Technology

information & communication technology

Defending against Sp@m

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In the past year I’ve registered over 104,000 comment sp@m on this blog. I’ve been using Akismet, which works well, but at +1,000 per day, they were chewing up bandwidth and slowing the system. I liked Akismet because it allowed me to accept new and anonymous comments, without the hassles of captchas or Turing tests, which I personally dislike.

I’ve just added Bad Behavior to my defence arsenal and it’s reduced trashy comments by almost 50%, but that’s still a lot. My recent change has been to enable “Strict Mode”, which is supposed to be more effective, but may block some legitimate comments. I’ve learned that Bad Behavior in strict mode may block comments from those behind firewalls, especially government and corporate systems.

If you are reading this from a government or corporate system, how about posting a quick comment and seeing if you get through? New comments are moderated, so it may take a while before your comment shows. Thanks.

Social Bookmarking with Ma.gnolia

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You may have noticed in the right column of this site under External Links that my bookmarks are now with Ma.gnolia. I switched from del.icio.us two days ago, after a recent switch from Furl, for reasons that I explained last December.

I saw Ma.gnolia and instantly liked it. The interface is pleasing; there is a cached copy of your page (which Furl had but del.icio.us lacked) ; and the RSS feed is exceptionally nice, with a colour thumbnail and the comments included in the feed. Transferring my data was easy and Ma.gnolia even provides you with the direct link to your del.icio.us OPML file. All 600+ of my bookmarks were uploaded and put into Ma.gnolia, which seems to be much more social and human.

Update: I have switched back to del.icio.us as I had some export and OpenID authentification difficulties with Ma.gnolia.

Linux for schools

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Novell is apparently becoming the leader in Linux installations for the education market:

Do these numbers make sense to you – $2,500 versus $100,000? This is the price difference felt between migrating over to Linux or instead, upgrading to the next version of Windows. What’s interesting is that I’m noticing that more often than not Novell is the company making this possible for schools.

I’ve recommended open source for our schools before, and even sent a letter to the Ministers of Finance and Education at the time, but to no avail. These cost savings are significant, but what is more important is that our education community can now own the primary means of production (operating system & applications) of knowledge artifacts, and not some multinational corporation. Students would be able to freely mirror their school computers and even play with new programs. Instead of just being consumers and users of software, students can become co-creators of software and the underlying knowledge.

With corporations like Novell behind Linux, it is difficult for education IT departments to continue to play the FUD [fear, uncertainty, doubt] card against open source. However, as Matt Asay reminds us, MS is not out of the game yet, “Importantly, the price comparison above may not be representative of reality, as Microsoft will likely discount to zero to keep a strong foothold in the Education market. ”

The bottom line though, is that open source in our government-funded institutions is one way to develop a sustainable Province, something that our Self-Sufficiency Task Force should know.

Everything is Political

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This blog is not supposed to be about politics; well at least I didn’t set out to discuss politics three years ago. However, Jon Husband recently quoted Dante Alighieri, who said that, “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.”

Then along comes Jon (again) referring to a piece by Joe Bageant that ends with this line – “Divisive politics once again beats the snot out of reason.”

All of this reminds me of my current read, Thomas Homer-Dixon’s, The Upside of Down. From the Chapter “Cycles Within Cycles”:

For the vast majority of us who sell our labor in the marketplace, our economic insecurity and relative powerlessness impel us to play by the rules. And in capitalist democracy, playing by the rules means not starting fights over big issues like our society’s highly skewed distribution of wealth and power. Instead it means focusing on achieving short-term material gains – such as bettering our contracts with our employers. Put simply, our economic elites have learned, largely through their struggles with workers in the first half of the twentieth century, to protect their status by creating a system of incentives, and a dynamic of economic growth, that diverts political conflict into manageable, largely non-political channels. As long as the system delivers the goods – defined by capitalist democracy itself as a rising material standard of living and enough new jobs to absorb displaced labor – no one is really motivated to challenge its foundations.

I’ve previously written about Corporatism Run Amok, but I may take more forays into the political realm, particularly as politics continues to affect my own intersection of interest – learning (state-run education), work (support of corporations) & technology (digital copyright & IP) .

Green Domain Hosting

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For Canadians, I have found two ways of becoming a “greener” presence on the Web. One is to use Green Hosting, where everything is powered by renewable energy:

All the electricity required by the server and ancillary operations (101% of demand) is generated by wind turbines in Alberta, and is distributed through the Greenmax© program of the Calgary utility ENMAX. Both generation and distribution are certified under Canada’s national EcoLogo© program to ensure that this service contributes directly to the reduction of GHG emissions and supports new renewables facilities.

