There are still several more sites to go, but I haven’t had any major issues yet. Most of the remaining sites will be easy. The two exceptions will probably be bassplaying.com (since it runs on Drupal) and wheatdesign.com, since it is old, full of cruft, and mostly held together by htaccess redirects. In fact, now would be a good time for spring cleaning, but I want everything up and running on the new servers before I turn out the lights at Dreamhost.

I’ll go into the reasons behind my hosting switch in another post. I just wanted to put this one up to test thing and to alert you to any outages.

Possibly Related Posts:

1. First post from the new host
2. branded
3. working on a massive redesign…

New Features

1. Captures both “Core data” and “Interaction data” (explained below). Version 1 only captured “Core data.”
2. Relational database structure. Version 1 captured everything in one table.
3. Debug mode. Allows you to see the contents of the array pre- and post-submission.

Core data is aggregate data for the entire quiz. It includes values for the user’s overall score, along with the maximum possible score, the minimum possible score, the total time the user spent on the quiz, and whether he or she passed the quiz (based on a pass/fail percentage you define in Captivate’s quiz preferences).

Interaction data is data specific to each question/interaction in the quiz. It includes the user’s answer, the correct answer, the result (i.e. was the user’s answer correct or not), the time spent on that question, the interaction type (e.g. T/F, multiple-choice, etc.), and some other metadata specific to the question.

In order to store all of this in a useful way, I’ve expanded the database a bit. It now has three tables (one for core data, one for interaction data, and one for person data). I’ve expanded the score submission form to include an optional employee ID, but, behind the scenes, I will be using the user-submitted email to uniquely identify the user. This provides a way to connect user data to quiz data without resorting to a login/authentication scheme of some sort.

Here are the steps for setting it up:

1. Create a quiz in Captivate 4.
   (I’ve included a sample project: cp2db_v2_rc3.cp.)
2. Choose Quiz –> Quiz Preferences.
   Under the Reporting category:
   Select the “Enable reporting for this project” checkbox.
   Select the “E-mail” radio button and specify an email address.
   Under “Report to LMS as,” select the “Score” radio button.
   Under “Reporting Level,” select “Interactions and score.”
   Under the Pass or Fail category, set a pass/fail percentage.
   Click the OK button to confirm your preferences.
3. Save and publish your project as a Flash (SWF).  Be sure “Export HTML” is checked in the publish options.  If you save your project as foo.cp, the HTML file will be named foo.htm.
4. Download and unzip the Cp2DB files.
5. Open sendmail_v2.js in your favorite text editor. Select all and copy the entire file to your clipboard.
6. Locate and select the sendMail() function in foo.htm. It should occupy lines 27-42.
   (If you are using the sample project, the code has already been pasted into cp2db_v2_rc3.htm, so you can skip this step.)
7. Use paste to replace the default sendMail() function with the new-and-improved one on your clipboard.
8. Save your changes to foo.htm.
9. Create a MySQL database called cp2db. It will contain three tables: tblcore, tblinteraction, and tblperson. You will find the SQL for creating the tables and fields in db_schemas.sql.
10. Edit insert_v4.php. On line 20, change “localhost,” “username,” and “password” to your MySQL host, username, and password values.
11. Edit the same values in lines 66-68 of display_v4.php.
12. Upload your Captivate oputput files (i.e. foo.htm, foo.swf, and standard.js), insert_v4.php, and display_v4.php to your web server and test your quiz. Once you have submitted some data, you can use display_v4.php to pull it back out.
13. Once you get it up and running, take a look at the code in insert_v4.php and the new sendMail() function. There’s a setting for turning the new debug mode on and off. (You’ll want it on for testing, of course.)
14. Feedback is welcome. Use the comment thread of this post for your bug reports, feature requests, and other feedback.

Known Issues/Limitations

1. For now, Cp2DB only handles the multiple-choice question type. If there’s sufficient interest, I’ll work on adding other interaction types in future releases.
2. As far as I know, it only works with Captivate 4. I haven’t tested it with earlier versions.
3. The script for echoing out the database data is still in its fledgeling stages. A fully-functional back-end remains to be written. I’ll work on that for the next version.

Standard Disclaimer

As before, this code is beta at best. There are no warranties expressed or implied, and you should have someone with better coding chops than me look it over before you put it into production–especially out in the wild. I hope you enjoy it, find it useful, and can leverage it to solve your own problems. But if it blows anything up, that’s on you.

