Author: ellen

Experiences with Dropsy in Goldfish

Dropsy is one of the worst diseases goldfish can come down with. It’s usually fatal. I hope this description of one goldfish that survived a bout of dropsy will help someone to save their fish.

Fish are said to have the disease “dropsy” when they swell up and their scales stand out all over like a pinecone. As JoAnn the Goldfish Guru says, “Dropsy is a SYMPTOM of other problem(s) with the fish. Dropsy can be due to problems with the environment (water quality, temperature shock, alkalinity), parasites, bacteria or virus.” Dropsy is apparently caused by bacterial infections and kidney failure.


Eggdrop in a happy moment. He has never been able to swim correctly, so he uses the bubblers to get around.

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When MovableType won’t recognize ImageMagick

Recently my web-host restored the server I use after some problems which necessitated wiping it and starting from scratch. After doing this my installation of MovableType was no longer able to create thumbnails. The thumbnail option no longer appeared in the upload dialog. When I looked at the config file, all the thumbnail options were commented out – in other words it was defaulting to use ImageMagick.

If you read the verbiage in that file carefully, which I did not, it says:

Specifies the image toolkit used to create thumbnails from uploaded images.
# By default, the ImageMagick library and Image::Magick Perl module are used;
# if your system does not have these, you can use the NetPBM tools instead
# (assuming that your system has these tools installed). Possible values for
# this setting are "ImageMagick" or "NetPBM".
#
# ImageDriver NetPBM

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A Trivia Game built with Questionmark Perception Part I

I. JCAHO Trivia – Background, objectives, and game play


(click to enlarge image)

In June, as a small part of a larger hospital staff training project, I built an educational online game for the nursing department. There were several requirements that helped determine the shape of the final result.

Synchronous game play vs. Asynchronous: When considering what kind of game might be best for our purposes, we first considered one based on Jeopardy, since that format is so popular.

However, Jeopardy is not an asynchronous system. In other words, each Jeopardy round is a timed competition against several other players, all of whom must be playing simultaneously or “synchronously” as the elearning people call it.

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