For various reasons (none of them at all dramatic or exciting but every one requiring some thought), I have moved to a new blogging space. I will be elaborating more on this decision as time goes on, but in case you are reading this, I will no longer be posting here. Comments will also be shut off soon. I will leave the archives up and available here, since I am not going to bother trying to drag all the content with me. This has been a fun beginning, which I look forward to continuing at my new blog.

Woo-hoo! I just registered for An Event Apart Boston. I’m really looking forward to this one, as it’s been a while since I’ve been to a conference with this kind of focus. Love that Dirty Water!

Can’t wait wait for late March (although lately it feels like I won’t have to - did you know it’s already February? Where did January go? For that matter, where is our 6 feet of snow?). Anyway, it sounds like the event is filling up, so if you’re planning on going, you might want to register soon. Hope to see you there!

Update: I’ve joined the event on upcoming.org - you should too, if you’re coming.

I finally sat down yesterday to erase and re-install OS X on my old 12” PowerBook G4. However, I was having problems getting the install disk to run so that I could erase the drive and install the OS. I kept getting errors like “this software cannot be installed”, and “this disk cannot be used as an install disk”.

Thinking that wiping the drive would fix it (doesn’t it always? ), I connected the old machine to my new machine via firewire, and booted the old one in target mode. Then I used Disk Utility to write zeros to the drive.

So then I had what amounted to an expensive firewire drive, since it still seemed that none of the install disks we have lying around the lab (including 10.2,10.3) were working. The Panther disk was giving me a circle with a slash through it, so I went looking for an explanation for that, and found a thread that suggested wiping the “PR Ram”, by holding down Apple/Command-P-R at boot. While this didn’t fix the circle-slash issue with the panther disk, I decided to give the 10.4 disk another shot, and voilà - it worked! The rest of the install process went smoothly.

Steve sent me a link the other day to the page of a faculty member in Computer Science here at UVM. Josh Bongard is doing some pretty cool stuff, and posing some interesting questions:

Imagine a robot-making machine is sent to Mars, and settles on Meridiani Planum. The machine detects that the ground is littered with boulders between 10 centimeters and 1 meter high. Should the machine build a robot with wheels or legs? If the robot should be able to not only observe its surrounding, but also manipulate objects (like drilling into rocks), how many manipulators should it have? What should the manipulators look like? Determining what the most appropriate kind of robot is for a particular task is tricky.

He goes on to describe how he tries to answer some of those questions:

I implemented a system, called Artificial Ontogeny, that ‘grows’ a virtual egg into a fully formed virtual adult robot. The adult robot is then evaluated against the task. This approach then combines biological growth with biological evolution; an individual robot can learn and adapt to its virtual surroundings over its lifetime, while the robot population evolves over generations similar to how organisms grow and adapt to their surroundings, while species adapt over evolutionary time.

Kind of sets the imagination wandering, doesn’t it? Cool stuff, and right in our backyard!

Don MacAskill has some insightful commentary on why we should be liberal in our linkage.

“The real, true power of the web is just that - it’s a web. Everything can be interconnected, and learning about or researching a subject can be vastly easier online than anywhere else. Using hyperlinks is the very reason content belongs online. If you don’t hyperlink your content, why on earth do you have it online?”

It’s a brief post - definitely worth the read of you put any content online.

A nice list of blogs and brief descriptions of each that discuss security issues surrounding web application development. (via Jeremy Zawodny’s Linkblog)

Interesting suggestions on where to look for inspiration, and reference to a book that looks like a lot of fun. One of my favorite inspirational toys is the Oblique Strategies Dashboard widget.

A conversation starter from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. (Via Bokardo)

Registration has opened for An Event Apart Boston 2007.

Student and TechCAT extraordinaire Katie Chang has been documenting her semester abroad in Ireland on her blog. My favorite post? Her description of getting to class in the rain, and the walk back counting twelve (12!) broken and discarded umbrellas. What an experience!

For more examples of blogging in and about a foreign country, check out last spring’s cultural exchange trip to Japan. The list of participants on the side leads to numerous depictions of the trip as told (and photographed!) by the students themselves on their own blogs.

Like what you see? You might also be interested in Dr. Paul Martin’s Canadian Studies course, The Great White North, and the links along the side of it going to posts from student blogs.