Users may add Group/List of  users to their private address books. The lists reside in the private, Staff or student address books.

Here is a video of the process -

movie

The ye;;ow circle will track my cursor movement.
The red flashed are the mouse being clicked.

Bill

I buy stuff on E-Bay. I admit it I have been a registered user for over 10 years. It has changed a lot since the early days. They started out as a “Venue” to allow people to buy and sell things. Which was great and a little bit scary at times. Now, they are quite different, because the users of E-Bay are stupid. Or so E-Bay things. They have launched on this safe buying experience path. Everything they do in the name of safety is ok. It has gone to far. Now they are saying I can’t pay with money orders or cash !
I believe they are hiding under this safety umbrella to prohibit the payment of items by cash, bank transfer, and even US Postal Money Orders. Now they don’t really say you can’t take these payments. But you can’t let the buyers  know that you will accepts these forms of payment, except in certain catagories of items. My opinion , this stinks. I pay for things with US Postal Money orders. I have even been know to send a $10 bill in the mail - which of course hey say isn’t safe.
Let me read off a dollar bill.
“This note is legal tender for all debts public and private”.
Seems to me the federal government trumps E-Bay’s policies and I should be able to pay for something with my cash - if I care to and an willing to risk it. Also, what about paying for E-Bay items in person ? Guess we can’t bring cash to that transaction any more, either.
Here is my take on E-Bay’s real motives.
1. The government is squeezing them to provide money trails for various reasons, but let’s just say one of the initials are IRS.
2. The E-Bay market has reached maturity and growth is slowing. Now we are in an economic slow down , and they need a way to increase revenues. No better way then to mandate that purchases use online payment services. Could it be that the largest online payment service , PayPal, is owned by E-Bay. Well of course it is. So the business types at E-Bay head quarters in response to the share holders desire for revenue, have decided the sell this safe transaction garbage so they can cloak their,  give me more money on every transaction,  agenda.

Yah, I will still use E-Bay. I will still ask sellers if they will take money orders. But I miss the old days when E-Bay was a “venue” and not a corporate business.

Just My Opinion
Bil

This is the pdf test

Achievement Serias Manual (pdf)

This is the doc test

Peer Tutor Observation form (doc)

If you haven’t heard - we have another browser to add to the collection of IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, et, al. Google put out the “Chrome” browser for Beta testing. While we certainly don’t need another browser - I waited a whole 5 minutes after hearing about it , to download it and fire it up.

I have been using it a lot for the last week. I must say - I like it. It’s fast , has  soe nice  features and, doesn’t always work. But hold on - does an y software really work  - I think not.

I like it’s search form the address bar , I like the new tab rendering of recent pages so you can select visually, I like its clean look, and did I mention it was fast ?. Sure does run through the pages fast.  Not everything works , and security advisories have been flowing around Chrome.

I don’t realy like it’s download mode for things like PDF’s , though you can turn that off.  I have found some sites that don’t work with it or are broken , but for the most part it is surprisingly complete.

I think with the move to cloud computing  and/or  thin client and mobile browser based computing - Google’s  chrome is moving in the right direction.  It’s engine is the Apple Safari engine - and needs a little beefing up, but I call it a winner.

Our job at the school is to communicate. Computers, the Internet, and webs are supposed to make that easier.  The traditional web site , while good for many things, is not that good  for communicating for educators. The traditional web is full of strange and arcane building blocks, that for most, just infringe on the ease of communicating.  At least, that is what I have observed after driving  the technology boat around here for a while.

This year  we are trying something a little different. We are going to use a blog mechanism to allow the teachers to put information out on the web, but without strangling them with lots of “technology do-dads”. This will allow the staff to produce documents, using a nice structured environment, that takes care of most of the nuts and bolts. Searching and archiving and composition is all taken care of.

I am hoping this will provide a beter avenue for  communication between the school and the students, parents and the public.

So , stay tuned

thx

Bill

There are lot of things that need to be managed in the typical small and medium sized computer facilities. My list is as follows
1. System service availability and notification of outage
2. Performance and capacity analysis of servers
3. Performance and capacity of network
4. Hardware/software inventories of servers and workstations
5. software/patch distribution
6. Network traffic analysis
7. Anomaly/threat detection.

This is a lot of information and services that often times are not done either because of cost or complexity. I have found that FOSS applications can go a longway to providing these services at a price you can afford and without requiringng the services of a gaggle of programmers.

These are my must have picks:

(more…)

I have always been a fan a  Google. They have pushed the Internet into areas it never thought it would go. BUT, some of it’s success ( translate - money ), has started to make the Internet almost unusable.  There is no doubt that search engines are a necessity and in many respects the backbone of  Internet use. Without the search facilities - we would just be islands of users and information. They provide a great and necessary service to the Internet.

What is starting to  happen is the income paradigm that Google is using is advertising based. And they are willing to let anyone become a vehicle for their advertising. Advertising income is based on the number of people that view an ad and the number of interested people that view the ad. It’s  just like TV or  Radio - so there is nothing new there.  What is new is that everyone wants a little of  Googles money - and  Google is happy to oblige. So, people build websites with lists of subjects that they have found on Google so they can get there little ( or big ) Google advertising income. Now there are becoming an increasingly large number of middle-site websites that only aggregate or replicate  websites so you will  look there first and the site owner  maks e ad revenue from Google. The real rub is we find these site using Google. I have seen pages of Google search results - that are almost identical  and completely middle-sites. They are providing nothing to the net. They will say the aggregation is a great benefit, but that aggregation was one of the fundamental traits of Google and the early search engines.  Worse yet, the technology is easily built that would remove these duplicate and unnecessary middle-sites. Google has no reason to do this, though. The more sites you have to click on , the more ads you are subject to and the more revenue Google makes.

