Solaris administration panic!

Argh! The problem with running a server for students' use when you're an 'amateur' sysadmin is that occasionally things will go wrong ... Today a problem with account permissions and orphaned uid's meant a selection of my students suddenly were denied their home directories, dumped into the root and saw everything! Fortunately they were the good students and didn't go hacking about through the file systems <shudder> but reported it ... 3 h. later and 5 years of ad-hoc mismanagement by 2 separate, amateurs is undone and the permissions are 'sensible' again. It was a nervous time! (But nothing confidential was on the server, just my lecture notes and research data.)

"At" symbol added to Morse Code

<grin> 160 years in the making, morse code can now describe a bit more of valid email address syntax: SYMBOL ADDED TO MORSE CODE 02/17/04 (spotted on www.dmxzone.com)

Annoying

A student I'm offering a chance to do some extra credit work to increase his failing grade to a marginal fail/bare pass (why I let myself be persuaded I don't know!) phoned 20 minutes after his supposed appointment time to say he'd just crashed his new BMW but was otherwise uninjured (emotional scars!) So, am I more annoyed because he missed the appointment or that a supposedly "impoverished student" has a BMW to crash? You decide...

18Feb Update: He turned up today with a piece of work he was adamant was his own but could not explain even the simplest thing about and had failed to validate his XHTML -- they start that in year 1 and I spent 11 weeks in their year 2 giving them weekly exercises where validation was necessary! The result: He was wasting my time, had not put in the effort, could not demonstrate progress towards any learning outcomes from the work so his grade remains a fail => Resit time! Moral: If given a second chance, don't throw it away!

The oddest thing for me was his statement Oh but I can't possibly make a summer resit as my sister is getting married abroad ... I don't know how it is with you lot but in my culture that's a really busy time. Is that a racial slur? Fun fun fun...

Max Design - Definition lists - misused or misunderstood?

Neglected HTML tags: The Definition List <dl>, <dt>, <dd> discussed by Russ Weakley Max Design - Definition lists - misused or misunderstood?

So today I gave out my the specification for a group project to my Databases and the Web class (lecture 3) and discussed a web database design technique that I wanted them to follow in the project. Lo! and behold! my lack of surprise when a dozen or-so (out of 50) left at the "5 minutes I'm exhausted and so are you" mid-lecture break. I thought I was presenting a vaguely interesting workthrough example but obviously that's not enough! I even noticed the student who spoke to me after lecture 2 sneaking out and she'd said she was finding everything difficult -- what kind of extra help will she expect in the future?! Blimey...

Hmmm that reminds me though: When she spoke to me (started with a bad question: Can you help? None of it makes sense.) I said: Read the slides, work out what you still don't understand and bring me a list of question. She never got back to me! Quelle surprise... What students get out of module is often related to what they put in: GIGO!

Feedback from standardised "module questionnaires" is often useless (so many students draw pretty patterns on their MCQ grids!) apart from the written comments section that I often enjoy reading. The dominant theme from WebTech last term seemed to be "It's too hard with too much work!" Well excuse me for having high standards!! It always amuses me to read comments like that and then see the same student ticking the "1-3 hours a week spent on the module" box or (funnier!) the "Found this module no harder than my other modules" or (funniest!) "I attended over 80% of the lectures" -- the average attendance is below 2/3 so it's a bit unlikely! However if you're reading this and genuinely found it hard work then ... good! I happen to think that there is an ideal workload that is often more than you/I/the student feels comfortable working at ... it's the balance that matters and I aim to make the workload challenging but not (hopefully) impossible. Not everyone is motivated by high expectations but as "they" say ;-) "You can't please everyone all the time"! (So a note for next year: The high workload stays!)

Now this is way cool <grin> -- Orson Scott Card's book "Ender's Game" (definitely on my list of books I'd pay to replace) and Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" (the book is better than the film -- trust me!) are both on the US Marine's reading list! (Thanks to Jen for the entertaining link.)

Beginning HTML pedagogically

Jill presents a lovely example of creative students using a creative medium and being inspired by their lecturer. If only our students were (a) creative and (b) could be inspired -- large groups, students disengaged from the beginning and other excuses (!) tend to doom us to failure in this regard (weeding out the wastrels needs doing quicker!) This year's beginning HTML class has over 150 students enrolled and last week's lab sessions had less than 25% attendance :-(

Mozilla Firefox

For various reasons my favourite browser (Mozilla Firebird) has been rebranded as Mozilla Firefox, accompanied by a 'new' release <grin>

The power of the human brain...

The pweor of the hmuan mnid

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch codnutced at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are tpyed, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit oedrer. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

That looks amazingly similar to some communiqués I get from students (in a hurry? not paying attention? dyslexic?) so it's a good job we do have the power to interpret information beyond strict ordering of letters <grin>

Hmmm ... more applications for SVG: Mapping and Visualization Resources :: hebig.org/blog. I've a 3^rd year project students looking at this kind of stuff but I'd not thought of GIS before -- cool!

Andy Budd::Blogography: The Business Case for Web Accessibility

Nice exposition of The Business Case for Web Accessibility (& a relatively local person too!) It's more and more important as we attempt to further widen participation.

Using Lovelock's "Daisyworld" metaphor to represent temperature: dealmeida.net : A garden of cellular automata. Now that's meteorological-geekyness <grin>