Category: General

Doesn’t this mean that they should have smaller classes?

The NY Times is running an article on the upcoming challenge to Florida’s controversial voucher system for student education. There seems to be a point that’s been overlooked.
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Moving to a new hosting provider

I’ve moved to a new hosting provider, so if there’s any quirks over the next few days, that’s probably why. I’m also getting around to doing a UI overhaul that I’d been meaning to do for months.

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Does it count when you get zero defects but you didn’t test?

Brett’s just finished his latest project with no defects. But did he test enough?
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Some businesses just don’t get it

Well, this entry started as a quick blurb to highlight an article on my boss here at Wotif.com in the Australian Financial Review But that’s not what it’s ended up as. 🙂
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Schiavo case was not about the “right to live”

I’m sick of reading articles like this one in the NY Times about how the Schiavo case was about the “right to live” vs. the “right to die”. This, frankly, is BS. What this fight was about is the extent that power of attorney goes.

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Science museums that refuse to show movies featuring evolutions should be renamed

According to the NY Times, some science museums are refusing to show movies that mention controversial topics, such as evolution or the Big Bang They should be ashamed to call themselves science musuems.
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The private sector will never roll out broadband to the bush

It seems that the tradition of the National Party leader selling out the party’s constituents whenever it conflicts with Liberal Party policy is alive and well.

A National Party think tank came up with the stunningly obvious idea of using T3 proceeds to pay for bush broadband rollouts But John Anderson has nixed the idea – apparently he thinks the private sector can do it better.

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Ah, so that’s the problem with the American education system.

The NY Times has an article on .”>problems with the US education system

The author, Diane Ravitch, points out the following:

It is hardly fair to blame high schools for the poor skills of their entering students. If students start high school without the basic skills needed to read, write and solve mathematics problems, then the governors should focus on strengthening the standards of their states’ junior high schools.

So that’s the problem: the US expects senior high schools to teach grammar school subjects. And Ms Ravitch thinks the solution is to get junior high schools to do it instead…

If a student can not adequately read, write, and perform arithmetic by the end of grammar school (primary school here in Oz), then either keep them there or flag them as a special needs student. Heck, if they can’t do it by grade 4 there’s an issue.

Earlier in the article:

Only a minority of students – whether in 4th, 8th or 12th grade – reach proficiency as measured by the Education Department’s National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Big surprise: if they’re not proficient at grade 4, a student is unlikely to become so in grade 8. This is really simple: if a student starts to slip behind, they need to be caught fast – the longer you leave it, the less likely they’ll ever become proficient.

iPods skip with large files

This is a minor annoyance, but hey… iPods seem to have problems with large bookmarkable files. Specifically, they start skipping, which makes the playback annoying.

Large non-bookmarkable files: no problems. So it’s something to do with keeping the bookmark in sync with the file. *sigh*.

So, I either need to split those 1-hour podcasts into things less than about 32MB, or convert them to a lower quality level. Anyone got a decent command-line tool to do this that I can plug into iPodder

I, for one, welcome our new corporate overlords…

Actually, I don’t. But I have to ask: if they can make it illegal to circumvent copy protection to do something you could legally do without the copy protection, then why can’t it be illegal to circumvent pop-up blockers?

Hmmm… considering that pop-up blockers are arguably a security feature, could the US DMCA be used here?