in the feature.…

  • Turing Digitalization

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    Some 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved daily according to Luis von Ahn (on Wired Science on PBS). His technology project reCAPTHCA will use unknown words in these challenges for solving the unknown words in OCR digitalizing books to solve these words in an a quasi-automated sort of way. I wonder though. Even if reCAPTCHA a)…

  • Maybe Now We’ll Be Heard?

    Its funny. Apparently its time consuming for companies to conduct brand analysis (just know what is being said about them). So a niche has been filled by Scout Labs and others. (Hopefully Scout is paying attention and is reading this. Maybe Umbria will also comment their product is better. :D) On the one hand, I…