Author: ellen

Imitation Behavior in Fish

Posted on November 7, 2005 by ellen

One of the more amazing characteristics of fish is their ability to learn by imitation. I’ve noticed imitative behaviors in all of my fish, including goldfish, parrot cichlids, convict cichlids, severums and oscars. Although they come out of the egg already knowing how to swim, how to eat, and how to hide, they add new behaviors as they grow.

Learning attitude: Parrot Cichlids
When young parrot cichlids are put in a tank by themselves, they will usually remain shy for weeks or months. They will hide behind anything they can. If there is nowhere else to hide, they will hover at the top corner of the tank tipping downward slightly, pretending to be part of the filter. However, if they are put into a tank with adult parrot cichlids who have no fear of humans, they get over their shyness very quickly! When we got one of our younger parrots, “Baby,” she immediately adopted the oldest parrot cichlid Winston (a female) as her “mother.” She would follow Winston around, and generally imitate everything she did, and as a result showed very little fear of us.

But most of our newly acquired parrot cichlids spend at least a day or two hiding, during which they peek out from a secure spot to observe what’s going on in the tank.

SSL for some files, not for others

Posted on November 6, 2005 by ellen

Certain applications work poorly under SSL: the back button may not function, or users’ security settings may be such that they are constantly presented with various certificate errors. Suppose you have a web application which

Make other extensions besides “.shtml” process for Server Side includes

Posted on October 30, 2005 by ellen

The default extensions which IIS reads for Server Side Includes are .shtm, .shtml and .stm.

Suppose you want server-side includes to be processed in .htm files also? For example you may have file with the .htm extension which has been on the web for some time and has numerous links pointing at it. You could replace it with a file with one of the allowed extensions, and put a redirect in its place, pointing to the new file. Or, if you have access to the IIS server settings, you could add the .htm extension to the list of files processed for SSI.

Click on thumbnail images to see larger version.

Open IIS Manager and right-click the Default Web Site. Select Properties from the popup menu. The Properties dialog appears.
Select the Home Directory Tab and click Configuration under the Application Settings area.

Make a directory on a server part of another server’s domain

Posted on October 29, 2005 by ellen

Sometimes it is necessary to have files or an application on one IIS web server (Server B) appear as if they were in the same domain as another server (Server A). For example, you may want

http://serverB.com/content

to be accessible via the URL

http://serverA.com/content

This is useful in cases where you need to avoid cross-doman scripting issues, or simply want to make everything appear to be hosted under one umbrella domain name.

On an IIS server, this can be accomplished by creating a virtual directory on Server A which points to a directory on Server B.

Getting Questionmark Perception to work with Docent 6.5

Posted on October 29, 2005 by ellen

Making Questionmark Perception quizzes SCORM-compliant, AND compatible with Docent 6.5 LMS was a big piece of our recent Docent implementation project, since we had many legacy quizzes.

Here are the steps involved:

Install QMWise (available from Questionmark.com) on the Perception server.
Install Content packager (available from Questionmark.com) on your workstation
( tip, do NOT have SSL enabled on the server – it blocks QMWise communication if the certificate is slightly misnamed).
Read the Knowledgebase article “How can I call Perception from a SCORM-compliant Learning Management System?”
Get the files scorm.pip and perceptionSCO.htm from Questionmark.com.

Docent, SCORM and cross-browser issues

Posted on October 24, 2005 by ellen

During our recent Docent LMS implementation, one of the most difficult tasks I was faced with was to ensure SCORM activities work if browsers other than IE were used.

The specific cross-platform issues fell into several categories:

Mozilla Live Connect Bug
Domain names not fully qualified
Query string length

Definitions of terms used in this article:

LMS – Learning Management System – a system of launching and tracking online learning content. In this article I am mainly referring to the “Docent 6.5” LMS

SCORM – Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model – a communication standard used by online learning modules to communicate scoring and interaction data to a Learning Management System and vice-versa.

How to publish Powerpoint files for the web

Posted on October 10, 2005 by ellen

This procedure which will leave you with an original PowerPoint-format (to use in lectures) document, and a web-enabled version:

Create a standard powerpoint presentation. Save it as ProjectName.ppt in the folder you are using for the project. Make sure every slide has a Title. These titles will be used as the titles of the buttons on the left navigation column in your web page. It helps to use a powerpoint template so that you are definitely creating a title with each new slide.
When you are done editing, and ready to make a web version of the presentation, select Save as Webpage from the File menu.
The Save As dialog comes up.
Navigate to your project folder in the file list area. Double-click on the folder so that it opens and you are working inside it.
Click the CreateNewFolder icon just to the right of the Save in: box. (the icon looks like a folder with a spark on it.)
A New Folder dialog will pop up. Type learningmodule in the Name box.
Hit OK. You will now be “inside” the learningmodule folder.

Questions that need to be asked about Lousiana’s response to Katrina

Posted on September 7, 2005 by ellen

This is best statement I’ve seen yet on the ineptitude with which Hurricane Katrina evacuation and recovery were handled.

After things calm down, and the memory of all this begins to fade, I hope no one forgets to ask these questions:

Why were no means of evacuation other than the SuperDome provided for those too poor or infirm to leave? These were not people who were set on remaining in their homes no matter what. They all flocked to the SuperDome for lack of a better plan.

Even if we accept the lack of leadership in facilitating the evacuation, when it quickly became obvious that the SuperDome was no longer a viable facility for the thousands of people inside – why did it still take a WEEK to get them out? Even though people were actually dying inside.

Issues with Shared Excel and Word files on Novell servers

Posted on September 5, 2005 by ellen

I’ve been using a shared Novell drive to collaborate with a team. We use Excel and Word files, and I’ve attempted to make them “shareable”. Quite often the file will work for a while, then “lose” its shareable attribute.

To make an excel file shareable on a Novell server, you have to do two things.

Open the file, select “Tools: Shared Workbook”. Check “Allow changes by more than one user at the same time.”

Adding Narration to Powerpoint