Archive for the ‘technology’ Category
My State of E-Learning #elearning #coursera #udemy #udacity
Recently I’ve gotten the online learning bug back, not that it’s ever away for long, so I’ve been busy again on Coursera. And thanks to a HTML 5 course I also started to use Udemy. An Eric Ries course is waiting on Udacity for me to start it. In the past I used to use iTunesU to follow online university courses, such as Yale’s Game Theory Lectures by Benjamin Polak.
Coursera
I’m currently enrolled in 6 courses, and I’ve followed a number of courses here, yet none to completion within the time period set by the tutor. Often the amount of time I would need to set aside for the course can be between 6 and 12 hours each week, this is entirely possible and I often do manage to do a couple of hours in the evening. Another issue is that to receive course credit these Problem Sets need to be in at a certain date, or courses which have been running over 1 week it is often impossible to submit these on time to be eligible for course credit.
Coursera does allow you to download all the video’s, so it is possible to view these at a later date, or even from the beach somewhere. And they sometimes offer the course multiple times, so in the example of Model Thinking I have enrolled a second time so I can complete easier.
Killing Big Data, About Time
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Killing Big Data, About TimeThat sounds like a very good idea. At The Next Web conference I was talking to an investor about a project I was involved in, I laughed and said it was a Big Data project. I brought out the cliché: I was in Big Data before it was called Big Data. The main issue I said with many of the Big Data projects I was being told about that they were actually Data Warehouse projects.
Why We Need To Kill Big Data
It’s the New Year and along with resolutions about eating healthier, being kinder and exercising more frequently, I’d like to add one more to the list. Let’s banish the term big data with pivot, cloud…
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XBMC BlastDav by Adrianus Warmenhoven
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XBMC BlastDavAdrianus Warmenhoven wondered what the minimum that XBMC needs to use a WebDAV server. So he scaled back all the unneeded functionality to create an easy media server for broadcasting te XBMC on any of your devices.
XBMC Blastdav Adrianus Warmenhoven Company
Ever since the original XBox with a modchip was capable of running XBMC I used and recommended XBMC to friends and acquaintances as the nicest media player. Now Android and the Raspberry Pi have come …
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They tried to make me go to Rehab
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They tried to make me goto Rehabhttp://unbounce.com/landing-pages/landing-page-rehab/
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It’s the incentive structure, people! Why science reform must come from the granting agencies.
Another day, another New York Times report on bad practice in biomedical science. The growing problems with scientific research are by now well known: Many results in the top journals are cherry picked, methodological weaknesses and other important caveats are often swept under the rug, and a large fraction of findings cannot be replicated. In some rare cases, there is even outright fraud.
What is wrong with ICT?
A day ago I read PHP: A fractal of bad design, and it made me sit down and think about writing this entry, of which the kernel has been gestating for quite a long time.
I see this a lot; pro’s ranting about an aspect of our ‘craft’ that has gone totally pear-shaped; programmers complaining about the languages or the quality of code they are asked to fix and/or maintain, systems administrators that just can not believe the insanity that is brought down on them because of either laziness of the in-house personnel or management-made bylaws.
Cryptographic specialists (even mildly spoken ones like Bruce Schneier), hackers nee security specialists, software designers… the whole palette of people that actually are proficient in their work gripe and complain.
Red Hat Open Cloud Tour #RHCTams #conference [UPDATED]
Today I spend my day at the Red Hat Open Cloud Tour, this is what happened today:
Just heard the opening by Rajiv Sodhi, who is here despite having a baby due any moment.
Margaret J. Rimmler’s keynote was interesting. One of the key takeaways being openness RedHat customers should have the choice to remain portable and replace RedHat, if that is what they want. Read the rest of this entry »
Proof of Concept: Shopper App
I often get people ask me to develop phone applications based on an idea and with little other input besides the idea itself. I usually ask them to write me a proposal and send that to me, knowing that most people will procrastinate – as it turns a fun idea into work – I rarely hear anything back. Not so in this case, a friend brainstormed a shopping application and we made the following rough mock ups using OmniGraffle.
Image source: me
Proof of Concept: Google Docs Mail Merge Form with Text and HTML #wordpress
I needed a way to be able to shamelessly plug the posts I recently bundled into the booklet “Write Something” again.In a similar way to the last time I did it in Proof of Concept: Google Docs Mail Merge Form
As I explained before I have set up a system to automatically mail somebody when the enter their address in the form, my issue was that I wanted to add a unique blogpost which they would only be able to get by signing up. Naturally I wanted to style it in the same way the posts are styled in this blog. Again I turned to the documentation, specifically the Class MailApp which I was using to send the mail. Using this documentation I had a starting point. I wanted three changes to the current script:
- keep the plain text
- add HTML message
- add inline images
Proof of Concept: Google Docs Mail Merge Form #wordpress #updated
I needed a way to be able to shamelessly plug the posts I recently bundled into the booklet “Write Something“. I want to build a list, and offering something which adds value for the subscriber is a good way to do this. There is a host of good material which you can use to help, so I won’t elaborate on that in this post.
I have a hosted WordPress.com blog, which means that I can’t run a local script to collect the mail addresses and mail them, so I turned to Google Docs’ Form functionality for the entry form, naturally I give them the option to download the booklet there, and I wanted to send the subscriber a message to thank them. In the Google tutorial: Simple Mail Merge they explain how to do a mail merge using the Script Editor. I wanted to go a little further and have it send a mail with thank you note and a link to each subscriber as soon as they filled in the form.
