# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Selenium is a testing tool for browser-based testing of web applications. It can be used both for functional and compatability testing. Selenium tests run directly in supported browsers, just as real users do.

• Textbooks (mostly math and physics, but probably others)
• Fanstasy novels (pocketbooks mostly)
• Lots and lots of RPG stuff (AD&D books, modules, etc, etc, (1st ed, some 2nd ed))

Elisabeth Richard, director of e-government partnerships in the IT services branch of Public Works and Government Services Canada, will give a presentation titled Online moderation and facilitation: The role of public servants. Richard says the Internet permits small discussion groups of interested parties from the private sector and non-governmental organizations to participate in policy discussions, but there are pitfalls. 'It's an environment that often fosters extreme views,' Richard says. 'It can be a scary environment for a public servant that's trained to be very neutral and very factual in their information.'

• The decision to switch was primarily driven by the fact that WebCT Campus Edition is not capable of supporting our level of usage.
  
  
• The system is used 24/7, but support is only available 8/5. The university is looking at improving this.
  
  
• Making course materials publically available is not high on McGill's list of requirements. The new systems do allow instructors to create guest accounts, but supporting something like MIT's OpenCourseWare is not in the works.

GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google GMail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium.

The computer lab will open at 8 in the morning and will stay open untill 5:30 in the afternoon. If you can't come for the opening, feel free to come in throughout the day. We'll have modelling, texturing, lighting, animating and pythong programming session during the whole day. There is NO price for attending at the conference, it's absolutly free.

"University labs are helping to produce some of world's best computer graphics artists"

"IT Conversations host and producer Doug Kaye is interviewed by Rob Greenlee for WebTalk Radio. Rob asks Doug about the birth of IT Conversations, web-audio business models, and what multimedia content formats work best. They discuss related topics such as the impact of Podcasting on IT Conversations, traditional broadcast radio and satellite radio, and whether audio streaming will flourish or die."

"The [CTRL] Controlling Bodies/Controlling Spaces conference is a timely intervention which aims to foster critical dialogue interrogating emergent modes and methods of control and their impact on individuals, institutions and intellectual thought."

• basic text manipulation
• find/replace in and across multiple files
• syntax coloring and highlighting for XHTML, CSS, and JS. Plug-ins would allow for other languages (ex. PHP) to be supported as well.
• the ability to collapse tags
• context-sentitive help on all markup tags and properties

The Stockton and Darlington had been laid down on a gauge of 4 feet an 8 1/2 inches, which was common among the tram roads in its neighborhood and which avoided the necessity of a few and different type of coal-waggon. Since there was no ground for dissatisfaction with this guage, it was adopted on the Liverpool and Manchester and the London and Birmingham, and there was naturally an advantage in using it also for all lines which might connect with them. Brunel, however, persuaded the directors of the Great Western to adopt a gauge of 7 feet. The broad gauge may have enabled greater speed to be attained with safety and more comfort to be provded for passengers; but, by requiring more land, it made construction more costly; and the existence of different gauges hindered co-operation and co-ordination of railway enterprises.

"Netscape Communications Corporation today announced that it is offering its newly introduced Netscape(TM) network navigator free to users via the Internet. The new Internet navigator, developed by the six-month-old Silicon Valley company led by Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark and NCSA Mosaic creator Marc Andreessen, is available immediately for free downloading by individual, academic and research users."

"A fixed scope contract only is fixed is the contractor really understands the requirements. But such knowledge is so rare that you can win by banking on its absence. Such contracting companies deliberately low-bid the fixed price, with the explicit plan of making a profit on change requests. Indeed some firms actually incentivize their sales and account managers based on how many change requests a project receives."

C'est pour cela que je dis, de façon un peu provocative, que HTML 4.01 n'est pas implémenté car dans la plupart des cas, la sémantique des éléments n'est pas utilisée et donc ne donne aucun bénéfice à l'utilisateur.