I am feeling the glut of middle-sites and they are making it very hard to user the Internet for research.

Google’s success may bog the Internet down with so much duplicate and unnecessary middle-sites, that is becomes painful and cumbersome to use, just the opposite of what it could be.

Just my opinion

thx

Bill

I hear it all the time on the new - that something happened in the mid-West and it is in Ohio or Indiana. I just don’t get it. From my map - Ohio is next to Pennsylvania - which is definately the East. The West starts at the Rocky Mountains wich is over 1200 miles away. And to boot - Ohio is in the eastern time zone. I think Indiana is in the same boat - so is Tennesee. I am hear to lobby for a new designation call ed the mid-East. Any state that is primarily to  the East of the Southern Tip of Lake Superior , should be refered this way.  And for that matter Texas and probably are too far South for my mid-western taste. But I will hold off judgement on that for now.

So please national media - can we get it right now?

thx

Bill

Horde is an open source application framework that supports a number of applications. We use it here and like it. Here is the script I use tod elete users and clean the associated horde database files. This is setup for a regular  Mysql environment.

It would be nice to use the actual horde config files to pobulate the information. But this works.

Note : 7/28/2008 Found I wasn’t cleaning out the history table - corrected

Hope it is useful.

thx

Bill

#!/bin/bash
#
#   script to delete all records for a given
#  user in the horde- framework and main applications of  

# imp/kronolith/mnemo/nag/turba
#  Exemple usage : /root/hordedel.sh “john-down”
#

USER=”$1″
# horde database
DB=”MY_DATABASE_NAME”
# horde mysql userid
SQLUSER=”MY_HORDE_DATABASE_USER”
# horde mysql passwd
SQLPWD=”MY_HORDE_DATABASE_USERID_PASSWORD”

#
#  Count records before delete
#
HP_B=`mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “SELECT count(*) from $DB.horde_prefs WHERE pref_uid=’$USER’”`
HH_B=`mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “SELECT count(*) from $DB.horde_histories  WHERE history_who  =’$USER’”`
KE_B=`mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “SELECT count(*) from $DB.kronolith_events WHERE calendar_id=’$USER’”`
MM_B=`mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “SELECT count(*) from $DB.mnemo_memos WHERE memo_owner=’$USER’”`
TO_B=`mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “SELECT count(*) from $DB.turba_objects WHERE owner_id=’$USER’”`
NT_B=`mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “SELECT count(*) from $DB.nag_tasks WHERE task_owner=’$USER’”`
HD_B=`mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “SELECT count(*) from $DB.horde_datatree WHERE user_uid=’$USER’”`
HDA_B=0
COUNT=0
mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “SELECT datatree_id from $DB.horde_datatree WHERE user_uid=’$USER’” > /tmp/01
while read I
do
  COUNT=`mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “SELECT count(*) from $DB.horde_datatree_attributes WHERE datatree_id=’$I’”`
  HDA_B=`expr $HDA_B + $COUNT`
done  </tmp/01

#
#  Delete records (Comments out these lines for testing)
#
mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “DELETE from $DB.horde_prefs WHERE pref_uid=’$USER’”
mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “DELETE from $DB.horde_histories  WHERE history_who =’$USER’”
mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “DELETE from $DB.kronolith_events WHERE calendar_id=’$USER’”
mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “DELETE from $DB.mnemo_memos WHERE memo_owner=’$USER’”
mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “DELETE from $DB.turba_objects WHERE owner_id=’$USER’”
mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “DELETE from $DB.nag_tasks WHERE task_owner=’$USER’”
mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “DELETE from $DB.horde_datatree WHERE user_uid=’$USER’”
while read I
do
  mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “DELETE from $DB.horde_datatree_attributes WHERE datatree_id=’$I’”
done</tmp/01

#
#  Count records after delete (Should always give zero)
#
HP_A=`mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “SELECT count(*) from $DB.horde_prefs WHERE pref_uid=’$USER’”`
HH_A=`mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “SELECT count(*) from $DB.horde_histories WHERE history_who =’$USER’”`
KE_A=`mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “SELECT count(*) from $DB.kronolith_events WHERE calendar_id=’$USER’”`
MM_A=`mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “SELECT count(*) from $DB.mnemo_memos WHERE memo_owner=’$USER’”`
TO_A=`mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “SELECT count(*) from $DB.turba_objects WHERE owner_id=’$USER’”`
NT_A=`mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “SELECT count(*) from $DB.nag_tasks WHERE task_owner=’$USER’”`
HD_A=`mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “SELECT count(*) from $DB.horde_datatree WHERE user_uid=’$USER’”`
HDA_A=0
COUNT=0
mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “SELECT datatree_id from $DB.horde_datatree WHERE user_uid=’$USER’” > /tmp/01
while read I
do
  COUNT=`mysql -s -u $SQLUSER –password=$SQLPWD -e “SELECT count(*) from $DB.horde_datatree_attributes WHERE datatree_id=’$I’”`
  HDA_A=`expr $HDA_A + $COUNT`
done</tmp/01

#
#  Display tables record counts after delete operation
#
echo “Before and after records count for user $USER’”
echo “===========================================================================”
echo “horde_prefs: $HP_B / $HP_A”
echo “horde_histories: $HH_B / $HH_A”
echo “kronolith_events: $KE_B / $KE_A”
echo “mnemo_memos: $MM_B / $MM_A”
echo “turba_objects: $TO_B / $TO_A”
echo “nag_tasks: $NT_B / $NT_A”
echo “horde_datatree: $HD_B / $HD_A”
echo “horde_datatree_attributes: $HDA_B / $HDA_A”

exit 0