Inline Comments

Stellar file extensions

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 15:37:00 EST

Craig Counterman sent around a little interesting statistic. Here are the top ten most popular file extensions for files uploaded to Stellar (included the files turned in as homework).

97106 pdf
38045 doc
23526 zip
14297 m
12914 jpg
12615 ppt
9520 gif
8910 htm or html
7880 mp3
4910 xls

Nice to see that PDFs trump word documents so soundly. The quantity of matlab files is also interesting.

Yet Another Edtech Image Project

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 15:13:00 EST

There is a microsoft-funded project at MIT called XMAS: Cross-Media Annotation System. It appears to be focussed on video a bit more than still images. There is a public talk on XMAS on 2/24 at 1:00 in MIT Room 1-375.

Visiting a real live class

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 15:11:00 EST

I did something we Ed tech developers and designers probably don't do enough and sat in on a class. The class was 4.602 Modern Art & Mass Culture and I plan to sit in a few times during the semester, and hopefully meet with the professor and TAs outside of class to see how they prepare for class. A survey for the students might also be useful, to see what they find useful when using images in learning. Here's what I learned from the first class.

The instructor came in with two carousels of slides, which she handed to an AV technician assigned to this class. During the lecture she operated the switched the slides with a wireless remote control with separate buttons for the two projectors.

The slide experience isn't so perfect in terms of image quality

In the past I've been told that one of our big challenges was equalling the hight quality of a slide image compared to a digital image. But these images were often crooked, dusty, faded or poorly focussed. One even had a stray label blocking nearly a third of the image. The quality of a medium resolution image (even 640x800) on a digital projector easily matches these images.

Similarly there were a few transition glitches, one of the projectors wouldn't go backwards, only forwards, and she had yell loud for the AV tech to hear her over the projector fans. There is much to improve on here.

The use of a remote was important in the performance

Making the instructors stand behind a podium while delivering the slideshow lecture would be a step backwards. How can we optimize stellar images to work with remote controls?

AV has a role - they ran the projection booth at the back of the room.

Are they still there with digital projectors? We have not included AV in our use cases. Do they need training? Are they on hand to set up digital projectors? Can they offer remotes that work wirelessly with instructor laptops or classroom PCs?

There is a slide list used as a handout

The instructor passed around a slide list for students to consult during and after the slide show. the list had the date and class title on top. The listings has the Artist, Image title, and date (e.g. Andy Warhol, Gold Marilyn, 1962). Can we generate these handouts? Can we make them better by including thumbnails or additional metadata?

There are many times when an image stays on one side while the image on the other side advances a few times

How do we enable this technique when organizing slideshows?

The instructor said that some of the images from the slideshow will be available for review on the website.

Do we need to have slideshows with more images than are seen by students? Or is this just because not all of the slides are currently available digitally?

Valid RSS

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 15:48:00 EST

I got a little worried after reading about the dangers of invalid RSS, sure enough the main feed on this blog is invalid. Well, between you and me I am really sick of using Blosxom for blogging anyway, and I may need to change a few things around here.

The good news is that linkwalla's RSS validates beautifully. There were some around encoding URLS, but that's all in the past.

del.icio.us wonkiness

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 12:32:00 EST

cogdogblog on the wonkiness of del.icio.us. It's driving me crazy, too. Especially since I use the delicious API in linkwalla.

At the social computing session at Sakai Austin, there were many calls to just use del.icio.us and flickr and google rather than developing open source software we can run on our campuses. These problems with del.icio.us really highlight to me some of the risk in deciding to just rely on some companies free services for classroom education. Classes run on a tight schedule, and sudden shift in the availablity of a service can really throw things off.

Linkwalla, Ajax edition

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 16:54:00 EST

I have release Linkwalla 0.8.5. This version adds some Ajax to linkwalla, so you can browse through the archives on the linkwalla home page without ever leaving the homepage. Despite introducing the giant buzzword Ajax to linkwalla, it isn't a major change in functionality, it just makes the UI a little more fun and pleasing.

The more I do the bigger the list of things i'd like to gets.