"Everyone at the conference had their own definition of what Web 2.0 was about, but I think Bezos got it right when he said it was about machine to machine communication versus the machine to human communication that typified the early days of the Web. And that's nothing new..it's just that it's starting to really take off as an idea that people are buying into, both literally and figuratively."

S5 is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible.

Nevertheless, however well it may have answered the needs of the eighteenth century, the system of inland navigation was in several respects inadequate for the nineteeth, largely because it had not been thought out as a whole and in relation to probably future developments. Thus, the various acts enabling parts of the system to be constructed had not imposed uniformity in depth or breadth, with the result that a consigner could not be sure of sending his goods in the same vessel if they had to pass from one canal to another on the way. Indeed, not only was uniformity lacking as between one canal and another, but, with regard to the dimensions of the locks, it might be lacking between different parts of the same canal. Reliance on optimistic private enterprise resulted, in some instances, in very heavy costs being undertaken in cutting canals where there was insufficient prospect of remuneration. It is thus not astonishing that, even before railway competition began, some canals made very small profits or none at all. To this fault--the lack of plan and control--which might have been avoided, another was inevitably added. Since the earlier canals were cut before Watt's engine had ben patented and long before Stephenson's locomotive had been invented, the possibility of steam traction could not be forseen, and the depth and breadth of canals in general were calculated only for horse traction.

"Acting largely on procedural grounds, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday upheld a lower court's decision from October 2002, which concluded that Web sites cannot be required to comply with the 1991 disabilities law. An advocacy group for the blind had sued Southwest Airlines, seeking a redesign of its Web site."

Now, the thing is, I know that it’s good for grad students to do this. I know that you need to network with other scholars and share ideas and do all the kinds of things that blogs end up being great for. I love what some of my new grad students this year are doing in their blogs, and I know that it will be good for their careers.

But I also know that the senior faculty are right. You don’t get tenure without funded research, and blogging is a waste of time.

ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is the most widely accepted approach to IT Service Management in the world. ITIL provides a cohesive set of best practice, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It is supported by a comprehensive qualification scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools.

"High blood pressure in otherwise healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 83 is associated with a measurable decline in cognitive function, according to a report published today by University of Maine researchers in the pre-publication online edition of the journal Hypertension."

We ran Linux until March of 2004, when we made the move to Windows Servers. Linux and Apache had served us quite well, but when we turned to look at building our new CMS, .NET was simply so attractive for our needs that we felt it warranted the switch.

"Pascal is extremely critical of Extensible Markup Language in database administration and data exchange. A self-described contrarian, he also has bad things to say about Structured Query Language and commercial implementations of the relational database model."

By combining today's most advanced networked robotic camera with a new visual database engineered by the Alpha Lab, Demonstrate is the first surveillance system whose software allows multiple remote users to simultaneously control a single robotic camera.

The Charest government has promised to maintain a freeze on university tuitions throughout the Liberals' first mandate.

One way or another, McGill needs more money, says McGill principal Heather Munroe-Blum.

"We estimate that McGill University — as against other research-intensive universities outside of Quebec and Canada — is underfunded by about $100 million a year."

That shortfall needs to be filled, either by more government funding, or higher tuitions, Munroe-Blum says.

“So here, for example,” I said, “You multiply the second row by three. So the coefficient of the y term is now three times eight.”

“Right,” she said slowly.

“Which is…?” I prompted.

She stared blankly at me. “I left my calculator in my car.”

There are aspects of this job that could - should - earn me Academy Awards. For instance, at the news that computing three times eight was not only something that couldn’t be done instantaneously, but was in fact something that could not even be done with a minute to think about it - I did not weep, or choke. I did not tear my hair, rent my clothes, or curse the heavens. I merely stared ahead for a second.

Or perhaps more than a second, because my student then giggled - ostensibly to lighten the mood - “Seriously, it’s really bad, I use my calculator to do five times one.”