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gravedigger, dead man,
undertaker, messiah |
Maxwell's silver hammer was McCartney's analogy
for something going wrong out of the blue.
We've been pummeled by the silver hammer a few times
in getting our semester going, but have proven equal
to the task. We are up and running, most users
have no idea we had problems, or if they knew
generally wouldn't care, but finally we are hitting
on all cylinders. We think. Is that the
sound of a hammer...?
We had to bring Blackboard down twice this week,
once for an hour, once for half an hour, to run
firmware updates on its new Dell database server.
Download
and update activity heated up this week, with new
offerings from Microsoft, Google, Adobe, FeedForAll,
Respond/StudyMate, and others.
David is finally back. We'll get the full
story about his absence as part of his Blackboard
feature this week. His topic is "The Faculty
Faux Student Account." Haydn
will be speaking on "Active Learning--The Key to
Online Success" in his Teaching with
Technology segment. My tech-talk-topic is
a review of a new tool from Blogger.com that allows
postings to blogger blogs directly from Word 2003. The
gizmo of the week is the Swiss army knife of memory
card readers. You won't believe how many
formats it reads. I'm closing the show with a
trivia question, one that's going to take some
detective work, so send us your answers.
Palomar Tech and Download News
-
Silver hammer one:
There was a problem in the first week of classes
with the Horizon Wimba voice tools, but we
upgraded the Blackboard building block and they
all work well now. This was a "known
issue" at Horizon Wimba, but we have no idea
when they were going to make us one of the
cognoscenti, because it sure wasn't known here.
File this one under unfortunate.
-
Speaking of known issues... Silver hammer
two, a really big one: We have been
fighting Dell server hard drive failure on our
Blackboard database server for 2 weeks now.
This is a valuable cautionary tale for IT
hardware techs and administrators out there.
The system drive is a dual, mirrored drive, raid
one, drives 0:0 and 0:1. 0:0 failed
several times, sounded an alarm horn, but no
lights and diagnostics would not report an
error. Each time we rebuilt. When we
got here last Friday, drive 0:1 had failed.
We became very alarmed. We knew there were
firmware updates to perform, so we scheduled
them fro last Saturday. We rebuilt
0:1 from 0:0 and Chris Norcross agreed to come
in early Saturday to do the upgrades.
Unfortunately, when he got here, 0:1 had failed
again, so he started a rebuild and went on to
the Angel's game. When we got in Monday,
0:1 had failed again, so we just HAD to do the
firmware upgrade. We brought Blackboard
down and did it. It took around an hour.
It came up okay, but when we got her next day,
it had failed again. At this point we
enlisted David Brown's help our IS server
expert. We called Dell and ran the DSet
diagnostics for specific errors. As soon
as we could contact a technician he knew exactly
what it was. He sent us a "known issue"
firmware upgrade for the specific Maxtor Atlas
II 15K2_146 SCA SCSI
drives in the system configuration. We had
to bring Blackboard down for another half an
hour, which we hate to do, but it was either
that or get clobbered by the hammer. That
was Tuesday. Since then, all has been
well. File this one under we were really
lucky. It could have been a whole lot
worse.
- StudyMate and Respondus have both been
patched (already yet again) as we enter third
week of the semester. Respondus to version
3.1.5c, and StudyMate to version 1.5.5f.
Respondus.com got feedback from professors
actually using the products and discovered some
nasty bugs related to publishing to Blackboard
version 7.1 (our version). For existing
users, open Respondus and/or StudyMate, click
Help, and Check for Update. When the
update dialog box appears, click Get Update.
If you experience problems, go to our
Respondus/StudyMate download site and do a
full install.
If you are not a Respondus or StudyMate user
yet, visit
that same web site, read about the product,
download the software and register it using the
registration information on that page.
Login to our Respondus/StudyMate web site with
your Palomar email address as username and
Palomar email password as password. These
products are for PC users only.
-
Windows Desktop Search 3.0 Beta 2 has been
released for download. The download
requires Genuine Windows validation.
For more information on Lithium-Ion technology,
click here.
- Thanks to Shay Phillips for discovering "Blogger
for Word," a blogger.com download add-in to
Word that allows composing and publishing
postings directly from the Word processing
program that most of us use.
Click here for the FAQ and Known Issues
page. More on this in my Tech Talk Topic
below.
- Google is now offering "Google
Apps for Your Domain." It is a bundle
of their Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar and
Google Page Creator tools offered through a
customer's own domain, hosted by Google.
Click here for the overview and FAQs.
One of the FAQs is "Can colleges and
universities use Google Apps?" and the
answer is "Absolutely, and we'd love to
share more..." Read more from BBC and
MSNBC. Microsoft has for some time had the
Windows Live @ edu initiative in place,
which offers pretty much the same thing.
Microsoft is soon to launch
Windows Live Essentials, very much like the
Google offering, not to be confused with the
Beta Office Live Essentials. Microsoft
for some time has offered xxxxx.
