Blog

At one time back around 1996 or so, browsers were being updated an released at such a torrid pace. You had to practically download and update 2x per month to get all the features. Not least of which were all the multimedia plug-ins to get the latest viewers for all the multimedia being produced.

I say this because I saw on Mastodon someone had been trying to get a web-browser working on an old computer, showing an old webpage for a University “Campus Wide Information System” thats what some IT orgs called their websites back in teh day. Because sometimes things were made available via gopher:// links and sometimes through http:// links, it was an interesting wild-cat, frontier days atmosphere.

The biggest barrier to getting an old web-browser working an old OS to display an old webpage was the need for https:// and the support libraries on the OS and the browser pre-cluded some choicies of web browser. For instance you can get a web browser from Google in 2002 because Chrome didn’t exist. But Netscape Navigator Did! But the https:// and SSL certificates and their underlying OS support libraries (things like OpenSSL) don’t run against Netscape Navigator 4.0 very well, if at all. And no easy fixes to civilian types like myself or artists attempting to recreate an old experience like that.

But back to my original paragraph, about the rate of change, and flurry of activity as someone in EdTech say in 1996 days, was that Netscape Navigator released updates fast and furious to add new functions constantly. New plug-ins were released by various and sundry outfits trying to get their new media tech adopted and market dominant. And darned if Microsoft wasn’t trying to get a browser into people’s hands that would compete with Netscape. So much so, they had to build it into Windows as part of the OS to get people to start using it regularly. I haven’t seen before or since this level of the new, new thing hitting FTP servers (at the time) and amount of work being done by developers for these desktop apps. And it wasn’t even for security exploits, or anything it was just to have NEW things you could do on the web. <sigh!> A bit of nostalgia over the web that was.

“Ultimately, to figure out what we really need to worry about, we need better AI literacy among the general public and especially policy-makers.  We need better transparency on how these large AI systems work, how they are trained, and how they are evaluated.  We need independent evaluation, rather than relying on the unreproducible, “just trust…

“Ultimately, to figure out what we really need to…

Jon Udell is really embracing Mastodon with his curiosity and programming skills. And everyone is better off for it.

Despite the popular adage about everything on the internet being there forever, every day pages of information and sometimes entire websites are lost to the sands of time. With the imminent shutdown of the DPReview website, nearly 25 years of reviews and specifications of cameras and related content are at risk of vanishing. Also lost…

Archiving the Entirety of DPReview Before It’s Gone

Having DPReview around in the dizzying days of newer cheaper digital cams, and each one claiming superiority was a godsend. Nowhere else were people using sensitometry, resolution charts, and color charts to characterize each one. In a word DPReview was the Consumer Reports for nascent, burgeoning digital photographers. And they were beyond reproach.

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F252961714&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&visual=true&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&color=ff5500

Chugga chugga chugga goes the 12 bar space age (bachelor pad) blues. In the same way a pot of your granny’s soup comes to be more than the sum of its secretive parts, the far-out music bubbles and squelches and fizzes and farts in all the right places, all gnarly, knotted wood Fender fuzz bass […]

Whole Lotta Rossi — Plain Or Pan

Full credit to CogDogBlog for this writing prompt and his attempt to nail ChatGPT with a known quantity (Fluid Dynamics and Volcanology). Cliff Claven on the other hand just like most other attempts at prompting ChatGPT does escape the same level of scrutiny. But that doesn’t make the rejoinder, “…what else are you gonna do with it?!” any less pathetic. Considering the money/effort poured into ChatGPT by OpenAI. They spent millions and all we got was this lousy meme.

https://wp.me/p1mEF-77x

Tony Hirst brief take on the spectrum of cheating, but also how that might be harnessed to measure student performance and mastery. The question isn’t “if” but WHEN are the students going to escalate up to the higher/negative end of the spectrum. Diploma mill, contract cheating, are all very intentional acts. But there’s a long slope before that happens, and so given how broad the slope is, how does one measure learning? Applausee to Tony’s measured and reasonable response to the hub-bub surrounding ChatGPT, OpenAI and all the machine learning thingz.

No end of year review here trying to track-back and account for what it IS I actually DO here. No this is just a pole, a fence post, hammered into the ground. This is the fence line between last year and now. Things happened, some were successful. Others were not (to borrow from Sec. Don Rumsfeld). I know a lot of people who are retiring. I hope to do that too. Not close, not by a long shot. I hope to travel overseas (let’s hope!) and finally declare Covid travel restrictions null and void. That’s my wish for this year. Selfish as it is.

If you’re a long-time Windows user, you’re aware that several processes or features in the operating system are linked to File Explorer. While explorer.exe should be associated with file management only, it’s also associated with other parts of the Windows experience, like the Taskbar, which isn’t exactly a good thing for performance. Microsoft has been…

Microsoft wants to make Windows 11 faster by decoupling features from explorer.exe

---

At work, I have just migrated to Win11 and have noticed all the Windows Explorer weirdness everyone has documented since the release of the OS to the general public. No doubt all of this effort comes years after the run up to Windows95 when Explorer and Internet Explorer were turned into a Frankenstein’s monster hodge-podge of integration into the OS. Now MS is paying off the technical debt of adopt, embrace, extend of http, and browser tech integrated everywhere. Hopefully new bits of the OS will also migrate to the Rust language as well, and MS will become 10x more stable.

Mastodon don’t fail me now! It’s that time, the time where people adopt the next big thing. Just like when I got my first FB account in 2005 and sat around waiting for the big wave to come in (2007) I had 1 half-hearted attempt at a Mastadon account, that I let go fallow. But then my brother joined, and picked a new server instance. So I started over and that was round about 2018. And there that account sat after an initial flurry of activity. But now, NOW things are shaking up again. And it feels like 2007 all over again where all the cool kids start dropping in and waves of people who swore they would never join, start coming in droves. Better late than never. So long Friendster, bye-bye MySpace, too-do-loo FB, sayonora Twitter. Hello Fediverse.

https://www.nfb.ca/film/universe/

This film was so novel in it’s day people freaked out at how good it was. The production values were exemplary. No crappy animations, or amateurish attempts at lighting. No. This was space as rendered by Norman McLaren’s National Film Board. And that narration, the voice,… that gentle whispery voice of Canadian stage actor Douglas Rain.

This movie impressed NASA so much back in 1960 they bought a bunch of copies to keep on hand and distribute to people, even before JFK was elected, much less before he announced the Moon Program. It as THAT good. But guess who else noticed it? A young film maker named Stanley Kubrick. Look at ever frame. Pause, rewind and watch it again. Does it remind you of something? And that narrator,… Does that voice ring a bell? Well Kubrick took one look at this film and wrote down the names of all 3 guys who did the Special Effects and hired them (along with a young Douglas Trumbull) to make 2001: A Space Odyssey. And the voice actor, was hired to play HAL 9000. When you see this and realize Kubrick was obsessed and wanted to make his own version of this,… and wanted a kind of “open-ended” script from Arthur C. Clarke, he got everything he needed to whip something up. It just took forever to get it perfect. This film came out just 6 days prior to me being born. But it started some 8 years prior to that.