Monday, June 16, 2008
The UCSF Memory and Aging Center launched a new collaboration today with YouTube, which is groundbreaking in UCSF web development in the sense that the University has been reluctant in the past to work closely with outside providers of information technology services—they prefer to do things in-house. Two common fears are: what if they go out of business? and what if they aren't secure? But I believe that at a certain point you know that certain services will not go away. e.g., today, I can tell you with certainty that YouTube and Flickr will exist for at least the next 5 years. And, as history has clearly shown, universities don't have a perfect record when it comes to computing security—no organization does, and probably no organization will, at least as long as humans are adminning. That's not to say that there aren't things to worry about, but I think universities and university leaders shy about working with outside entities lose so much opportunity because the world around us can innovate far better and far faster than we can ourselves. I found out about the UCSF YouTube videos first from a search on summize.com of the keyword UCSF which led me to a tweet on sobrefacebook's Twitter stream. I later realized that news of the launch is also on the UCSF home page. Noticed something weird today: When I visit trazzler.com, it looks like Facebook. Indeed, it seems like I'm logged in to Facebook. That's weird and a little creepy. When opening Word documents from a link in Firefox 2.0.0.14 in Word 2008, either nothing happens or a blank document titled Document1 opens. The best information and workarounds for this problem appear on Alea Jacta Ouest at cortig.net/wordpress, but I tried the Folder Action Script workaround posted on 5-20-2008 and it did not completely resolve the issue for me. Word 2008 (12.1.0) is now essentially unusable for me. To resolve this problem, I uninstalled Word 2008 and reinstalled 12.0.1 but did not install 12.1.0. Now when attempting to open Entourage, I receive the following error message: "This identity cannot be opened with this version of Entourage." The Microsoft Database Utility did not fix the problem. I updated Office to 12.1.0 and I updated Microsoft AutoUpdate to 2.1.1 and now I can open Entourage but I am stuck with my original problem—Word documents opened from links viewed on web pages through Firefox open a blank document called Document1. A separate problem: When attempting to burn additional files to a DVD using BurnAgain FS 1.0b2, I receive the following error message: "Copy: Sorry, the operation could not be completed because an unexpected error occurred. (Error code -1407) (OK)" I burned anyway and it seemed to work okay but then I got info on the new folder I burned and obviously not all the data had copied successfully, so I deleted and recopied and burned a second time and then it worked. I insert a new disc and perform the same burn of additional files, and this time during the burn BurnAgain FS 1.0b2 spits the disk out from the computer and this error message appears: "Error during burn! The DVD burn aborted with an error. (OK)" I again delete the folder that (probably) partially burned, then close (reburn). It again quits during burn with "Error during burn! The DVD burn aborted with an error. (OK)" I download and install BurnAgain FS 1.0.1. Attempt the same thing. Result: "Error during burn! The DVD burn aborted with an error. (OK)" I create a temporary folder on my desktop. I copy all the files from the known-good DVD to the temporary folder. This process takes a very long time—5 or 6 hours I'm guessing. I'll continue the BurnAgain FS story tomorrow. Troubleshot PharmAdMIT 2008 letters printing problem with Chris F and Joel. With Chris's help, we got it working. The only thing done differently (it seems) is that she ran the regedit fix as Joel whereas I ran it as admin. Shouldn't make any difference, but it works now when it didn't before. I'll do the same for Scott's computer after he leaves today. Late lunch: tostada from Carmelina's. Read a lot about Twitter. Learned what bacn is. Computer maintenance for Scott, Carol, Cindy, Lucia, and Eric V: installed XP SP3 and all Microsoft updates, installed QuickTime 7.5. I noticed that my rss feed for ucsf in tweetscan was broken, so I visited the website and plugged in ucsf manually and here's what I got back: "Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Host 'www.tweetscan.com' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' in /home/ts/public_html/dbconnect.php on line 5—Database? Anyone? Anyone? Database?" Funny, but ouch! Regarding my DVD burning woes, I am thinking that I will never again buy another writeable optical drive if I can avoid it. Tina L is expected to arrive tonight. She is spending some time in the Bay Area with friends, and we'll enjoy having her company for a few days. Tina arrives. We have dinner at Old Mandarin: chicken and beef chow mein, onion pancake, wor won ton soup, beef with broccoli.