Another possibility is to use Ethical Hosting’s service, which uses offsets, or green tags:

Obviously we can’t just throw up a Wind turbine outside our office and it would be very expensive to do so (but would be very cool if we could!) This is where green energy certificates or Green Tags come into play. After auditing our energy usage, we were able to calculate the electricity usage of our office and computers. We are then able to purchase the necessary amount of Green Tags through a nationally recognized provider: The Pembina Institute.

Definitely a couple of considerations if you’re looking for a new host or considering changing your current host.

Open Source is (still) best for customers

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I’ve been an advocate of open source software for quite some time now. Part of the reason for this advocacy was my experience selling a proprietary learning management system. I saw how customers could become hand-cuffed to a technology once they had put a critical amount of data into the system and could no longer get it out. This wasn’t just our company but everyone in the business.

Matt Asay, in a case study from University of Nebraska (that’s an academic client folks), once again shows why open source is better for the customer in the long run:

You buy into a Microsoft (or Oracle, or ….) ecosystem, and they provide all the tools to get you in deeper, and to keep you there. There are good reasons for Microsoft to do this, reasons which have nothing to do with pernicious business practices. One reason is that Microsoft can better control the total user experience if it controls all the interlocking pieces, just as Apple does on its computers.But therein lies both the promise and peril of a vendor-dominated ecosystem. It’s hard to get out once you get in.

Here are some of my past discussions on open source for learning:

How open source has a much lower total cost of ownership.

A Canadian case study on open source in education.

Open source is recommended by impartial research organisations.

Why does Aliant’s service suck?

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I don’t like using the “S” word when referring to a company, but in this case I feel it’s appropriate. I have complained before about Bell-Aliant’s service, and how it took over a year to get things straightened out:

A little bit of searching and I found the e-mail of one of Bell Aliant’s VP’s and sent my story, with links to my blog. Within 24 hours, Aliant had delivered:

  1. an apology directly from a VP
  2. a rebate on the High Speed Ultra service for which I paid
  3. a year’s worth of free Ultra service

Unfortunately, what I received from Aliant has almost no value. First of all, Aliant’s service does not work with Skype, my preferred VoIP application.

Net Neutrality Canada - Neutrality.ca

Secondly, Aliant’s Ultra service comes with free “TV on your PC”, but this service hasn’t worked at all for 3 weeks, and my requests for help remain unanswered.

All I can say is, “Buyer Beware”, and choose an alternative.

Update: I never received a response from Aliant’s technical support regarding TV on my PC, but my son suggested that I roll back Windows Media Player, and after two rollbacks (to v. 9) it now works, in spite of Aliant’s statement that the service works with Version 9 “or higher”. Still no joy with Skype.

Update 2: It seems that other telco monopolies are blocking traffic.

TED Talk Videos

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Many of the presentations from TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talk are available on YouTube. I’ve watched a number of these recently and some of them are absolutely fantastic. These 53 videos are online and free and make for great informal learning and discussion. We have been watching some of them as a family with favourites being Sir Ken Robinson, Al Gore and Dan Dennett. I think that they are an excellent break from online reading, which many bloggers do a lot of.

These videos are also good conversation starters and I’d think that the 20-25 minutes format would be perfect for a quick lunchroom view and chat. I really appreciate the fact that TED Talk has made these available.

For those in the learning field, check out Richard Baraniuk from Rice University on A vision for free, global (online) education which looks at the publishing industry, academia and open source.

New Creative Commons Licence 3.0

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labs-puzzle-2.jpg

With the release of version 3.0, it’s time to check out Creative Commons if you don’t already know about this great organization. I would call CC the lubricant of the Creative Age. It makes the wheels go round :-)

As the CC site says:

Creative Commons helps you publish your work online while letting others know exactly what they can and can’t do with your work. When you choose a licence, we provide you with tools and tutorials that let you add licence information to our own site, or to one of several free hosting services that have incorporated Creative Commons.

A CC licence is not just for indivdual websites and creations, but a great tool for educational institutions and non-profits as well as for-profits who understand the Internet economy.

Skype is getting slower on Aliant’s Network

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My ISP is Bell Aliant and I subscribe to their high speed Ultra service, which has a download speed of around 600 kbps from the Aliant server. A recent speed check on SpeakEasy showed the following:

Last Result:
Download Speed: 5163 kbps (645.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 543 kbps (67.9 KB/sec transfer rate)

My problem over the past couple of months is that the quality of the calls on Skype is getting much worse. I thought that it was a problem with my connection, because the people I called said that there were gaps in my transmissions, making it almost impossible to understand me.

I had this problem on a call to California the other day and later on a call to Switzerland. In each case we switched to Google Talk and then we had clear, telephony-quality, calls. The cause of the problem was not my connection speed.

There seems to be either a decrease in the quality of Skype’s VoIP, or something else is affecting this service. Does Google Talk use a different transmission protocol? Is someone on the network blocking or slowing-down Skype’s service? I’d be interested in hearing about similar problems or ways to fix this.