I have previously wrote about how it’s a good idea for a university to adopt a Content Management System (CMS), not only to streamline managing content, but also to improve the consistence of the “look & feel” of the site. Generally, having a consistent look is a good thing – it gives an air of professionalism, something that is important about an institution one is considering attending and paying money to.

However, is it possible for a CMS to be counter-productive to those who have to use it? By this, I am referring not necessarily to the readers, but to the publishers that depend on it to disseminate their information. For a university, the publishers of content on the site are usually the professors. Short of the main site that acts to attract prospective student and faculty, a university’s website is mainly used by existing students to get access to course material and to communicate with the professors and teaching assistants. The true measure of a CMS should be how easily it allows the main publishers (in this, case the professors), to put their material on the site and make it readily available in a manner they like.
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Since it’s not Thanksgiving in the US, news has been anything but slow today. Google has officially bought YouTube, sending shockwaves throughout the online world. Now, a $1.65 billion USD deal is going to be news-worthy anyday, but what makes this even more remarkable was how fast the Google-YouTube deal went from a rumour to a fact. I’d been hearing rumours of potential YouTube buyers since way back in the summer, but in no way was Google a top prospect.

Some will say that this deal officially marks the beginning of “Bubble 2.0”, since YouTube is not yet profitable. I’m assuming Google has some pretty bright people working for them, so what was their reasoning behind this move? Certainly, $1.65 billion USD isn’t a lot for them, ever since their IPO, but the real concern is YouTube’s high operating costs – serving up all those videos takes up a lot of bandwidth, which in turn translates into large monthly bills.
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If you’re on the front page of my site, you’ll notice my Zooomr Photostream in the sidebar, which I just recently added. Zooomr is a neat photosharing site that I use since it’s currently free for near-unlimited usage. (There’s a 2 GB monthly upload limit for Pro accounts, which they were giving away for free)

As far as I know, Zooomr doesn’t offer any neat “photostream” widgets like Flickr does, but they do provide an RSS feed of your photos, so naturally, it was only time before a Zooomr WordPress Plugin came around that took advantage of that RSS feed to offer photostream-like capability to your blog. I decided to give it a try, and was quite impressed. It’s simple, but works well, as you can fully control the format in which your photos are displayed. It’s a nice workaround/solution until Zooomr decides to implement something themselves. Continued

Google Reader recently got a makeover, with the user interface changing drastically in order to make things easier to use. In addition to being able to easier navigate through one’s feeds collection, the changes better organize information and present it in a manner that makes the application look more like the familiar GMail.

I’m a big fan of Google Reader, as I use it everyday to keep track of my feeds. As I mentioned before, I think RSS is one of the good buzzwords surrounding “web 2.0”, though some may disagree. Since RSS is a web-centric technology, it only makes sense to view them in another web-application, in my opinion. I’ve always liked using Google Reader, but admittedly some changes were needed. Continued

Yes, that time has come – the time to start thinking about a job. This being my last year of university, things are shaping up to be tough, and the added pressures of looking for a job add just a little more stress. Not that I mind; personally I’d rather be busy than bored. But, it just seems as if everything is due at the same time.

I’m thinking about graduate school, so I have to apply for funding for that – NSERC and OGS applications are due on October 16th and 23rd, respectively, so I’d better get started on that. Additionally, the deadline for many job applications are also in early October, making October the “busy month”, especially when you consider most midterms fall around that time. I intended to make my fall term more busy, since I thought that most job searching would take place in the second semester – boy was I wrong! Continued

I had a few things to do today, and started thinking about how one usually organizes a “to-do” list. Some people do things in the order that they come to mind, while others tend to do things right at that very moment, pushing other things to the bottom. The first group of people would be classified as a queue – think of a lineup at a grocery store, while the second would be called a stack.

The defining property of a queue is the First-In-First-Out (FIFO) property. Things that come to mind first should be accomplished before others, while the analogous property of the stack is Last-In-First-Out (LIFO). I tend to think of myself as a queue-type person, though admittedly sometimes I push things to the back in a stack-like fashion. Continued

Besides all of the jokes about the ineptitudes of engineers when it comes to explaining things, I’ve found that most do a reasonably good job at explaining or teaching the concepts of some topic. However, this does not mean that they are good at presenting information to the general public or “selling” a product or service. Why? They tend to go into too much technical detail regarding the inner workings of the system, oftening leaving the layman feeling bewildered and befuddled.

