Blackboard Course Evaluations Building Block 01/04/2012
During the month of November, I worked on a project at UALR to create a process for online course evaluations. The result of several weeks of slaving away on one of my first blackboard Building Blocks (B2) ended up being used to allow online students evaluate courses at the university. If you're interested read on...
Blackboard taglib issue with itemIdAccessor 11/26/2011
Blackboard has a tag library which allows you to put familar Blackboard looking html objects into your Building block. One element in the tag library is an inventoryList, which gives you a nice looking list of items. An inventory list in Blackboard might render something like this:  You can drag and drop to re-order this list. ActiveRecord is to Ruby on Rails as Active Objects is to Java. Ideally it would be called AwesomeObjects. At last, persisting data for your Java web application is not all xml, POJOS, EJBs and did I mention xml? I don't hate xml but I find configuring your application extremely inefficient after working with other frameworks that utilize convention over configuration. Why do I have to specifiy a log4j properties file, hibernate persistance.xml configuration. And there's soooo many options of how to develop: JPA, Wicket, OJB, Spring, Struts, Torque, Cayenne, Jaxor, TJDO, JDBM, pBeans, JPOX, Simple ORM, Ibatis, XORM, Speedo, Smyle, PAT, LiDO, JDO, IntelliBO, KodoJDO, Hamlets, Faces, RIFE, Shale, Sling, Stripes, Vaadin, Poopdeck (okay, I just made that one up). Point is that It can be a real headache to develop a Java web app. Furthermore, why do I have to create my POJOs and SQL for my database? Why can't a framework just create my data objects, along with nice RESTful CRUD operations for each. Why, crow, why?! So at least for the moment, finding ActiveObjects is lemonade to quench my thirst for answers. Blackboard CourseSites (Introduction) 10/21/2011
Am I head over heals for Blackboard CourseSites? CourseSites offers anyone who signs up as an instructor 5 free courses, templates, plenty of integration such as Blackboard IM and Facebook, which means you can chat with your students that are in your course. Anyone who has a Facebook, Google, twitter, Hotmail, yahoo, i.e. OpenID account can login to CourseSites as a student - without ever creating a Blackboard account. This seems like an awesome step forward for online education. Unfortunately, it may take a few years for universities to realize that net ids and expensive custom SSO portal integration offers little value for the cost. In minutes I had configured a profile: https://ktdockins.coursesites.com/
Google+ vs Facebook 09/21/2011
Signed up for a Google+ account a few days ago. If Google+ goes public in the next year (2012), then it may be the end of the world and Facebook. When they go public, it is on like Donkey Kong. And I think the guys at Facebook know this and have a plan, but given that Google has a larger customer base (1 billion strong) and their innovative products are used by the entire world - they have made their mission clear: become the world's Social network. Only a powerhouse like Google could do this, with the level of integration between Picasa and Android and the budget to make it #1. The 3 things that stood out to me about Google+
Replace Array Keys In PHP 04/28/2011
If you want to replace the keys in an array there is no native php function that does this currently. So I wrote one. It takes the keys from the first array and replaces it with a new key. See code snippet below. How The Mighty Have Fallen! 02/08/2011
I took a ride on the way back machine to find something that is interesting to me. Even since Google first started their search engine in the 90's they have kept the same consistent layout.  Even the "I'm feeling lucky" button remains! How many other products do you know that have kept the same user interface for over 10 years and grown in success? Furthermore, my memory is cloudy with various vage snapshots of random search engines I used before Google. Dogpile and Metacity for instance. In fact, I've been using Google so long I can't remember how to search without it. Language Tag Cloud Creator 02/08/2011
Today I made a tag creator that uses Google API and translate. This will allow me to provide a text ("hello world") and then create a tag cloud from this text. It is not a true tag cloudsince the sizes of the words are random and there is no popularity logic to determine the size. I just randomly assign a tag class to each tag and let the CSS take care of the layout. Here is an example to create a language tag cloud from the English words "Your mother is very nice" So how do I create this? I include jquery.langCloud.js (and jquery.translate.js) and create a ul object The size means that I will get around 10 translations of "whatever" for the language tag cloud. Feel free to download the language tag cloud generator and use however you see fit. Make sure you also download jquery.translate.js or this won't work. 
ASL - 3 Little Pigs 02/08/2011
Below is a story (youtube) I made up in ASL which is similar to the 3 little pigs. However, since the invasion of technology into our daily lives, not just children but everyone has been affected by the explosion of social networking and instant gratification of timely communication. Text messages and Facebook devour our minds and time but we allstill love it. It truly is Sophie's choice for the previous, current and next generations. You can blame video games, you can blame parents; either way, children (and adults) have been desensitized to violence, life, liberty and freedom. Thus, this is how I imagine the 3 little pigs would be told by today's standards. No matter the ramifications of Facebook, Twitter and Youtube - ramifications which are still unknown, we will continue to enjoy these technologies always awaiting the next new tech-fad. | Kelt DockinsDeafie, geekie, techie, chewie Social Networking
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