Oren’s Weblog

I’m finally getting a chance to catch up with posting my notes from the 2003 ECAR Symposium that happened last week. This was a really good forum – smallish (140 attendees), short (day and a half), with great content.

ECAR is the Educuase Center for Applied Research. It is largely the brainchild of Richard Katz, who is not only Vice President of Educause (the largest professional association in higher ed computing), who is trying mightily to get us to focus on finding out what is actually happening in our field so we can make decisions based not only on intuition and anecdote but at least partly informed by real data. Not an undertaking for the faint of heart – something nobody would accuse Richard of.

Alan Kay gave the keynote presentation. His talk was titled “Back To The Future – Real Math, Real science, Real Children, Real Computing” and he spoke of how it is possible to teach very young children math, science, and computing in ways far more meaningful than is commonly done today. He talked about how children learn from actually doing things and observing results, and can then generalize from those results, rather than by memorizing wrote answers. He showed a fifth grade class where they recreated Galileo’s gravity experiment, dropping balls of differing weights from a height, and recorded the results on video. Using the Squeak programming environment, they were able to analyze results side-by-side for the different drops, and time the ball drops.

Kay’s wry comment: “”In every class of children there’s usually one Galileo – interestingly enough it’s usually not the teacher”

My complete notes from his talk are posted here.

The Sakai project, a new project to combine several open source projects in higher ed including OKI, uPortal, CHEF, and OSPI, has put its prospectus on the web here. This is a project that has the propsect of being very important, and is well worth keeping an eye on.

We got our first dusting of snow here in Seattle this morning, and (just coincidentally) we’re off to San Diego for the Educause Center for Applied Research Symposium.

I’m looking forward both to the event, which features a keynote presentation by Alan Kay, who was at least partiallly responsible for inventing computing as we know it today (the GUI, object-oriented programming, etc), and to being at the way cool Hotel Del Coronado.

I’ll be reporting from there as possible…stay tuned.

Recently my wireless at home has been exhibiting strange behavior – the laptop makes the connection and works fine for about a minute, then network applications just stop working, though XP reports that it has an excellent wireless connection. The Airport management software (I use Freebase on my Windows XP laptop) doesn’t see the Airport on its scanning, but if I manually tell it what IP address the Airport is on I can connect fine.

So I spend several days futzing around with settings on the Airport, making sure that I can connect fine with a wired connection on the same port on my hub, etc. Then I bring the Airport in to work and let my colleague Mark McNair take a look at it – works fine for him – and he even updates my firmware for me (there’s apparently no way to update an Airport from a Windows machine).

So I bring it back home, plug it in – same deal. Finally I have the bright idea to disable the Internet Connection Firewall on the wireless connection – voila – everything works fine.

I have no idea why it worked ok for months with the ICF turned on and all of a sudden stopped working. But now that I have it working again, I’m not messing with it.

I think this is the box I’ve been waiting for to get my mp3s to my home stereo – though I’ll have to make sure it can cope with AAC files.

This has been widely reported, but it’s too mind-boggling to pass up – David Sifry of Technorati (a site that tracks which weblogs are linking to which other weblogs) reports:

“One year ago, when I started Technorati on a single server in my basement, we were adding between 2,000-3,000 new weblogs each day, not counting the people who were updating sites we were already tracking. In March of this year, when we switched over to a 5 server cluster, we were keeping up with about 4,000-5,000 new weblogs each day. Right now, we’re adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We’re also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds.”

Wow!

My colleague Josh Larios wonders how many of those weblogs actually get updated regularly. An excellent question, and probably someone’s upcoming PhD thesis topic.

Wired is reporting here that Virginia Tech’s Mac-based supercomputer, made up of 1,100 dual processor G5 boxes, has been rated the third fastest supercomputer in the world. Wonder if my cgi processes would run faster on it…