Possibly Related Posts:

1. Adobe Captivate 4: Storing Quiz Scores with PHP/MySQL
2. Adobe Captivate 4 Aggregator Issue

If you have any autodidactic tendencies, happen to be bedridden, are a shut-in or an unapologetic misanthrope, this must be the best of all possible worlds. But even for the more-or-less well adjusted knowledge junkie, this is a real find. We live in a time of plentiful information and infotainment, but a lot of what’s out there for free isn’t really worth your time. There’s a lot of surface, but not much depth. A lot of the content on the web is like an infinite magazine rack. And, just as in the real world, the US Weekly and People-grade fluff occupies more space than the more substantive fare.

At first, you might rightly wonder “what’s their angle?” And, while there’s a try-before-you-buy marketing component, that alone wouldn’t justify the time and expense it takes to capture and render the content, much less the work that goes into organizing and maintaining in some sort of content management system and the bandwidth costs that go along with that. I think you have to chalk it up, at least in good measure, to one of those ideas that’s so old-fashioned it will almost feel corny when I type it: the public good.

The first mission of higher education, after all, is to teach people. It can be easy to lose sight of that, sometimes, with all the bureaucracy and politics that go along with it. Colleges these days are often run a lot like businesses. And, while there’s certainly common ground between the two (you gotta keep the heat on somehow), educational institutions worth their salt have higher aspirations than the bottom line. Teaching at its best aspires to make the world a better place by creating a better informed and more thoughtful public, one student at a time. Educational institutions, at their best, are simply the necessary infrastructure that enables good teaching.

I suspect a lot of institutions who are not yet in this game resist because they don’t see how they can profit from giving things away. But they have little to worry about on that score. Even if you could watch an entire degree programs’ worth of video lectures, there’d still be no transcript to point to and no degree on your wall, unless you pony up for online classes, submit work for evaluation, and pay your tuition. That’s fine, I think. If all you want is the knowledge, it’s there for the taking. If you need a credential to move down a career path, there are more options for that than every before. Either way, I welcome it.

Possibly Related Posts:

1. Untitled
2. On Online Teaching, Part IV
3. Untitled

I read up on every web-based backup plan I could find and tried out several of them on my own machine. Most of the online backup services have a lot of features in common. Many of them offer “unlimited” storage, meaning they’ll mirror everything on your drive (except, generally, system files and application files). But these are generally mirrors, not archives. So, if you delete a local file, it will eventually (generally, after 30 days) be deleted from the backup as well. Most of them run about $50/year if you pay annually. There are some metered services out there, but I prefer a fixed cost, so long as it’s reasonable.

I eliminated Mozy pretty quickly because I read far too many comments about people being unable to restore files they had previously backed up (which is worse, when you think about it, than having no backup at all). I disliked CrashPlan’s GUI, so I pitched it fairly quickly (and, as an added bonus, the uninstaller is like something right out of the 1980s). Apple’s MobleMe iDisk is pretty slick, but as it only allows 20GB of storage, it’s about twice as expensive as the other options.

At first, I was pretty happy with Carbonite. I tested that one out for nearly two weeks and I liked quite a few things about it. The interface is nice (it installs as a system preferences pane with an associated menu bar icon). But there were were a few problems:

• Video files are excluded by default. You have to opt them in one-by-one. I don’t need new maintenance items on my to do list; I need a set-it-and-forget-it solution. This was a big issue for me.
• They pay Rush Limbaugh to pimp their service. That fact alone doesn’t mean its a bad service, but it does mean that of my money would be going in that lying, hate monger’s pockets, and I can’t abide that.
• Connected drives (i.e. USB2 drives and the like) and networked drives are excluded, and there’s no way to opt them in. This isn’t a problem at present, but it will be eventually.

Then I discovered BackBlaze, which seems to give me everything Carbonite did, and more:

• The interface is nice. It installs as a System Preferences pane with an associated menu bar icon.
• Video files are included by default. In fact, all files except operating system files, application files, and temporary files are included by default. You can exclude any file or directory you like. Otherwise, it grabs everything.
• File restoration is accomplished via the BackBlaze web site. You log in, select the files you want to restore, and click go. A few minutes later, you get an email with a link to the zipped version of your files. The directory structure is maintained. This means that, once your files are backed up, you can use BackBlaze to nab a copy of a file from their site to your current location, even if that’s a different machine running a different operating system.
• Connected drives are included. There are a few caveats: they have to be present at least once every thirty days or BackBlaze will think they’re deleted and delete the backups associated with them. Time Machine drives aren’t eligible and neither are networked drives.
• Estimates how long it will take your backup to complete and has a throttle control so you can devote more of your bandwidth to speed up the process.
• Can, for an additional fee, copy your backups (up to 400GB) to a USB2 drive and FedEx them to you. I hope I never need this feature, but it would be nice in an emergency.