My Linkwalla todo list

Major

Create a Unique URL for each link entry (a permalink for your link + description)
Add, edit and delete inline
An installation script gives the XML files the right permission, prompts for linkwalla and delicious passwords, etc.
Search for links
Tagging
Create a linkwalla website

Minor

Have an error message appear if the XML file is not writeable. currently it's just that nothing happens.
Create an if statement so that if there is no delicious username entered, the option for delicios links isn't there
Make the layoout of the links less of a table and more like blog entries
Search through files to prune unused CSS classes and IDs

Openness by department at MIT

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:46:00 EST

This semester is the first semester when everyone who requested a Stellar class website had to choose whether to limit access to the students in their course, or let anyone at MIT or the world to look at the site.

I did a little look at the classes requested so far to see how many people are picking a closed access site vs. an open site. What's interesting is that numbers really vary based on the department. Here is a random sampling of departments:

Department	Closed	Open
Chemical Engineering	100%	0%
Political Science	89%	11%
Urban Studies	67%	33%
Civil & Env. Eng.	36%	64%
Electrical Eng. & Computer Science	35%	65%
Brain & Cog. Science	5%	95%
Chemistry	5%	95%

In general the classes that are in the minority camp (e.g. BCS classes that are closed or PoliSci classes that are open) are likely to be cross-listed courses. So it appears that either the role of departmental cultures or the role of influential administrators who set up course for many people skew a departments' bias. It's great to have this information on hand the next time a student group approaches us requesting more open access, because we can now tell them which departments to lobby.

Scary Maven message

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 11:43:00 EST

I'm making changes to the Stellar Images JSP pages, and using Maven for the first time to install my changes on our dev server. While watching all of the maven messages scroll by this one caught my eye:

[INFO] Exploding webapp...

Yikes! That doesn't sound good. Sure enough I did explode the application, too. Instead of boom it sounded like HTTP Status 500.

Hampshire College OCW

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 09:36:00 EST

I just learend about Hampshire College OCW. It's extremely cool that this is a student-led initiative, and i hope they can take it far.

I left a big picture comment on their weblog.

I'm glad to read your thought on how OCW interacts with a course management system. One of our priorities at MIT is improving the flow of course content from our internal course management system (a mashup of a homegrown system called Stellar and Sakai) to OCW. Another angle to consider in the long term is improving the flow in the other direction. How can an instructor teaching a course (say an intro to Victorian literature) take advantage of the materials that are in their local OCW? And what about that great Robert Louis Stevenson module in the Tufts OCW, how can they bring that in to their course?

New javascript goodness

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 15:53:00 EST

In order to enable the use of more client-side scripting, and eventually some Ajax interactions, I added the Prototype javascript framework to Stellar. I used it to stream line a new validation trick in Stellar 1.7.1.

In Stellar 1.7 we changed the access denied page, so that if the person seeing the Access denied page is a member of the MIT communuity, they can send an email to the instructors asking to be added to the class list. This reduced the number of students calling the help desk to report they were unfairly excluded from a class. Unfortunately it increased the number of faculyty complaining about students asking for access to the class website. This was especially true for big classes, with lots of TAs and instructors, where the faculty delegate jobs like keeping track of the class list to their assistants.

We now allow instructors to indicate who in the class staff should receive access requests from the students. At least one person must be designated, more than one is also fine. We couldn't use a radio button, because that would allow selecting more than one, and by using check boxes we allowed people to emove everyone. So I wrote a java script that notices when the penultimate check box has been checked and disables the last check box, adding a little expanatory note. When more than one check box is checked, all of the check boxes are enabled and the note goes away.

Prototype.js made it much easiers, especially being able to collect all the check boxes with the same 'class' in an array. I'm looking forward to doing fancier things with it in the future, espcecially in Stellar images.

Stellar statistics

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 14:17:00 EST

Check out the new Stellar statistics page.

Some statistics are current (like number of uses, the % of undergraduate vs. graduate classes, etc) some will be updated once per semester (e.g. the mime types and numbers of documents per class). We will add in the statistics from Fall 2005 soon.

PHP Markdown

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 19:45:00 EST

I offer my unadulterated praise to PHP Markdown. Markdown is a way of writing that can be converted to HTML. I use the BBEdit Markdown Plugin from Daring Fireballto write XHTML (including these blog posts) and it saves loads and loads of time.

