Playing with Technology

Why the long absence?

Jon Breitenbucher — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 18:31:59 +0000

So, I haven’t posted for a while. Curious as to why? Well, too bad, I’m going to tell you. I started playing World of Warcraft (WoW). It’s Joe’s fault really although Derek Newland contributed. “So what does that have to do with the absence?”, you ask. I used to do a lot and I mean a lot of stuff for work at home. I would spend 3-4 hours a night blogging and doing other things related to work. Those hours are now split between family and WoW, which is much healthier for me and my family (Kathy also plays WoW and that’s my fault.). However, it means the blog suffers because I am only 2/3 Instructional Technology and there is more than enough work to fill 2/3s of a person when the department only has 2 and 2/3s staff plus an intern and a few students. I’ll try to carve out some time to post each week, I have a backlog of things to post about.

Something to keep an eye on

Jon Breitenbucher — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 17:22:39 +0000

Automattic and KnowNow seem to be entering some sort of formal arrangement according to TechCrunch and a press release. I wonder what if any implications this could have for Wooster and our RSS/Blogging future.

This is what this site looks like

Jon Breitenbucher — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 02:19:07 +0000

Well, I joined the masses today and made a graph from the sites DOM structure using the java applet found here. Here it is

I also made one for the main site

and my personal sites

I’m not sure what this exactly accomplishes but it makes nice images.

Here is a key for the colors.

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Performancing extension

Jon Breitenbucher — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 04:16:18 +0000

Mark Pearson mentioned this Firefox extension and I thought I would give it a try. I don’t really have time to do this sort of stuff right now. Abigail is ill, I have about 50 things to do for work (growing everyday), and four home improvement projects soon to be underway. I feel completely overwhelmed. But from what I can glean from other bloggers, this is how everyone feels. I have to find a way to reduce the stress and soon. Hopefully the new pool table will help.

Bagpipes rule!

Jon Breitenbucher — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 15:08:39 +0000

Proof the you can find a Podcast on any topic. I stumbled across the National Piping Center’s Vodcast. I love the highland pipes and was very happy to find this.

Copyright will drive you mad

Jon Breitenbucher — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 01:36:42 +0000

Here is my bit of wisdom for today.

Reading the US Copyright law will drive you insane.

I have been looking at the laws for Copyright and Fair Use for the last week or so. All I can say is, “Ow.” I have never seen a more complicated set of documents in my life and I doubt there is a single person walking this Earth who can explain what one can use under Fair Use. Now I am going to sit down with a lawyer to get their perspective. I can only hope I survive.

Web content management

Jon Breitenbucher — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 03:54:01 +0000

We had a discussion today about Web content management. This discussion involved David Waldron (CITO), John Hopkins (Associate Vice President for College Relations and Marketing), Janet Russell (Director of Instructional Technology), Peter James (Director of Web Services), and myself. What is at issue is a way to allow faculty, students, and student organizations to create and manage a website without the need for learning HTML. There were a couple of options that were discussed: Dreamweaver/Contribute and a Web based content management system (WCMS) using a database to store content (Mambo for example).

Neither solution seems to be a clear winner. Dreamweaver is very expensive and would require a lot of training to allow people to create nice looking websites. A WCMS would allow for easy content creation and updating but would lack flexibilty in styling. Nothing was decided and further discussions will be held, but a decision must be made by April.

A good source for a discussion of the issues can be found at Shorewalker.com.

Organizing information

Jon Breitenbucher — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 05:55:49 +0000

Dr. Havholm has asked me to give some pointers to his Digital Aesthetics class on managing RSS feeds to keep up with the blogs and stay sane. There are a few things I plan on talking about:

Mozilla Thunderbird
RSSOwl cross-platform RSS reader
Google Reader requires a Google account
Firefox extension Feedview will be in Firefox 2.0
Safari

Cool program

Jon Breitenbucher — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 05:15:52 +0000

Ivars Peterson highlights a wonderful program called NameVoyager in his article in ScienceNews for Kids. The program is a Java application which allows a person to type in a name and see a graph of the name’s popularity over time. There are some interesting things that can be gleaned from the graphs. For example Abigail was almost never used as a girls name until the 1940s and as of 2004 it was the sixth most popular name for girls. This allows people to guage a persons age by their first name, as names appear to go through cycles. The program would be a fun tool for exposing young children to data analysis. If you get a chance check it out.