BackBlaze, like several of the other online backup services, offers a free fifteen-day trial. That wasn’t long enough to back up my entire hard drive. But it was long enough to back up a wide variety of files, test out a few restores, read a few more reviews, and get familiar with the software settings. It was enough to convince me that $50/year wasn’t too much to pay for some added piece of mind.

I think using online backup as your only backup solution is a profoundly bad idea (but, if that’s all you have, it’s still a lot better than nothing.) USB2 drives and backup software are cheap. They also fail at a fairly high rate. But having a local backup is a good first step, and having a redundant remote backup is extra insurance, since all drives fail eventually.

Possibly Related Posts:

1. Nothing’s Perfect
2. Lessons learned: the iMac lives
3. Untitled

Migration Assistant Weirdness

Before it grows entirely fuzzy, I wanted to note a few things that didn’t go entirely according to plan. One of these was Migration Assistant, the software included with OS X that helps you migrate from one machine to another, or, in cases like mine, from a Time Machine backup. When I got my iMac back home, I walked through the Migration Assistant’s steps, and it started copying things over. It started with my documents, then it transferred my applications, and then it got to a final stage, called “transferring files to support applications.” And that’s where it stayed, claiming, for many hours, that it required less than one minute to complete.

I called Apple Care, and we ended up cancelling the transfer. Logging into the transferred account revealed that the data was transferred, but there were several question mark icons on the Dock, none of which would launch anything (even though they showed names of the apps that should have been there, when hovered). So we logged back into the generic account that the Apple Store created (a passwordless user named “james”), deleted the migrated account, and started Migration Assistant a second time. But, this time, we excluded one category of data, under my user account, labeled “all other data” (or something close to that). In my case, this was 9GB of stuff, including, evidently, some of the mysterious “files to support applications” that were hanging up the Migration Assistant.

This time, the Migration Assistant did its work. And I logged off of “james” and onto my restored account. So far, I’ve had to reinstall two things: my printer software (I have one of those ubiquitous HP all-in-one things), and iWork ‘09 (Pages launched, but it warned me that it was missing files and needed to be reinstalled). I suspect there will be other applications that will need to be reinstalled.

Time Machine Weirdness

A scarier issue, but one so far of no consequence, was that a lot of my old Time Machine backups disappeared last week, before I contacted Apple, after I booted from the system DVD and attempted to restore from a Time Machine backup. What I think happened was that, since Time Machine was still on, my restored system started creating a brand new backup of my system (which was, at this point, still sitting on top of a soon-to-be-dead hard drive). This process never completed. But, in the meantime, Time Machine carved out space for the new backup, dropping off the old ones.

Dropping old backups isn’t a problem in and of itself; that’s part of how Time Machine works. What was disconcerting was that so many dropped off at once, with no warning. In the midst of all this weirdness, seeing something that drastic change on my only backup, put me in a highly anxious state (I feel that Apple Care owes me, at a minimum, a new bottle of Tums). In my case it hasn’t been an issue (fingers still firmly crossed, wood knocked). I just no longer have the ability to roll back to what my box looked like a year ago. The backups that remain go back about three months.

The Road Ahead

Spending a week worrying that you might have hosed your internal hard drive and your backup of the same tells you a lot about what really matters to you. In my case, the one thing I don’t ever want to lose is my iPhoto Library. I’m fairly paranoid when it comes to data. Unlike most people I know, I actually have a backup system. And, it’s fair to say that Time Machine saved me this time. But I want to get even more paranoid. I’m investigating two additional options:

• Buying SuperDuper! and setting it up to create a clone of my Time Machine drive on a regular basis. This would give me a second option if my Time Machine drive were to fail.
• Subscribing to an off-site online backup service. The three I’m currently investigating are Carbonite, Mozy, and CrashPlan. One of these would provide a bit of last-ditch assurance, in case some catastrophe were to happen.