Click here and
here for an overview of Microsoft Live
strategy.
- Also from Microsoft,
QnA Live has been released in public beta
this week. The idea is, as with
Yahoo Answers, that you ask a question and
the community answers. The stuff that
always goes on in forums anyway, but in a nicer
looking, less obscure location, where subjects
are unlimited. Ask a question.
Ponder the answer.
- Adobe issued a number of updates this week:
- Photoshop CS2 to version 9.0.2
- InDesign CS2 to version 4.0.4
- Stock Photos to version 1.0.7
- Adobe Bridge to version 1.0.4
If your Adobe update manager isn't already
enabled, go to your application and click Help >
Updates... to get them, or simply go to the
Adobe Download Center to pick and choose.
- A new
FeedForAll
Beta version has been released with support
for iTunes tags--at last. This is Beta 2
software, version 2.0.0.4 Beta 2, to be
specific, and is free to registered users.
Click here for the release notes.
- Finally, Blackboard has announced
a new "Patents" web site which addresses,
from their perspective, the many issues that
have arisen following the announcement that they
were granted patents on the overall concept of
e-learning and course management systems in
general. They also have a series of
webinars, and other avenues for finding out
about it.
Training Opportunities
- Academic Technology Training
- Horizon Wimba offers
ongoing online seminars in their Voice tools
and Live Classroom.
- Microsoft webcasts:
Blackboard Feature of the Week - David Gray
David's topic this week is "The Blackboard Faux
Student Account." At Palomar, we create
"dummy" or, as we like to say, "faux" student
accounts for all faculty, and enroll them in their
own courses. David explains why, and talks
about uses for this account.
Listen to this segment only [mp3 - play time =
12:56]
See
the index of Dave's previous "Blackboard Feature
of the Week" segments.
Note: To get to David's vodcast site,
click here.
Teaching with Technology - Dr. Haydn Davis
Haydn's topic is "Active Learning - The Key
to Online Success." He references a book
by Conrad and Donaldson, titled Engaging the
Online Learner, spends some time on the
theory of active learning, and presents a couple
of very practical examples.
Resource:
Active Learning - The Key to Online Success [PDF -
24K]
Listen to this segment only [mp3 - play time =
12:44]
See
an index of previous "Teaching with
Technology" segments.
Tech-Talk-Topic - Terry Gray
Blogging from Word 2003
Courtesy
of Shay Phillips, I discovered this week a Word
add-in that permits blogging directly to your
Blogger.com blog using Word 2003. The add-in
is free, directly from blogger, but has some
problems, that I'll detail below.
The new version of Word (Word 2007) allows direct
blogging to blogger.com, and many other blog sites,
and even supports pictures (though requires that the
pictures be linked to a non-blogger web site within
the post). I've tested the beta, and that
works well. The product we are considering
today, however, brings the ability to post directly
to blogger to Word 2003 users.
Click here to download the add-inn,
here to read the FAQs (and you really do want to
read the FAQs and known issues).
Let me begin by saying I tested it and it works.
It has some down-sides, unfortunately, and you have
to be willing to live with them if you are going to
use this tool. Here they are from the outset:
- recent security
fix to Outlook prevents running Word plug-ins in
Outlook. Running Outlook and Word at the same
time can cause errors if Word is not turned off
as your email editor. As a work around, you can
either
turn off Word as your editor in Outlook or
close Outlook before running Word independently
and vice-versa.
- The Blogger for
Word add-in breaks the Remove Hidden Data tool
from Microsoft, though the add-in itself still
works. We are investigating this matter further
but there does not appear to be an immediate
workaround.
Here's how it goes, starting from the install.
I dare say this is typical:
The add-in install program offers to turn off
Word as your Outlook Email editor. You like
Word as your email editor, so you ignore this and
choose to leave it on (that's one of the choices).
Naturally, you have not read the known issues or the
FAQ page, so you think, that's weird, but blunder
on.
After install, the first thing you do is start
Word to test the thing, and you immediately see this
error message:
Reinstall? Reinstall what? The Remove
Hidden Data tool, presumably. You might try
this, or you might also say to yourself, when I
tried that tool it didn't really work well so I'll
just blow it off. Blogging from Word means
more to me than partially removing hidden xml data.
OK. You close Word, go into the control panel,
choose Add Remove programs, find the Remove Hidden
Data tool, and uninstall it.
You start Word, and see the new blogger tool bar.
You click Blogger Settings, and the first time it
loads, it confuses itself with another Word add-in I
have called Natural Voice reader. The Natural
Voice settings box comes up. No, no, no.
You click the cancel button, and the Blogger
settings box appears:
Ok. You enter your blogger publishing
settings.
Next, you're not quite sure, so you click Open
Post... on the toolbar, and it opens a menu of
previous posts. You can edit them in Word,
which is nice. Unfortunately, when it can't
make a connection with the blogger server, it throws
a completely unhelpful error message (as I found out
on day two):
Well, this worked before, so I don't worry so
much about it, figuring its a communications error.
