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Joshua Brauer

DirecTV DVR gets upgrade to 6.2

May 3, 2005

DirecTV is mailing notices to customers about the impeding upgrade to version 6.2 of the software on the DirecTV DVR units. The traffic in message boards seems to be a pretty positive response. Faster access to the program guide, folders for TV series and the ability to sort recorded programs by title or date recorded are new features listed. A few posts on the forums indicate problems with the 30-second skip after the upgrade but these all end in successfully getting the skip put back.

On the down side it resets favorite channels so there will be more time spent getting rid of the home shopping network and it's cronies.

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Drupal.org down?

May 3, 2005

Drupal.org seems to be down at the moment. Murphy has managed to make sure it's down (an extreme rarity) when I'm doing some migration. Good thing there are local copies of the modules I need.

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The road to content management

May 3, 2005

Educause has a paper published in 2003 about Gonzaga's move to a content management system. The article details the perils of starting with a centralized system and then realizing that a monolithic organization can't handle the publishing for the many small units, groups, departments etc. that make up a modern university. Sounds eerily like the state of affairs I'm familiar with.

By the way, this problem is not unique to universities. I've been with several companies that struggle through the same thing. Having built a system for content management using text files in 1996 it's odd to see organizations trying to figure out, nearly a decade later, what the solution is.

Many technologists begin to think the world is about their technology. They jealously guard the company product - "we use product X" the line goes. (Though in higher education the product portion is often left out.) In their view the world begins to revolve around their product. They stop seeing faculty and staff members as organizational peers who have needs that might be met by technology and begin to see users. Part and parcel of this shift is the view that product X can do everything any user might want. If it doesn't then the user is mistaken about what they want. The conversation shifts from being driven by the question "What do you want to do?" and is replaced by "You need to use product X."

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Presidential tales

May 1, 2005

The weblog Wonkette has some choice excerpts from First Lady Laura Bush at the White House Correspondent's Dinner.

My favorites include:

"I'm proud of George. He's learned a lot about ranching since that first year when he tried to milk the horse. What's worse, it was a male horse."

"George's answer to any problem at the ranch is to cut it down with a chainsaw. Which I think is why he and Cheney and Rumsfeld get along so well."

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Benchmarking Content Management Systems

May 1, 2005

Today was time for a bit more work on server moves. As a part of that process I spent some time working with Apache tuning for performance. I also did some very unscientific tests on a couple of content management systems as well as some static sites. The static sites, not surprisingly, outperformed the dynamic pages, but even within the dynamic realm there was quite a difference between the couple of systems I looked at. The tests were not complete enough or reasonable enough to publish yet. I'll do some more testing in the next few days and see if I can't put together some meaningful results.

The array of content management systems available makes testing rather complicated and can cause it to lean towards the meaningless side. For many low-volume web sites the differences won't add up to a whole lot. Compounding the difficulty is that few systems have identical features. I think I'll put together a sample site with a half dozen stories and use that.

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H2G2 Hit and a miss

April 30, 2005

Fresh from seeing the new Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy movie I thought I'd come home and write a great review. As is oft the case, however, I found that it has already been done very well. The BBC review covers the subject very nicely. A nice, if quirky adaption of the story that most Hitchhiker's fans will likely appreciate and chuckle at a time or two and will be lost on the unread or unheard masses.

The bottom line is this is a good movie and Hitchhiker's fans won't be nearly as disappointed as the Star Wars generation will be in a couple of weeks. Since there was an Episode III trailer I'm now more convinced that Episode III might be a tiny (but only a tiny) fraction better than the last two disappointments. Some posts suggest it might be better. The trailer, however, suggests it tries, once again to strike a balance between the original trilogy's heavy battle story-lines and the lighter storytelling. Episode I and Episode II have proven a failure in this regard. The trailer offers little reason for different expectations of this installment. When the trailer has more talking heads than the PBS News Hour one has to wonder.

Thanks to the BBC I now know where to find the Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy on my Treo phone. This will lead to many fine hours of exploration.

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Friday funny

April 29, 2005

During the daily work online I came across this statement describing a high school laptop program: "students become experienced with high end computer software such as Windows, Office, and much more."

I wonder now if they use high-end General Motors station wagons for drivers' education too.

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