Word to Your Mother

First, if you don’t have a backup strategy, get one. Even better, be paranoid like me and get two or three. There’s really no such thing as too many backups. Second, if you buy an Apple computer, buy Apple Care along with it. It’s a sound investment. This would have been a lot less fun if I, in addition to all the stress and strain of worrying about possible data loss, had a hefty repair bill to deal with as well. Finally, don’t trust drives. They’re totally expendable. The only way to live your life in a digital age and sleep well at nights is to have enough backups that you don’t care when a drive dies.

Possibly Related Posts:

1. Nothing’s Perfect
2. Untitled
3. Not out of the woods yet

Since I’m up, at least in safe mode, I’d like to copy my iPhoto Library to something. It’s about 45GB, which rules out burning to DVD or uploading over the web. I think I’ll pick up a new drive today and copy it to that, just for safe keeping. All this hard drive instability makes me nervous as hell.

Possibly Related Posts:

1. Nothing’s Perfect
2. Goodbye, Norton AntiVirus…
3. Lessons learned: the iMac lives

Time Machine, the automated backup software that is included with OS X, is pretty cool. But I found myself in a bind, because the last Time Machine backup I had to work with was from noon on a day when I worked until five.[1] So there was a very big gap of time in which I had been highly productive (on a Friday, even! Take note, current and future employers!). Naturally, I wanted to nab those files before I started any sort of restoration process.[2]

As usual, AskMe came to my rescue. I posted a question and someone there turned me onto the ditto command and to how OS X specifies the location of drives. I was able to boot from the OS X installation DVD, fire up a terminal, and copy the files I had created to a USB jump drive. Then I reinstalled OS X. When the installation finished (and it took quite a long time), it asked me if I wanted to start fresh or start with a Time Machine backup. I went with the Time Machine backup, and the migration assistant started on its journey. It was late, so I let it run overnight.

When I woke up the next morning, the file transfer dialog’s status bar was almost all the way across. A status message told me it was “Transferring files to support applications” and that it had about three minutes left. Good enough, I thought, and went about my day. I kept checking on it, but it never changed. I was reluctant to coldcock[3] the machine, as I suspect one too many improper shutdowns (i.e. Haden + power strip + pretty light on power strip) had been the cause of the hard drive issues in the first place.[4] So, I let it run until about eight o’clock that evening.

Some web research convinced me that my machine had zombied out, and that I might have better luck booting from the DVD and restoring from Time Machine via its utilities menu, instead of via the migration assistant.[5] Alas, the first stab at that (which took several hours to run) failed to produce a bootable system. (I, again, found myself staring at the grey screen of death.) So, I tried it again, this time rolling back to the penultimate Time Machine backup. Luckily, that one took. And, though I composed this on my backup machine, I’m happy to be posting it from my beloved iMac.

Notes

1. I have no clue why Time Machine stopped backing up. I suspect that the internal hard drive issue was to blame–that it was trying to back up something incurably broken.
2. I booted from the OS X installation DVD and ran Disc Utility, which fixed some errors with my hard drive, but I still couldn’t boot.
3. I don’t know why all of my metaphors for computing are violent. My favorite phrase for using very powerful and complicated software for a simple task is that it is “too much gun for the job.”
4. Note to self: buy an uninterruptible power supply.
5. It should go without saying that, at many stages in this process, I was feverishly researching all manner of solutions, using both my iPod touch and my wife’s ancient Dell laptop (Inspiron 5100, 2.40GHz Pentium 4, 384MB RAM) that we haven’t used in months because, after having become accustomed to the iMac, it feels about as modern as one of those newfangled electronic calculators we had as kids with the LED display.

Possibly Related Posts:

1. Lessons learned: the iMac lives
2. Not out of the woods yet
3. Untitled

I’ll blog more observations about the novel as I make my way through it, though I’m more concerned, now, with simply reading it.

Meanwhile, Infinite Summer has launched a follow-up reading project focusing on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Coincidentally, I have been reading that novel along with Infinite Jest. It is one of the novels that comes with Classics app, and I found myself reading when I didn’t have my copy of Infinite Jest around, both because I like vampire stories (in film, at least) and because I’d never read it before and felt a little guilty about it. So I could jump on that bandwagon, but I’ll probably just eschew the deadlines and continue to read them both at my own pace. Dracula is light fare compared to Infinite Jest, and can be a nice respite from it, at least when Stoker’s occasionally ham-fisted prose and tin ear for dialect doesn’t get in the way of his storytelling.

Being as I’m still in the thick of it, I can’t offer a resounding pronouncement on the novel itself. All I can say is that I continue to enjoy it. And I’ve enjoyed chatting with you about it.