I decided to add the ability to use markdown to linkwalla, to make it easy to add HTML to the link descriptions. I was able to get every thing working in about 20 minutes, I downloaded PHP Markdown and edited one file in linkwalla. Suddenly linkwalla is feeling much richer. That's some nice modularity right there.

So the when the next update of linkwalla come out, and that will be real soon, you'll be able to use Markdown. The only downside is the 40k markdown.php file is about the same size as all the rest of linkwalla combined, so I'll have doubled the download size of linkwalla. But sub 100k is still pretty lightweight.

Linkwalla 0.7 is live

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 11:36:00 EST

A new version of linkwalla is available for download this morning. This is the first release since August.

What is linkwalla? Linkwalla is way to share interesting web pages you see, or just to keep track of them for yourself. It's sort of a mini-blog for links. You generate an RSS feed of the links you've saved, that includes the link and a short description. It's also compatible with del.icio.us, so you can save your links to del.icio.us at the same time as adding them to your site.

What's new in linkwalla 0.7? Monthly archives are now created. Previous versions of linkwalla saved your links in one big list. This works for a while, but at time goes on the list gets unwieldy. With monthly archives the front page shows your last 20 links, and there links to monthly archives, so I can see all of the links I added in September, for example, on one page.

The other reason for moving to monthly archives, is that the links are saved in monthly XML files, instead of one big honking XML file. This means linkwalla won't slow down over time. I hadn't experienced any slowness in 0.7, but I knew that eventually as added hundreds of links, the file would slow down.

One downside to changing the way files are saved is that this release is not backwards compatible with linkwalla 0.6. I guess that's why it's not a 1.0 release yet. However converting the old linkwalla.xml file into monthly archives is pretty easy - it took me about 5 minutes.

It's been great using PHP again, I love being able to figure out how this stuff works.

Small college liberal arts students speak out on Tech

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:42:00 EST

As an alumni I have been participating in an experimental class at Earlham College called "Social Impact of computer technology." The class members blogged their way through the class, with their blog entries the primary means of being assessed. Then at the end of class each of the 13 students recorded their thoughts on class and the technologies they'd learned about.

I was pretty interested to hear a small sample of undergrads had to say on these topics.

Blogging: Mixed reviews. Students didn't like the tendency for rants and impolite comments, and many felt exposed by putting their work out for the whole world to see. On the other hand they said it was easy, and many liked getting feedback via comments. Trackback technology was universally held in contempt. It did seem that people thought blogging was the most interesting part of the class.
Moodle: Pretty poor review. Apparently some bug around submitting homework seemed to have soured the class on Moodle. People did seem to enjoy at as a shared reference work.
Social software: The only thing anyone had to say about social software was about del.icio.us. del.icio.us seemed to be new to everyone in the class, and nearly all liked it a lot and planned to continue using it. Flickr, et.al. didn't even rate a mention.
Podcasting: Sounds like the general consensus is that it's interesting but hard and probably not worth the effort. Many people said podcasting is a good way find grammar errors in your writing, so I guess their assignment was to read their paper out-loud and record it as a podcast.

I decided not to link to the studnet blogs, because I'm not sure how long they will be around and reading some of those comments, I'm not sure the students would all welcome me doing that.

The Stellar News Site

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 16:01:00 EST

I just updated the Stellar homepage so that the latest Stellar news article is linked as the 'spotlight.' This is good because we've been pretty slow about replacing those spotlight, while our communications person, Margaret Meehan, posts news and information about Stellar at least once a week.

User controlled design

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 11:52:00 EST

This note is reposted from an email I sent to the Sakai UI discussion group

Someone at MIT asked me to provide more information about what complications I see with the plan "to provide maximum flexibility for institutions who were keen to implement their own look & feel on the interface." This was a follow up to the recent "Do you support moving toward a flexible or adaptable UI approach in Sakai?" thread on the Sakai design mailing lists.

Unless I'm misunderstanding the plan from Toronto is not "to provide maximum flexibility for institutions who were keen to implement their own look & feel on the interface." It is to provide maximum flexibility for INDIVIDUAL USERS to implement their own look & feel on the interface.