I’m guilty of this, probably moreso than most engineers. You see, the tendency for engineers is to gloss over the aspects that would be of interest to a potential client and instead go straight to the heart of the system, explaining all of its inner workings. (“You see, this is how widget A interfaces with module B, using sub-system C. This was done because using the direct interface caused all sorts of bad harmonics that threw the system out of control…”) This is especially true if this system was designed by the engineer in question, who inevitably spent many, many hours slaving away at minor details to get things working just right. (Or, just working at all) Continued

My laptop, a three-year old Dell Inspiron 5100, was recently suffering from some heat-related issues that manifested themselves in slowdowns and sometimes shutdowns. You see, the CPU in this laptop is an Intel desktop 2.8 GHz P4 – one of the truly hot-running CPUs, made before Intel decided that clock speed wasn’t everything under the sun, and thus is probably not the best part to include in a laptop. When I first purchased the laptop, it was able to run CPU-intensive apps well, though it did occassionally overheat. However, after three years of use, it would routinely overheat to the point that it would always throttle itself to a lower speed, resulting in my system becoming very slow – things like browsing the Internet or trying to watch video on YouTube just wouldn’t work very well.

I finally decided to take a look at the heatsink/fan area – it didn’t look like it had a lot of dust in it, but then again, I had been lazy. Not any more – I took a can of compressed air and aimed straight at it. Immediately, a huge puff of extremely fine dust spurted out and I had to cover my face. I then proceeded to spray out the rest of the dust until no more was seen. Now, the laptop runs like it was brand new. If you have a laptop that’s getting very hot, invest in a can of compressed air, but make sure you’re in an area that you feel comfortable scattering with very fine dust particles.

Got back from Edmonton yesterday after a decent flight to Toronto and a bus ride to Kingston. Arrived around 6:00 PM, and so I had time to enjoy a good meal and then do some grocery shopping, lest I starve. The city is a lot more busy now, with all the students being back – it was almost a shock to me. You know you’re getting old when you shake your head at the “noisy kids”.

School starts tomorrow, and my course load for the first semester is quite heavy. I’m signed up for seven courses (which includes a fourth-year project course), and my schedule includes 8:30 AM starts on most days. I also have a conflict between one of my technical course and an elective course that I really want to take – but it’s only for one particular lecture, so I’m hoping I can work through it. We’ll see. Continued

Bell recently increased their speeds for their “Sympatico High Speed” service (of which I am a subscriber) from 3 Mbps to 5 Mbps, which is great. I wasn’t really aware of what the speeds were before (though I did notice peak speeds of close to 400 Kbps, which translates into 3+ Mbps), but this is a welcome increase, and one that’s somewhat expected considering they recently raised the price of this service from $44.95 to $46.95 per month.

$50 a month for a 5 Mbps connection isn’t that bad considering it’s still for unlimited bandwidth usage, although those days may be coming to an end. Out here in Edmonton, Telus offers DSL offers a 3 Mbps package for $40.95/month (with a 60 GB cap), or a 1.5 Mbps package for $30.95/month (with a 30 GB cap).

Of more concern is Bell’s future plans. As I mentioned before, their “High Speed Edition” and “Ultra High Speed Edition” (which is still at 5 Mbps despite the former’s increase) are still set for unlimited bandwidth usage. However, this is very likely to change in the future, as indicated in a recent interview with Kevin Crull, President of Residential Services for Bell Canada. In it, he says:

It used to be that the real heavy users were 2 percent of our subscriber base, but now we would consider heavy users to be 30-35 percent of our subscriber base.

This quote is supposed to justify the rolling out of their new “Optimax” service, which I understand is their shiny-new fibre optic solution, probably similar to Verizon’s FiOS in the States. However, what isn’t so blatantly advertised is that Optimax will feature caps, set at 50 GB for the 10 Mbps service or 75 GB for the 16 Mbps, with each additional GB costing $1.25 (for the 10 Mbps) or $1.00 (for the 16 Mbps), quite a hefty fee.
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