If you have a moodle installation, you can quickly browse all the uploaded user pics by going to http://mymoodleinstall.com/userpix/
You have to be logged in as admin or the script tells you to get lost, but you can modify this behaviour by commenting out the
if (!isadmin()) {
error("Currently only the administrator can access this page!");
}
bit of the code.
Filed by dave at 12:50 pm under Moodle
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Just been trying to figure why my previously working copy of performancing was refusing to login to this blog but working fine for others.
Even after updating wordpress, trying a clean install of the scripts creating new users, checking permissions, manually checking the DB to ensure hashes were being written properly etc etc, no joy 
the users accounts could login as normal through wordpress but not remotely using xmlrpc.php.
It would appear that my webhost must have disallowed access to xmlrpc.php to thwart malicious scripts attempting to scan for vulnerable installations.
As soon as I renamed xmlrpc.php to somethingelse.php it started working splendidly again. An email would have been nice and saved me a couple of hours of head scratching…
Filed by dave at 2:38 pm under Uncategorized
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I’ve had this blog for a few months now and I don’t really know what to do with it. I started a blog because the college I work at was considering providing blogs for students, well a senior member of staff heard about blogs been the next big thing “so why don’t we have one?”.
I didn’t know what to put on a blog at the time and was dubious about their contribution to a student’s learning. I decided to see what happened when I used a blog for no particular reason and months later the answer is not very much. A few posts about nothing in particular, not connected, related, of any educational value or of any interest to any one including myself. A few passing thoughts recorded for no great reason other than thinking ‘I really should blog something’.
I feel no great desire to publish my thoughts to the world, many blogs I’ve looked at seem to be inane drivel pouring from persons thought processes onto the web (like this is). Other blogs are for corporate projects, hobbies, political coolness, rants and neurotic outlets. A seemingly huge span of human culture centred around a person or project.
I am also a little worried about the future consequences of providing blogs to students, even if a student deletes a post there is no guarantee that it doesn’t still exist in a cache or archive, the internet archive has a 2 petabyte collection of old sites from the last ten years. People are already very aware of how easy it is to use caches to dig up deleted material as can be seen in this blog entry about why people blog:
Speaking of hot, and why not? Here’s Gillian Gunson: My simple answer: I’m a passive-aggressive attention whore.After visiting Gill’s blog “gillianic tendencies” it doesn’t seem that simple. (The researchers among us can find her earlier postings in Google cache. Thank you Google.)
What happens when students go on to apply for responsible jobs?
No point denying it when the third link on the google results page for a search of your name points to the archived version of your 10 year old uni blog post where you wrote about waking up with a hangover having slept with someone you shouldn’t have after taking too many drugs the night before. Interviewers will tend to strike you off the list for running their new particle accelerator…
A good even if extreme example of the consequences of even an anonymous blog is the girl with a one track mind A 30 something woman starts an anonymous blog in 2004 writing very explicitly and intimately about her sex life, she gets a readership of several hundred thousand and the offer of a book deal which she accepts. The same week the book is published in 2006 a national newspaper revealed her true identity to the world. She looses her job and career and has to come to terms with the fact that her family, friends and everyone she has ever slept with now know about it.
If blogs are personal and intimate does education have any place encouraging students to publish in this fashion by providing the service?
If blogs in education are provided as a less intimate learning log, personal learning journey or reflective journal surely this is best done within the confines of an institutional learning environment rather than out in the wild web?
Looking at warwick blogs there seems to be little difference between the subject of posts to blogs and the subjects you would see by collecting a persons posts to different forums. It’s just organised in a more egotistical fashion.
A pattern I have noticed in comparing blogs, forums and comments is that many blog owners put a lot more effort into the construction of their work than if they were starting a thread on forum or posting a comment. The subject (and even the quality/value sometimes) may not change greatly but the effort put into it and the quantity seems to be consistently higher. Anybody know if there is any proper research available on blog posting?
I have noticed this in the few posts that I have made on this blog I seem to put more thought and care into a blog posting than I would normally put into a forum post or even many emails.
Instead of letting it die I’ll see if defining a set purpose for blogging will motivate me to post more.