I think everyone wants to make the UI flexible for institutions, there's no debate there.

Here are some issues with asking users to set their own interface preferences:

Help desk support

If every users' interface is different, it is much harder for the help desk staff to tell user how to do something, because they have no way of knowing what the user is seeing. Even if they if can see what the user is seeing it means they help desk staff need to know all of the possible configurations of any given tool.

Added complexity to the UI

A lot of UI design is centered around understanding user goals and making it easy to accomplish those goals with as little interference as possible. Adding additional forms that let users tweak the interface is more interference.

Easy to make bad choices

We also don't want to make it easy for people to shoot themselves in the foot. People messing around with the settings might think setting their link style to pink italics is fun for now, but it can cause them to not see links they need to work with in the future. People really do make some bad choices in this area, you can be a smart and talented person and not know a thing about UI design.

Not a great track record

Someone on the list pointed out (I lost the email unfortunately) that many portals have tried this, and found that users don't tend to be all that interested in personalizing the UI. So a lot of effort towards this might be misdirected when there are so many features more important to teaching and learning.

Let browsers do it

Many browsers have the power to overrule website CSS styles. So users who are keenly interested always having white text on a black background can use this method already - we just need to make sure Sakai uses web standards behaves well with supported browsers.

It may break the goal of loosely connected modular tools

It may well make tool development in Sakai closely tied to a particular technology (JSF or RSF or JSTL or whatever). This will make much harder to bring tools that were not explicitly designed as a part of Sakai into Sakai. By forcing all developers to use a set of shared JSF tags you've closed Sakai to most 3rd party application, and all applications written in PHP, Ruby, etc. New Sakai developers will have to learn an obscure method of coding in order to contribute a Sakai tool. This could really impact the future prospects for Sakai.

The accessibility argument

The strongest argument for this approach is that is supports accessibility, but there may be better ways to make accessibility work.

In addition browser feature, operating systems now have features for magnifying screens or forcing high contrast.
Make this explicitly a mater of accessibility by offering simple presets in the user preferences that do things like increase font size or increase contrast.
Best of all do rigorous accessibility testing to ensure that the UI works for all users right out of the box.

Sorry for the long note! I was afraid I hadn't written clearly before, and I wanted to break it down a little. I also want to be clear that the work demoed by Toronto is really strong, especially in the area of working with multimedia in the LMS. I think there is an important place for it in the content authoring space.

Award nomination

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 12:10:00 EST

This here website, inline comments, is a finalist for a "Best designed/most beautiful edublog" award. And anyone can go vote. Vote now! You don't need to vote in all categories.

I describe my blog as �notes about my work� and �the life support system for an RSS feed.� The notes get automatically uploaded my a script on my laptop, allowing me to keep it fresh with little distraction from my other work. The aesthetic of the site aims to make the most of sites minimal mission. I think it could use some work of course, especially the archive pages, but I'm having fun working with the fairly extreme constraints of blogging this way.

Yahoo del.icio.us

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 20:40:00 EST

Not satisfied with Flickr, Yahoo purchased del.icio.us, and now own the majority of the tags on the web. Good for del.icio.us and good for Yahoo really, they seem to be really on top of this Web 2.0 thing.

But I can't help feeling weird about it. I mean, at the Sakai Social Software BOF lots of people were talking excitedly about mixing flickr, delicious, and google into their course websites. I think it's worth doing, but somehow i don't like the idea of having those two companies hold all of that data for us, using it all as the fertilizer for ad farming.

Why are all the big Web 2.0 hits owned by only 2 companies?

Sakai Austin Highlights

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 14:12:00 EST

In addition to the vigorous UI discussions I mentioned in my previous post, there were several other highlights to the conference

Social Computing BOF

I presented at this session, and here's the proof.

Hot topics

Back channels (IRC, jokes, comments, google searches being added by students as the presentation goes on)
Is it better to create more functionality in Sakai, or extend Sakai with external (commercial) services like Google, Flickr and del.icio.us?
How do you keep the fun in social software when it is institutionally supported?
Digital divide between students use of this tech and faculty use.