Blogger is hard to access sometimes from within our
firewall.
We blunder on. Next we type a post and
click publish. Miracle of miracles, it works.
See my first test post from word at:
http://atpalomar.blogspot.com/. Looks
good, acts good. The publish dialog is short and
sweet:
In fact, I got no communications error at all and
don't have time to find out about the mysterious
error 5 above. If it works it works, and
that's ok with me.
So, here comes the kicker. You start
Outlook and get this whopper:
Decision time. At the blogger website they
fix the blame for this on a recent Microsoft
security update, but what is Microsoft supposed to
do? We hope blogger is fixing the code, yes,
we hope, but with 2007 coming soon, we're not so
sure. So do I abandon Word as my email editor?
Well, I like it, but I'm not married to it. So
I decide to throw it overboard, at least for the
time being. I change editors, reboot
everything, and it all seems to work OK.
Clearly, this is not a rave review. In
fact, this add-in is much more error-fraught than
most, but having read the known issues in advance
calmed my palpitating heart and made the error
messages intuitively decipherable (sounds like one
of those infrequently used phrases you see at
Amazon).
On the plus side:
- Easy to use locally;
- Simplifies blogging;
- Includes a save draft feature;
- Can update previous posts from Word;
On the minus side:
- Confusing and annoying start-up process;
- Confusion with other add-in configuration
screens;
- Can't use Word as Outlook email editor
- Breaks the Remove Hidden Data tool
- Throws unexplained error messages as part of
the publish/update process on occasion.
So would I recommend using this tool? If
you are a heavy blogger.com user, yep, at least for
now. If you are a beginner at blogging, or
worse, a beginner at computing, not a chance.
It really depends on how much monkeying around you
are willing to put up with balanced against the
benefits of not having to login to blogger.com to
create a simple post. For now, I'm in.
That's my take.
Listen to this segment only [mp3 - play time =
9:13]
Gizmo of the week
Got
memory? This week the gizmo of the week is
the 52-in-1 card reader. Yes. 52-1.
It is a bluetooth enables card reader from Dtech
that can read 52 different memory card formats.
The price, $25. Yep.
Here are the formats:
CF I, CF II, Extreme CF, Extreme III CF,
Ultra II CF, HS CF, XS-XS CF, CF Elite PRO, CF
PRO, CF PRO II, IMB MD, Hitachi MD, MagicStor,
MS, MS PRO, MS Duo, MS PRO Duo, MS MG, MS MG
PRO, MS MG Duo, MS MG PRO Duo, Extreme MS PRO,
Extreme III MS PRO, Ultra II MS PRO, HS MS MG
PRO, HS MS MG PRO Duo, HS MS PRO, HS MS PRO Duo,
MS ROM, MS Select, SD, *MiniSD, HS Mini SD,
Extreme SD, Extreme III SD, Ultra II SD,
SD-Ultra-X, Ultra speed SD, SD PRO, SD Elite
PRO, HS SD, MMC, MMC 4.0, HS MMC, HS RS MMC, RS
MMC, RS MMC 4.0, DV-RS MMC, SM, SM ROM, XD,
T-Flash
But what about the cartridges I used to stick in
my Texas Instruments 99/4A? Get this: it also
features "multi-mood lighting" using flashing,
multi-colored LEDs.
This is how bad it can get when the marketplace
becomes the non-standards driver. The
cost-product life-market share has simply not tipped
towards a single standard, so they continue to
metastasize. How about a flash memory summit?
(Source:
gizmodo vendor:
http://usb.brando.com.hk/prod_detail.php?prod_id=00154)
Music
The
music for today's show was provided by
Magnatune.com,
and is used through their Creative Commons license
for podcasts. Today's album was "Dead
Man's Hand" by
Seismic Anomaly." Seismic Anomaly is
really a guy named Michael S. Band name allusion: Hunt
for Red October, right?--Courtney Vance to Scott
Glen: 'Would that be anything like a seismic anomaly
captain?,' 'I guess so Jonesy, whadaya got?' right; album name allusion:
the video game, right? Dead man's hand is the
poker hand held by Wild Bill Hickok when he was
murdered: two aces, two eights, clubs and spades.
Email us with the answer to our quiz: what was the
fifth card in the hand? Here's a quote: "...his
[Michael S] work is done primarily utilizing his
Peavey EVH Wolfgang, Millennium J Series Bass, and
Indianola ER Acoustic." Clearly a technical
kinda guy.
We used tracks 5: "Judee's Tune;" 2: "Santa
Rosa Shuffle;" 8: "Tsunami;" 7: "Scuttlebutt Strut;"
4: "Jack Rabbit;" 1: "Walkin the Line;" 6: "Deep
Blue Eee;" 3 "Long Gone."
Visit
magnatune and reward them for their generosity,
and if you like this album, buy it. Magnatune is not evil!
"Horse sense is
the thing a horse has which keeps it from
betting on people." ~
W. C. Fields
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for September 1, 2006 - Episode 30