I’ve decided to use this blog to form passing abstract thoughts into something more coherent and lasting and reassess my use of it in a few months time. The only audience I’m targeting is myself, I could of course simply use a diary but that wouldn’t be blogging would it? A fairly vague raison d-etre but good enough for now 
Filed by dave at 2:20 pm under Uncategorized
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Isn’t it cool when you get annoyed with your computer and wish it would do x, y or z and then a quick google search later you find someone else thought the exact same thing and wrote a plugin for firefox.
I was getting annoyed that to find a definition of a word while I was browsing I had to double click it, right click, choose ’search web for…’, switch tabs to the new google results page, type ‘define:’ in front of the query and resubmit the results.
I was thinking it would be much easier just to highlight a word right click choose define and have the results loaded into an inline frame and not have to move from the open browsing tab.
Apparently Eugene thought so too
This plugin is really cool actually, really useful in schools etc for improving vocabulary.
Give it a try and you will find yourself learning new words every day just because it’s so fast and easy to use it’s simpler to find out what a word means than to stare at it for a couple of seconds wondering…
Filed by dave at 12:08 am under Cool stuff, Firefox
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“I was not pleased that Hamas has refused to announce its desire to destroy Israel.” Bush — Washington, D.C., May 4, 2006
Filed by dave at 12:03 am under Uncategorized
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Get ready for the Vista/SUSE smackdown!
“As unbelievable as it might seem, OpenSUSE actually seems to support more hardware than Vista does at this stage in its development. Linux having more hardware support than Windows — who says we don’t live in a time of miracles?!”
Hmmm suse is very good and getting better all the time. Will be interesting to see if microsoft can pull off a good operating system in 6 months considering the number of features they have dropped.
Filed by dave at 8:30 pm under Uncategorized
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I’ve been listening to Pandora a lot recently, WOW! It’s the best thing to happen to music for ages
I’ve made a few stations to different tastes and most of the time the music that gets played is just what I am in the mood for. It’s really good just doing some work on your pc and then all of a sudden a track you haven’t heard in years starts playing and makes you smile, I’ve even bought a couple of cd’s from new artists that I had never heard of before. Brilliant stuff, if only I could get it in my car for the daily trudge up the M6….
Pandora - Find New Music, Listen to Custom Internet Radio Stations
Filed by dave at 8:26 pm under Cool stuff, Music
1 Comment
Filed by dave at 3:17 am under Uncategorized
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Came across a couple of interesting url’s while surfing, michaelgeist.ca link
the CRIA released a study that in a nutshell says people buy less music because they are put off by the price and they are not interested in the music.
The study also looked at music content on people’s hard drives, apparently we have far more legal, purchased music on our computers from ripped CD’s & purchased downloads then we have illegal content from p2p networks or stuff copied from friends.
I’ve been annoyed with DRM for a while but never really been interested enough to investigate it further. Interesting, slashdot comments seem to closely mirror my own feelings and actions.
I don’t listen to normal radio anymore, it’s full of music I don’t want to listen to.
If I do listen to radio it’s internet radio or a prerecorded session from the internet because the only time the BBC plays music that I like I’m not near a radio…
I discover new (to me) music by using P2P networks
I download and listen to a few tracks by an artist that I have not heard of before. If I generally like the tracks I buy the album on CD.
When I get the album I rip it onto my computer to listen to, burn a new CD to keep in my car then shelve the original.
I don’t actually own a CD player anymore except for the one in my car.
I don’t keep originals in my car as it gets expensive when little toe rags steal them.
So if I get a CD that has DRM on it, it is useless to me and just puts me off being honest and actually buying music.
Normally if I can’t bypass the DRM in 60 seconds I return the CD for a refund then post a message on the artist’s website explaining that I tried to buy the music but couldn’t use it so I downloaded it for free and I offer to pay for it if they contact me with and suggest an appropriate method of payment. I’ve even emailed the address in small print of the legal stuff about the DRM saying the same thing, but I have never had a reply. I guess that they really aren’t interested in customers that want to give them money.
Given the choice between letting a record company install software and use DRM or never paying for another piece of music I’ll take the later thank you very much.
I like to think that I am an honest person, if the music industry wants me to spend more on music then all they have to is increase my exposure to artists I might like instead of hyping up crap teeny pop ‘artists’ who will be long forgotten by the time you get the CD home.
And oh yeah, stop doing the DRM thing, it’s harming sales far more than illegal downloading…
Filed by dave at 8:36 pm under Music
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