Faculty led pedagogy sessions

In particular Course Management Tools for the Humanities and Wouldn't it be great if.. - Exploring instructional methods using Sakai. I would love to see a conference based entirely around how instructors want to teach, and their ideas about what they would like educational technology to do.

Hearing about other schools' work

I'm thinking in particular of the oddly titled Is Linking Thinking? Web Pedagogies and Tools for Teaching and Learning in which Paul Bergen (Harvard), Tom Lewis (U Wash), and Dirk Herr-Hoyman (U Wisc.) described the homegrown non-Sakai (and non-Java) tools they use to help people teach and learn. It was the most persuasive thing I saw for showing the reasons Sakai should take 'loosely coupled' approach to technology that makes it easy for schools to mix and match in the tools they like with Sakai tools.

Sharing Stellar Images at the Technical Demos

I loved showing off the work we've done to date on Stellar Images and having the chance to talk to so many people from so many schools about it over just 90 minutes. It was absolutely exhausting.

Austin

I just love Austin, in a way I haven't quite defined. This was my third visit, and it just keeps growing on me.

How flexible is too flexible?

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 12:22:00 EST

After the Sakai conference in Austin, the wires are humming with mesages about how to move forward with an overhaul of the Sakai UI. This is great. Part of that discussion has revolved around the ideas that Jutta Teverianus and Anastasia Cheetham presented at "We don't all have to agree:" Flexible UI Design.

"Even if we go no deeper than simple style transformations, one implication of this approach is that we would transition from a style guide to a design guide accompanied by default style sheets or other styling mechanisms. Unlike the style guide the design guide would not make any recommendations regarding the specific presentation of the UI if it is possible to restyle that presentation characteristic. The design guide would require that the tools have a replaceable presentation. The recommendations regarding styling would in effect be communicated through the default styling mechanisms. This would also aid in achieving commitments to accessibility and internationalization."

I've been re-reading the Sakai style guide, and there is very little that relates to appearance or graphic design. The bulk of the style guide is describes common views and the elements used in those views.

An example from page 6.:

3 - Column Header (required)

A meaningful label for information contained in column that displays at the top of each column. Users can change the sort order of columns by clicking the header. When using column headers, indicate the following:

Users can change the sort order

The column that controls the current sort order (bold heading with triangle)

How the column is sorted

There is a parenthetical reference to "bold heading with triangle" but otherwise this entry is about interaction. Anastasia pointed out at the Friday UI BOF that the user might prefer to sort tables using a drop down menu, and hence the style guide was being to strict.

You can go too far with user preferences. Few people will want to go so far as filling out a form that allows them to choose details like what mechanism they use to change their table sort order. Even having the option of making sort order headers italicized rather than bold is a bit obscure. Institutions may make this choice, but they can do that already in the CSS.

As far as user-driven CSS overrides go, I think it's an OK idea if kept fairly minimal. I am concerned that it could add complexity to the UI that most users will not need, and that it creates support difficulty (Help desk: "Click the my workspace link. That may be on the top left, top right, bottom left or bottom right of your screen depending how you set your preferences."). Many browsers offer this functionality already, so building into the application seems odd. If I prefer white text on a black screen won't I want all my websites to look like that, not just Sakai? A browser-based solution seems more suitable for those users. We just need to make sure Sakai's front end coding plays nicely with those browsers, and issue for the accessibility team I think.

We can't make the mistake of thinking that our users will design for us, we need to make choices about what works well based on research and experience.

A couple more questions:

Is this modular functionality? It is a plugin for Sakai that people can take or leave, or is it hardwired in? If we decide this level of configuration is confusing our users, can we turn it off easily?
How much additional work does this approach create for new tool developers. It is already seen as being a fairly complex task to create or adapt a web tool to work with Sakai. Does this make it harder or easier? If was adapting something like JForums to work in Sakai, what would it take to make the presentation layer this flexible?

Sakai Austin: Open Source Portfolio

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 15:41:00 EST

I showed up for the wrong Open Source Portfolio (OSP) presentation . I came because I have little concept for what the tool does. The presenters are talking a lot about what it will do in 2.1. I have no concept of what 2.0 can do, so it's not to enlightening. They are using the metaphor of starting at 30,000 feet and moving down, so hopefully at the end they will show the actual tool and I'll be able to see what it does.

