digitalsean@typepad

Moodle and Mediafilter - disabling inline flash

So among the small things I've found out today is that moodle does some interesting things when you upload html pages and try to serve them through a moodle course.

If the filter files configuration is on then the moodle text filters may rewrite things in the file, making smilies appear or adding the theme css and moodle javascripts eg. Ufo.js to the header of the file.

It also means that if mediafilter is turned on, links like a href="something.swf" are automatically rewritten into an embedded flash object.

Quick tip to disable this is to add a question mark onto the end of the filename. A href="something.swf?" will not be rewritten.

date/time value reaches 1234567890 tonight

Many computer systems represent date and time values by counting the number of seconds since a specific date and time. The commonly used UNIX date time value counts from 1 January 1970 00:00 GMT.  

At 23:31:30 GMT today (Friday 13 February 2009) the unix datetime value reaches the integer number 1234567890.

Frequently asked questions

Q1: Is there a website where I can see a countdown?

A: Why yes, visit : http://www.1234567890day.com or also http://coolepochcountdown.com

Q2: Will anything bad happen? 

A: Probably not.  We have another 29 years before we reach the maximum 32 bit value for this time, see wikipedia on the 2k38 problem

Q3: Is this important?

A: Not really^[1], just a cool number.  

Q4: How do I turn a number into a local date/time?

A: date -r 1234567890

Q5: How do I find out what time it is in this form

A: date +%s

Q6: But I don't have  a unix machine?

A: javascript:d=new Date;alert('it is now '+d.getTime()+' seconds since UNIX epoch');

--

[1]: Unless you wrote some code in the 80's or 90's and never imagined we'd still run your program, or have working computers after y2k and decided that 1234567890 was a nice number to represent something like 'end of file', or 'initiate self destruct sequence'.

Telescopic Text story

A nice little story about making a cup of tea by Joe Davis which uses javascript to expand and re-wite the story word by word.

Telescopic Text is a short story by Joe Davis. ...
Telescopic Text is a short story by Joe Davis. The story expands word by word. ....

I wonder if something similar might be a nice starter or exercise from writing in English?

My first thought was some kind of programming project to write a telescopic text editor. 

On second thought though, perhaps it is simpler to use a bit of paper.  Start with a sentence at the top of the page, and progressively rewrite adding or replacing words to make the story longer and longer, as exercise in drafting and rewriting.

passing time with android phone

We've excused ourselves from part of a family get together in theWe've excused ourselves from part of a family get together in the pre-Christmas weekend. Having a baby is a great excuse for afternoon naps.

Having exhausted all of the hotel room TV and radio options, we turned to the G1 phone for entertainment. Loaded up the Last.FM player (aLastFM) and searched for the word "christmas". We now have our own personal christmas-musak.

(You can also listen to this from the Last.FM website on a real computer.

Even better, the android phone is letting me carry on web browsing, twittering and now writing a blog post with almost no skips or halts in the music. You can see the track name by sliding down the notification area, and also to quickly go back to the player and skip or ban an unwanted song.

Feeling a bit more Christmas-y now.

Baby Changing Aerobics

There are meny things that I'll try doing in order to keep the baby entertained. He often starts to get upset when being changed, or getting ready for bed.

One of our early tricks was just to stop freeze, or pretend to be a tree. Drama classes come in handy for something. We've now moved on and playing peel-a-boo is a favorite at the moment.

Silliest thing so far has been playing out part of the film Monstors Inc. "scarry feet, scary feet - kid's awake", Jumping up and down and hiding under by lying flat on the floor.

This is aso how I noticed the strange feeling that I get in my wrists if I jump up and down while my hands are raised in the air (I get a rebounding pulse-like feeling in my wrists when I do this).

I feel a Doctor Doctor joke coming on : "Doctor, Doctor ... I get a funny feeling when I jump up and down, with my arms in the air"

Site specific CSS overrides in Opera 9.5 mobile

I was pleasently surprised to find that Opera 9.5 beta2 for Windows Mobile has a lot of the features of the full browser. In fact it can be difficult at times to persuade websites to provide their mobile friendly version.