Notes:

1. I found lugging the book around was an impediment to my actually reading it, so I bought the Kindle version for my iPod touch. The Kindle app doesn’t give you page numbers, it gives you a “location” value which is, for reasons I still can’t determine, expressed as a range (I am, currently, at “Location 12515-12523″). Triangulating with the paper copy, I found that multiplying that first number by 0.044 makes for a pretty accurate estimate of the page number in my paperback copy.

[This post was dual-published at Infinite Zombies and at wheatblog.com.]

Possibly Related Posts:

1. The experience of reading in the age of digital reproduction
2. “a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy”
3. Way down in the hole

Clerk: We have those, but only in a “Husky.”
Woman: [Emphatically] Oh, no, no. He’s anorexic skinny–concentration camp skinny.
Son: ???
Woman: It’s okay: skinny is good.

How many things are wrong with this conversation? The flippant use of “anorexic”? The even more grievously flippant use of “concentration camp”? Or is it that maxim at the end (and its unspoken converse). For the record, the boy was of normal size–neither particularly skinny nor at all overweight for his age. The mother I would describe as verging on gaunt.

A note to the college bound: psychiatry is a growth industry, and ever will be.

Possibly Related Posts:

1. Untitled
2. Arrested Development + Jesus Camp
3. Untitled

I’ve been pretty vocal about how much I like OS X and the suite of apps that ship with it. iPhoto, in particular, is a wonderful thing. It makes managing media incredibly easy, intuitive, and powerful. Now that I’m a parent, I generate a lot of photographs and short video of this kid. Wrangling these with Adobe Photoshop Elements, as I had done when I was on WinXP, was workable but slow, especially when it came to editing. Managing and editing them with iPhoto is cake. Even better, the “Faces” (i.e. face recognition) feature in iPhoto ‘09 saves me the trouble of tagging things, I just let Faces work its magic and then go through every once in a while to weed out the false positives.

The most obvious difference between OS X and WinXP is the subdued color palette of OS X–mostly shades of grey–that makes it very easy on the eyes. After working on my iMac for a while, WinXP (and, even worse, Vista) seems gaudy. You can tame most of those excesses, of course. But, out of the box, it’s way too flashy. With OS X, the only thing I had to change was the desktop image.

The three-dimensional vibe of the Dock is nice; I feel like I’m looking into a window rather than at a flat wall (the designers had even more fun with that depth metaphor in Time Machine). Though OS X is visually understated, it isn’t lacking in sophistication. The dock icons are reflected in the semi-translucent surface of the Dock. Dragging an app near creates quite beautifully realistic reflections between the two. It’s eye candy, but it’s classy eye candy. Beyond the looks and it’s utility as an app launcher (though I tend to use Spotlight for that), the dock is handy in that it tells you at a glance which apps are running. Many apps use it to provide notifications (the icon for Mail is telling me right now that I have three new messages).

On the geek side, having a bash terminal is a wonderful thing. I learned my way around the Unix command line back in the early days of the web, when my university email and web hosting accounts were on a SunOS box to which I only had telnet access. On every WinXP box that I use regularly, I run Cygwin, as DOS makes my head and eyes hurt. But, on OS X, bash support is  native, thanks to the BSD-based engine that undergirds everything.

PDF integration is amazingly handy. I don’t print receipts anymore. I just save them as PDF to my web receipts folder–a feature that is native on the print dialog and is compatible with every application that implements printing. It’s also great as a workaround for apps that don’t export to a format I like.

It’s rock solid; I think I’ve managed to crash it twice in the past year. I had two power outages lead to startup difficulties, both of which were solved with a second power cycle. (The grid here is incredibly weak.) If it weren’t for Haden’s obsession with the power strip, I’d almost never need to restart it.

As a software trainer, one of my favorite features is the help menu, which searches through the menu items themselves, before hitting the help docs. When you choose from the available matches, the appropriate menu opens and a nice blue indicator appears next to the menu command. It’s saves me lots of time, especially when I’m using an app that I don’t use often. It’s so effective, I often don’t bother learning the menus: I just rely on the search. Instead of starting you off on a goose chase through the documentation or, worse yet, some web-based version of the same, the help menu keeps you focused on the application and helps you become familiar with it. It’s incredibly clever: a simple idea, brilliantly executed.

Of course, there are annoyances, too, but I’ll save those for another post.

Possibly Related Posts:

1. Untitled
2. Dropbox to the rescue
3. Switching Back (to Mac)