Sakai Austin

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 11:51:00 EST

I'm here at the conference - it's packed as usual about 550 people. Just saw a good talk from Missouri State about how to get departments to move over to using Sakai, by targeting early adopters and focusing on Sakai's ability to work with custom discipline-specific tools.

No hearing about Portland States move to Sakai and OSP.

I'm taking the occasional cameraphone photo while I'm here. You can see all the Sakai Austin photos on Flickr.

Ready for Austin

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 15:48:00 EST

I'm ready for my trip to Austin tomorrow. I pulled to gether a couple of 2x3 Stellar Images posters (pdf-950k) for our technical demo on Thursday.

The gadget bag will be full as usual. I have have been practicing sending my camera phone photos to Flickr with nifty new cell phone.

Boston expects a big snow storm tomorrow so I'm just hoping I get out of the airport.

Sakai Austin

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 10:35:00 EST

Wow, the draft agenda for the 4th Sakai Conference is up and it is packed with interesting sessions. I'm going to help lead a BOF meeting on 'Trends in Social Computing' and we'll have a table at the technical demonstrations to discuss Stellar 2 and Stellar Images.

Jean Foster

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 19:07:00 EST

One of the earliest members of the Stellar team left MIT today. While I was still working on the user interface for the initial release of Stellar, Jean told me we'd be doing usability testing, which I'd only vaguely heard of, and handed me a copy of Jakob Nielsen's book to read. Over the following months (and years) I observed a great number of occasionally excruciating user tests. The design crits I'd had at the Museum School were nothing compared to the horror of watching a stranger sit down and fail to understand how to do add a document with the user interface you'd built.

I've learned a ton from Jean. Those tests changed the course of my career, and even the way I see the world. Thanks, Jean!

Jean Foster is now going to help make websites useful at InContext Design.

Stellar discussion board

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 15:02:00 EST

The current installation of the Stellar discussion board needs to be replaced. It is slow, and seems to be taking a significant performance hit as more and more Stellar courses come on line.

What we have now is an old version of Jive Forums. We identified 3 contenders to replace it, based on their technical compatibility with Stellar.

The newer version of Jive
JForums, which is being adapted to Sakai by Foothills College
A custom Sakai discussion board being developed at Indiana

By comparing the published feature list and screenshots of each product with the feature list for forums that came out of the LPAG meetings and other input, I created a grid to show how each product lined up with our needs

I wound up recommending the tool Indiana is developing. That tool is still under development, with an expected release in December. Indiana is pretty good about being on time, though, so it will probably work for us as a new forum tool for Fall 2006.

By the way of you are JForums or Jive developer or user, and you want to contradict my conclusions, please do! This was a quick study, and there a lot of 'maybes' in my diagram.

Building 9¾

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 14:25:00 EST

When we came into work this morning, we were amused to find that all of our room numbers had been changed to read building 9¾ instead of the usual plain old 9, and our offices had been reassigned, so that my room is now Professor Flitwick's office. Also the old Men's and Women's bathrooms are now marked for "Witches" and "Wizards." I guess some MIT students are pretty enthused about the new Harry Potter movie opening tonight.

MITblogs.com

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 19:43:00 EST

I just noticed that the MIT admissions office has set up a whole bunch of blogs over at a site called MITblogs.com. There's even a ben.mitblogs.com, with no relation to me. This is part of the MIT Admissions website at the highly desirable URL my.mit.edu.

People from outside MIT assume we're all working in the same office as part of some large coordinated strategy, but there are so many web projects, and we techies are so busy with our own, that we're lucky if we know half of what is going on.

Fresh links available

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 21:54:00 EST

I've decided to add a little 'mini-blog' to the footer of this website, provided to you by one of this website's sponsors, linkwalla. Special thanks to Feed2JS

Google print ego surfing

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 13:24:00 EST

I saw a reference on Caveat Lector to ego surfing Google print. I decided to give it a try even though I've written anything scholarly, so I imagine there would be precious little to for anyone to cite. But lo and behold there I am, and three of the four are actually me.