iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

I changed the URL of my blog!

It all started with mattclare.ca/wordpress because that’s the software I chose to use to use back when I wanted to try this blogging thing out in 2004.  Shortly after that I regretted the choice (or lack there of) of the url mattclare.ca/wordpress.  A much better choice would have been mattclare.ca/blog

It took a lot of work to get the pretty URLs working, plus there’s the issue of visitors to my blog and search engines still having the old URLs.  Because of this I was hesitant to change the URL, but today after a lot of research and modelling, I finally switched the URL.  I had been testing redirecting /blog to /wordpress since I re-did the main page of my website, but  today I took the big plunge.

The most important thing was to setup the redirect via the Apache web server I use in a way that preserved my Google ranking.  The trick (according to Google) is to send the 301 header with the redirect.

The “httpd.conf” config line was

RewriteRule /wordpress(.*) /blog$1 [R=301,NC,L]

Please let me know if you see anything that doesn’t work anymore!

Hate Sakai? Do I have a “bumper sticker” for you:

Love Sakai? Amplicate.com has a “bumper sticker” for that too:

I just find the whole idea of a web site that aggregates opinionated tweets and provides bumper stickers about opinions expressed on Twitter to be a novelty.

For those of you who are wondering what a drobo looks like when it’s rebuilding itself.

The drobo allows you to make Moore’s law work for you. The 1 TeraByte drive being replaced cost $20 less than the dead drive being replaced.

If your curious the original drive was a Seagate/Barracuda, the new one is Wester Digital Caviar Green.

Brock University’s documentation for Isaak, Brock University’s Sakai-Based Learning Management System (LMS), is maintained within a wiki at kumu.brocku.ca/sakai. This wiki is intended to be a practical, readable, guide that is aware of the context that instructors use Sakai/Isaak for teaching at Brock University.

What follows I had actually hoped to present on this at the last Sakai Conference. Brock University is not a member of the Sakai Foundation, but had intended to become one, as such the ambiguity made it hard to register.

Brock University offers only a few on-line or distance courses and as such Brock’s LMS functions primarily as an additional channel of communication; content distribution; and community for otherwise face-to-face courses based at one of the two physical campuses. This amounts to slightly more than a thousand courses with faculty responsible for their own course spaces with complete control over it. The responsibility for assisting instructors in their development of on-line course content falls upon myself and the other important members of the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies (CTLET) at Brock University.

The CTLET strives to offer a high level of support through: one-on-one consultations, workshops, E-Mail dialogues and phone-based support, but one thing is certain; every instructor cannot expect that when they need help with Sakai/Isaak that they can pickup the phone and get someone immediately. If the answer to every question about Sakai/Isaak could only be found at the other end of a telephone the ability to distribute critical information would be severely limited and it would represent a considerable bottleneck.

Personal one-on-one help is important and very effective, but it is also resource intensive to deliver. University technical and pedagogical support staff work conventional business hours, however, instructors need not work from their office nor work conventional business hours. These are schedules and locations that do not always compliment each other.
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Apparently in the new version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, there is an update to the command line tool ‘top’. Now it not only displays CPU, memory and disk I/O information it also has network I/O. There might be hundreds of new features! My count so far 1 * 3 (exchange support) and this….