I had a great time at BETT this year and never stepped foot in the UK. And after reading a tweet about someone spending 17 pounds for a sandwich, drink, and chips…sounds like I made the right choice

I’m new at this twitter thing, but I think I’ve found a new hobby combining blog posts and twitter hashtags.

How did I discover this hobby?

I attended a conference a few months ago where I saw tweets scrolling across large screens throughout the conference rooms. When I asked an experienced twitterer (I guess that’s a word) how they were filtering only tweets related to the conference to display on the screens–he introduced me to the wonderful world of hashtags. That’s when it hit me…with a little determination anyone can have a real presence now at virtually any tech conference in the world–you know geeks are going to broadcast tweets.

So, I tested my theory with tweets this past week at #bett, #bett2011, and #bett11. I immediately noticed significant traffic to my blog [okay, my blogs ] coming from twitter. Very cool when theory translates to practice!

I expect I will “attend” at lot of tech conferences (maybe even a few “moots”), this year without ever needing to get on a plane…may even break some news at one of them

Technology is cool!

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Blackboard, known for its course-management software, is moving into a whole new sector. Today the company announced that it bought Presidium Inc., which provides outsourced call centers and consulting services for admissions, financial aid, and other student services, and also runs IT help desks for many colleges.

Blackboard paid $53-million to acquire the company, in a deal that wrapped up December 30...

Read story here…

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A very interesting blog post of 21 Things That Became Obsolete This Decade can be found at the link below. I’m not sure what will be on the list next in 10 more years, but I would be willing to bet good money the Desktop Computer and the LMS will be among the other 19 things on the list…enjoy them while they’re still somewhat relevant

http://www.businessinsider.com/21-things-that-became-obsolete-this-decade-2009-12#pdas-1

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Note: The following is made available under GPL from http://codex.wordpress.org/GPL. It may be edited a little from its original form, but probably not a lot. There is no guarantee this information is accurate…use at your own risk.
—————————————————–

To get information about your server, you can use the PHP Info function:

• Type the code shown below into a text file

• Save as info.php
• Upload to server. Visit in your browser (www.example.com/info.php)

That will give you info about your php version, mod_rewrite, and lots of other server “stuff”.

The info.php file returns a page outlining the details of your PHP installation.

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Outline of my presentations at WordCamp Louisville:

WP  Basic Installation and Setup:

• Install in subdirectory
• Install in root
• Install multiple copies
  • Using single database
  • Using different databases
  • Mention setting up a networking
• Install local copy for offline testing/development

Moving WP From One Host to Another:

• Move WP maintaining same url
• Move WP changing the url
• Move WP subdirectory to root & vice-versa
• Copy WP from hosting account to local computer

Tools used in presentations:

WinSCP: A simple ftp client I use in conjunction with hosting control panels such as Cpanel.

http://winscp.net/eng/index.php

Notepad++: A free source code editor.

http://notepad-plus-plus.org

XAMPP Apache Web Server: An excellent choice for easily installing a local copy of WordPress on your computer.

http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

Search & Replace Script: A php script from Spectacu.la that allows you to search & replace values in your WordPress database. Great for changing the web address on your blog during a move.

http://spectacu.la/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases

BigDump staggered MySql import script: Great tool from Alexey Ozerov that allows you to import very large databases that you may not be able to import using tools like phpMyAdmin.

http://www.ozerov.de/bigdump.php

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FlexBooks is a site where you can create custom free textbooks under a creative commons licenses. Interesting…selection is a little limited, but may be of use to some…

http://www.ck12.org/flexr/

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Assisted Learning for All is a website published by Saddleback College with over 150 short nursing videos…could be a good resource for those involved in nursing education.

http://www.saddleback.edu/alfa/vid_index.aspx

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The link below is to the Khan Academy website where you will find hundreds of short video tutorials on various subjects. If you are a math teacher, you will want to check this out. All videos are made available under a creative commons license.

http://www.khanacademy.org/

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A Dutch security company called Online 24 released a “research” study claiming to have found 84 security vulnerabilities in the Blackboard LMS. You can download the paper from Webwereld.

Research? Strikes me as simply a load of unsupported, extremely vague ramblings. Why would I say that? Maybe it’s due to their liberal use of “Imagine this” support in their “study”:

Imagine this situation:
“An attacker is able to gain access to files outside Blackboard’s document directory.
The attacker includes Blackboard’s access logs. These logs can be influenced by
the attacker, so exploitation would lead to a new highly dangerous vulnerability
that allows the attacker to execute custom commands on the Blackboard server.”

Really? Could you be just a little more abstract in what you’re asking us to “imagine”?

Each reader can be the judge, but in my opinion, if this was a book I think I would have to shelve it in the fiction section due to the lack of a shred of real support. Don’t get me wrong…I’m not naive enough to believe BB has no security holes, but if you found 84 of them, maybe you could provide support for one or two. Otherwise, maybe a better place to publish your findings would be in the The Onion

Here is a novel idea for the would-be researchers…if you’re going claim something exist, then support your claim…an example…or, if you prefer, read about it in Webwereld as well…

But then again, based on their site Blackboard is actually a client. If BB is paying for this kind of advertisement, then maybe they really do want to become obsolete….

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Last week I had a server crash — hardware problems — and have spent the past week recovering. I had several php apps running on the server along with a lot of static content–including a couple thousand videos. So I spent a day rebuilding the server on a new box and restoring the static content was a breeze–really drove home the point for me about the value of keeping things simple. 500+ videos were just uploaded into a directory and were not part of a php app–very simple to restore. However, the vast majority of my content was tied to a couple Moodle LMS installs, several WordPress installs including one WordPress Mu install, and five MedaiWiki installs.

Fortunately, I was able to recover the data from the crashed box, but not all of it was in a format that I am accustomed to dealing with…specifically the MySql databases. I’m very comfortable working with MySql database dumps, unfortunately, the latest .sql dump I had of each of my DB’s was over a month old and my server backups were not running — long story

So, I was stuck with restoring my php apps using the database files from the file system.

After a little web-searching and a little common sense, I was able to easily enough restore all my MyISAM databases. My Moodle and WordPress sites were all using MyISAM. So, on my new server, I simple created new db’s, navigated to the db directory on the server and then copied the .frm, .myd, and .myi files to the directory. This resulted in a db that I could then see via phpMyAdmin, but all the tables were read-only. The simple fix to that problem was to then dump the db to an .sql file, drop the tables, and import the .sql file — only a few minutes work and back in business.

The solution to the Innodb databases was not so intuitive — my Mediawiki sites were all innodb. There were database directories in the mysql folder for these just like all the other db’s, but they only contained the .frm files for most of the tables — I think two tables were actually MyISAM and had all three files. So, the process I used to recover the MyISAM db’s didn’t work on these db’s. After about three days of work, Google searching, and plain old trial-and-error, I finally figured out how to recover the Innodb databases as well. In short, I installed a fresh copy of XAMPP on my local computer, moved over the db directories from the crashed server (the ones with just the .frm files) and moved over the ibdata and ib log files — three files total — and then the db’s were recreated in XAMPP. This allowed me to dump them as an .sql file and from there I was good to go. Note, that working in XAMPP wasn’t absolutely necessary, but it allowed me to work in an offline environment and get to the end result of creating .sql dumps that I could then import into my live site. Needless to say, when I restored my Mediawiki sites, I made sure the db’s were MyISAM — in my opinion, a lot easier to work with.

I’ll make a video in the next few weeks detailing how I did this — not only to help others, but to also to document my own process just in case I’m confronted with this issue in the future.

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