There's a probem with the layout in Bloglines, which is ignored by PocketIE, but Opera shows up. There's an unclosed (center) tag which leaves all of the content centred.

m.beta.bloglines.com/feedtree

So a little work with Opera, it's big brother allows site specific CSS overrides. So created a file called

override.ini in /Application Date/Opera 9.5 Beta/

Opera Preferences version 2.1 ; Do not edit this file while Opera is running ; This file is stored in UTF-8 encoding

[Overrides] bloglines.com

[bloglines.com] User Prefs|Local CSS File=\Application Data\Opera 9.5 Beta\mystyles\bloglines.css

Created a subfolder mystyles and bloglines.css

@charset "utf-8"; /* Stylesheet for bogines.com */ center { text-align: right; !important

} /* the yellow background was a test to see if this realy works */ body { background: yellow; }

Relaunch Opera, and we have bloglines with our custom styles. More examples of style overrides at http://userstyles.org

I think the syntax of the override.ini file allows many of Opera's settings to be customised on a site by site basis. Not experimented with this yet, but I would not be surprised if you could turn off javascript, or stop downloading images for specific sites using this override file too.

Interactive Screen Experiments for Physics piCETL

Interesting talk and workshop from piCETL. (Physics Innovations Cene for Excellence in Teaching and Learning Open University) They have developed a series of interactive screen experiments in Physics. These differ from interactive computers simulations, in that they are based on highly interactive videos and photos of real experiments. This means students take real measurements from photos of a real experiments

They are being used by OU to help students prepare for residential courses, to teach skills and introduce new equipment. They have been funded as part of a UK Higher Education Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, so they are enthusiastic to have people trying out the resources with their students, and to get feedback

http://www.open.ac.uk/picetl/activities/details/detail.php?itemId=4612203073f3a

They also reported positive expeience of students using a virtual oscilloscope simulation to learn about and practice using lab equipment.

http://www.virtual-oscilloscope.com/

posts to do

Some headings to write and expand on later

• remembering to develop services for the loosely connected world
• repurposing twitter and jaku : formal and informal tools for near real time response and feedback in education
• text messaging services - bridging the instant-message-vs-email generational gap)
• rss in moodle, for providing offline-able services
• e-portfolios vs myspace and facebook. Teaching about positive profile creation

Filtering your facebook feeds

Here's a quick guide on creating your own filtered view of <a href="http://www.facebook.com/friends/?status">facebook status updates</a> for your news reader.

I got an email from a friend of digitalkatie about facebook and twitter.  Apparently the constant stream of status updates via twitter into facebook is overwhelming his use of the facebook status RSS feed.  There is a nice solution using yahoo pipes without needing any real programming.

You might want to take a look at pipes.yahoo.com.  They provide a nice gui based process building tool which allows you to set up a chain of processes to take action on combinations of RSS feeds and web pages.

1. Login using a yahoo id, create a new pipe.
2. Copy the the address[1] of the facebook RSS feed into a new 'fetch feed' block. 
3. Add a new  'filter block' and connect the fetch feed to the filter block by drawing a line between the bottom connector on the fetch and the top one on the filter block.
4. You could enter some text in the filter block - choose to block ANY items with ' is twittering: ' in them.
5. Now connect the bottom of the filter up to the 'pipe output' block. 
6. Save and 'run feed' to view the results.  (No need to 'publish it' or to rename the feed)

Buttons on the results page will allow you to add it to My Yahoo, Google Reader or other feed readers using the orange RSS 'more options' link.

I'm using the filtered feed in Bloglines and finding it quite useful.  There is no point in seeing the same messages twice as I read twitter on my phone or on the website.

Going offline for travel with Window Mobile

Holidays always make me think about packing online media. It's a time to copy across working files, email, and new music to the laptop.

I have become a bit of a fan of services which store data and make it accessible through a browser.

• Google for email and calendar
• del.icio.us for bookmarks
• Bloglines for blog reading

At home I can switch between desktop machines and mobile devices both at home and work and know that I will have access as long as I have a browser with an internet connection.

Packing for holiday means that I might have to manage without. How can I prepare my windows mobile phone for the prospect of only having an intermittent connection?

In theory Google Mail now has imap, a mail protocol designed with exactly this sort of scenario - keeping folders and emails on a sever in sync with an intermittently connected client. Unfortunately window mobile mail client isn't quite up to the job, and deals with imap slowly with timeouts. Fortunately WebIS have FlexMail 2007 which does the trick nicely.

For blog reading I am using Egress by Karl Hessinger (GarishKernels). This picks up my subscription list and unread items from Bloglines.

I've brought over calendar information using OggSync. And I am currently typing this using a commercial blog service Typepad, because of it's nice offline mobile client.

And for some reassurance that the PCs at home and work will still work when we return, some backups were needed. Carbon Copy clones the complete Mac hard disk, and Cobain Backup to selectively backup the important bits on each of the windows boxes.