Author: grabe

I have spent the last two days attempting to backup this server. Two days of my life! Things should not be this complicated, but security comes at a price. I have had very good luck throughout my career with technology, but bad luck catches up with everyone from time to time (recent problem).

Two situations cause me problems.
1) I purchase a lot of software and upgrades that I download. I tend to get excited about any new toy and if it works I forget to make a backup of the download. If I have a disk problem, there is no box on my shelf with the CD I need to reinstall.
2) I am now using software that is beyond my level of technical understanding. The MySQL database supporting this blog is a good example. I can write scripts to query a database, but I am not certain I even know where the data in the database is stored.

My solution is to backup the entire hard drive. I purchased a 160 Gigabyte LaCie drive for $160. One dollar for a gigabyte of storage! Back in the old days I purchased a box of 10 Elephant brand 5.25″ floppies for $25 and felt I had received a bargain. Each would hold approx 360 K.

Anyway, the idea was to back up the 5 gigabytes on this server on the new external hard drive. Should be simple. It takes several hours to transfer 5 gigs using the free software that came with the drive. I also figured out I had to log in as “root” or the copy program would ask me to certify that some system files could be copied. After a couple of hours of playing around, the drive crashed and hence the need for a second day.

MacMall was great about sending me a new drive and when I return the one that no longer works for not charging me twice. However, the salesman offered my a two year warranty for $40. Cindy says I have this very annoying habit of being very logical and having to discuss the logic of different situations with people who really are not interested. It took me about 15 minutes to explain to the salesperson that a $40 guarantee on a $160 product was stupid. What I could not afford to lose was the potentially hundreds of hours of labor it took to create the content stored on the drive. A new drive would be of limited value should the first drive crash because the costly component would be gone. Given this reality, I explained to the salesperson that it did not instill confidence to offer a guarantee that was such a high percentage of the product cost under such circumstances. Insurance rates are based on the frequency of bad events and it appeared the company either expected many bad events or was trying to make too much money. I could have just said “No thanks”, but what fun would that have been.

He was a nice guy and I hope was paid by the hour. Perhaps someone was actually monitoring my call as they claim is possible and was impressed with the employee’s tolerance.

Four times in the past few days I have received the following message:

You are not authorized to send mail to the DIV28 list
from your mark_grabe@UND.NODAK.EDU account. You might be authorized to send to the list from another of your accounts, or perhaps when using another mail
program which generates slightly different addresses, but LISTSERV has no way to associate this other account or address with yours. If you need assistance or if
you have any question regarding the policy of the DIV28 list, please contact
the list owners: DIV28-request@LISTS.APA.ORG.

Following this automated message was an attached Cool_MP3.zip file.

I am a member of the American Psychological Association, but not DIV 28. This is the reason the message “from me” was rejected. I had to ask around to find out what DIV 28 was. It turns out it is the group of psychologists interested in psychopharmacology (I am not certain I know how to spell this).

This situation is a good example of what is now the most common e-mail virus technique – the virus operates from the computer of a third party, takes two names from that computer’s address book, and sends some message and a virus from one name from the list to the other. If one of he addresses is a listserv, it appears the virus may be sent to the listserv.

It is good listservs have protection against participation by nonmembers. I wonder how many nonmembers are attempting to crash the psychopharmacology listserv? I bet “spoofed email” is a more common problem.

Those who employ automated reply procedures should adjust these procedures to current circumstances. A smart modification would be to not forward any attachments. Division 28 of APA ends up sending me “back” a virus I did not send them in the first place.

One nice thing about a Mac – you see the file extension. Would you open a Music_MP3.zip file from the American Psychological Association?

The e-rate has received a great deal of negative publicity because of institutional fraud and improper commercial practices associated with e-Rate resources. Critic of the e-Rate program have seized upon these improprities to argue against the program. In attempting to defend itself, the FCC is oganizing a conference to showcase some of the positive accomplishments of the program – see eSchool News description.

I am intrigued by the Open Source movement. The idea that programmers would create high quality software and give it away because they feel it is the right thing to do is very interesting. See previous post regarding Open Office.

A similar idea is surfacing regarding course experiences. The idea is that prestigous institutions will give away courses. Exactly what this means and what such resources will look like has yet to fully emerge. Will this effort result in “learning objects” that are “static” information resource (in the sense that lectures are an information source like a book) or will this be more inclusive and involve interactive experiences (scored activities, simulations)? Will the evaluation be built in and whose standards would apply?

You can experiment right now. Explore MIT OpenCourseWare. My strategy for evaluating such resources is to try to use them myself – it is not enough to read what someone else has to say or to glance through the resource. My personal experiment is based on the statistics course from Carnegie Mellon. Statistics is a content area for which my academic training provides enough expertise that I can move quickly and also compare my personal experiences with courses at my institution. I have only a couple of hours invested at this point and it would be inappropriate to generalize in any way – I do encourage others to form their own personal opinions in this way.

Take the time to examine the Carnegie Mellon research agenda which can be accessed using a link on the home page.

The Seattle Times ran a recent article on blogs and reports that Bill Gates may start his own blog. I have read other Gates works “The Road Ahead”, “Business @ the speed of thought” and he (with co-authors) does have some interesting things to say.

Gates Web page

The Center for Science Education offers an online manual (PDF) for educators looking for CD and Internet science resources. Educators are provided with thirteen key questionbs to use as a guide.