This summer, Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) will be replacing Blackboard and e-College with Desire2Learn (D2L) making it the lone commercial learning management system (LMS) across its campuses [1, 2, 3]. As a college educator and techie, I’m increasingly reliant on my school’s LMS to communicate with students and supplement learning. I also know how much [...]

I recently got an Asus EEE 1005ha PC to tide me over until I get my Dell laptop fixed (bad Nvidia chip). I’m digging Windows 7, and the long battery life of the netbook. However, I can really feel it lag when I have a couple of programs open (or even multiple browser tabs). So [...]

There’s an interesting article up on Ars Technica on how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has the potential to infringe on free speech. The idea of legal versus illegal in the information age is interesting because information is a type of speech. The Internet is based on the free exchange of ideas and knowledge – blogs, [...]

Happy New Year everyone. 2009 saw me move from Movable Type to WordPress. So, one of my resolutions for 2010 is to keep up with my blog and site as a whole. I had hinted in a previous post that the end of Net Neutrality would mean spats between content providers and cable companies. For actual examples [...]

I upgraded to Karmic Koala recently, and I’m digging how fast it is. It also has a bunch of nifty backgrounds (which you see here to the left in my screen shot). I´m not digging Empathy though. I’ll probably install Pidgin and make that my default chat program when I have time. In the image [...]

The BBC has a decent and short article on the growth of Pirate Parties in Europe (noting that the German Pirate Party has gained the support of 13% of first-time male voters). The latest news is that Pirate Party is getting a second seat in the European thanks to the signing of the Lisbon Treaty. [...]

Ars Technica has a good editorial up on Network Neutrality. It brings up the position of Holman Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal, which argues that online companies are free riding off telecom companies, while making the Internet appear ‘free’. The Huffington Post has criticized this and other WSJ articles on Net Neutrality, raising questions about the paper’s [...]

My thoughts for this post originally came a few years ago, while watching TechTV. There was a discussion on there about new uses for CAPTCHAs beyond anti-spam security.  What CAPTCHAs are, are tests used in websites and other types of computing to ensure that responses come from a human and not a computer. The most [...]

An update of a post from earlier in the summer on the Swedish Pirate Party getting into the EU. It looks like Pirate Parties have been springing up all over Europe, and in some cases politicians are defecting from other parties to it. The emergence of the Pirate Party in the UK has gotten a [...]

Things I’m looking forward to in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), which comes out in October. – Fast boot times – New boot loader – Firefox 3.5 and OpenOffice 3.1 – UbuntuOne integration – Empathy over Pidgin As I eagerly wait for the next Ubuntu release, I figured that I might as well post my current [...]