Grok This

shades of red

Here are the ranges of reds, with the three colors that we have already discussed.

Found a link to a video about Sloodle, a tool that integrates Second Life with Moodle to allow educators to teach classes in there.  It was made by a group of Full Sail students for one of their classes.  It’s a very good overview and resource for educators interested in the possibilities of teaching in virtual worlds.

http://web.me.com/dlaks/FSO_Blog/LMO/Entries/2009/5/3_Future_Trends.html

I’ve gone to Sloodle Island several times and looked around and also checked out their website… basically just  lurking at this point, but am definitely interested in testing it in the near future.

Discussions of 3D Web usability and accessibility are still in their infancy, and it’ going to be an interesting process to watch and maybe even participate in.  There’s a nicely designed discussion site set up by an avatar friend of mine called Azwaldo Villota called Instructional Alchemy that starts with a intro on web usability - there could be many similiarities in the way 2D and 3D spaces are designed for usability and accessibility, but there are quite a few dissimilarities also.  One big difference I can think of is that you don’t have to figure out how to get your spastic avatar up a winding staircase to get to the next bit of instructional content on the 2D web.  Hey, I’m talking to all you builders in Second Life who love to frustrate me by not giving me the teleport option!

Looks like Google is living up to its promise and offering downloads of their O3D API.  Check it out at http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/ available for Mac, Windows and Linux.

So, I just spent an hour trying to figure out why my localhost stopped working today.  A little backstory…I have Apache listening to port 80 and IIS listening to port 8080 and everything was peachy keen(I thought) until I tried typing in localhost and got a 404 error.  I stopped and restarted all services but the icon remained yellow and localhost still gave me the same error message.  I fiddled around with IIS, but that was working fine, localhost:8080 worked.  So, I was totally stumped and decided to use the ‘test port 80′ option under my handy dandy wampserver icon and lo and behold, it said that my port 80 is actually being used by Microsoft-HTTPAPI 2.0.  Hm.  So I knew it wasn’t IIS, because I already checked that, so I typed the message into Google and ran into a little forum where they were discussing exactly this issue!  I had forgotten that I had recently installed SQL Server 2008 - (hey if you’re a student, you can get a free copy at Microsoft’s Dreamspark website!) and it seems that if you install Reporting Services, it automatically listens to port 80.  So, here’s what you do…you go into Reporting Services Configuration Manager and change the port to whatever you have IIS listening to.  In my case, it is port 8080.   You need to change it in two areas:

Webservice URL  - just change the port in the text box

Report Manager URL - click Advanced, then in the pop up box, Edit and change the port. 

That’s it!  Once I made those changes, the Wampserver icon turned white and all was right in Naomi’s world.

It’s 2:43 AM and can’t sleep, so thought it would be the perfect time to set up a personal blog.  I decided to call it Grok This because of a little editorial I wrote yesterday where I made up a fictitious blog called Grok This…

From the little that I remember of the book ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’, grokking means to understand something so completely that you become a part of it, or something to that effect.  Similar to the feeling you get when you’re snarfing a Cheese Danish, probably.   I’d look it up on Wikipedia, but it’s 2:47 AM. 

Anyway…