Dr. Chucks Blog

I spent this week working on connecting the Chisimba framework to IMS SimpleLTI as the first real producer of IMS LTI. With help from Paul Scott and Charl van Niekerk – I made good progress. I have working prototype code showing Chismiba tools working in both Sakai and Moodle. Screen shots when my connectivity is better.
I will continue to evolve the code in the Chisimba SVN over the next few months to make it production ready – that will probably wait for Summer break – as teaching once again takes over my spare time.
Tomorrow I visit Stephen Marquard, David Horowitz, Caly Fenlason, and Anthony with at the University of Capetown to talk about Cloud Social and Sakai 3. Afterwards there will be pubbing at which I will be dropped off at the airport for the ultimate red-eye.
I leave Captetwn at 12:30 AM arriving a Amsterdam at about 9AM and then leaving for the US after a long layover and getting home about 9PM and 7 timezones later.

I have had free hosting from 1and1.com since 2003 based on a special deal they sent out through IEEE Computer Magazine called the “1&1 Professional Linux” offer. It was cool – 100% free, shell access, – all in all a lot of fun – it has allowed me to do lots of cool things (including this very blog) for the past six years.
Recently I noticed file uploads were failing. So I dug into it a bit and realized I had hit my disk Quota! My free quota was 500MB. So I guess it was time to get off the free thing and pay for my hosting (I already pay over $1200 per year to 1and1 for domain names – another $60.00 for hosting is barely noticeable).
So I was looking at the limits of the $5.00 per month account – the storage is 120GB and the transfer was 1200GB. If I paid $10.00 per month the storage went up to 250GB and the transfer went up to 2500GB per month.
I started looking at my monthly transfer for my current dr-chuck.com – my monthly transfer was 2700MB out of 5000MB. This kind of concerned me because my new account only had 2500GB per month and I was *already* at 2700MB per month! I figured that while I could easily afford the $10.00 for hosting, I really was uncomfortable paying for bandwidth. I get hit a lot by search engines – and I just did not want to be nailed with a $100.00 bill when my bandwidth limit was exceeded – and it was not even my fault!
I went back and forth – how could the free account from 2003 give me 5000MB transfer per month and the pay account from 2009 reduce that to 1200GB transfer per month! It seemed like my free account was just too good to be true with its awesome 5000MB per month transfer – perhaps this was a trick to get us off those free accounts and stick us with bandwidth bills! What is up with that! Good thing I caught these folks before I mistakenly upgraded!
It took about 20 minutes of going between screens at my ISP before I realized my mistaken logic – and went ahead and ordered the upgrade. Perhaps you can find the flaw is my thought process in less than 20 minutes :).

I got this message on my iPhone so I read it sequentially I could tell right away that it was a call-for-papers spam message but the first paragraph grabbed my attention.

Subject: Invitation to a Symposium in Peer Reviewing
Only 8% members of the Scientific Research Society agreed that “peer review works well as it is.” (Chubin and Hackett, 1990; p.192). Horrobin concludes that peer review “is a non-validated charade whose processes generate results little better than does chance.” (Horrobin, 2001). This has been statistically proven and reported by an increasing number of journal editors. Since a growing number of studies conclude that peer review is flawed and ineffective as it is being implemented, why not apply scientific and engineering research and methods to the peer review process?

This sounds sweet – I am pretty critical of the notion of “peer-review” – I will blather on about the subject for a long time – particularly after a long day and a few beers at the pub. This was the perfect tease for me – I was hooked – I kept reading while pumping my gas as the snow was falling around me. I also was thinking – this is Orlando Florida – could be a family trip combined with business. Hmmm. Lets see how this works…

So I looked further and kept reading as the gas tank filled. But I stopped when I got to this bit:

All Submitted papers will be reviewed using a double-blind (at least three reviewers), non-blind, and participative peer review.

Hmmm – somehow this does not make sense – why not choose papers randomly? Since random is better than peer review according to the above references.

This reminds me of the feeling over the years watching endless bad PowerPoint presentations describing how PowerPoint is the *worst possible* approach to teaching and learning. Somehow irony hits me differently than others I guess. Ah well – I thought the call for papers was uproariously funny while pumping gas in the snow.

I started getting this messaage

Sending        wiscrowd/mod/freerider/templates/index.htm
Transmitting file data .svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: Base checksum mismatch on '/trunk/contrib/drchuck/wiscrowd/mod/freerider/templates/index.htm':
expected:  1c2fe4a8f013f8af2729280d89567095
actual:  2ea55328bc430c0f6e738303e4393f3b
svn: Your commit message was left in a temporary file:
svn:    '/Users/csev/dev/cloudcollab/contrib/drchuck/svn-commit.4.tmp'

The solution was to make a copy of the file, delete the file from svn and then re-add it.

This loses history – but is quick and dirty when you are in a hurry.