Closed Course – Page 11 – <CONTENT /> v.6

January 29, 2014

How the US CCA generate PDFs

A real quick look at PDFs from the Circuit Courts reveals how the PDFs they release are generated.

1st – Corel WordPerfect
2nd – Microsoft Word
3rd – Microsoft Word
4th – Microsoft Word
5th – Corel WordPerfect
6th – ? not obvious from PDF meta data
7th – Microsoft Word
8th – Corel WordPerfect
9th – Corel WordPerfect
10th – Microsoft Word
11th – Microsoft Word
DC – Adobe
Fed – Adobe

Information was obtained by simply downloading a recent PDF and looking at the properties of the file for creation information.

January 27, 2014January 27, 2014

Resetting the KDE Desktop on Debian Wheezy

Note to self: tinker less with the desktop set up and just get some work done.

After seriously messing up the KDE Plasma desktop on my Debian box while adding a second monitor to the setup, I needed to reset the desktop and get some semblance of order again. Turns out that it took a bit of Googling to figure out so I thought I’d put the steps here so I can find them the next time I bust the desktop.

Start by firing up your favorite console. Then just enter these commands, no need to be root:

kquitapp plasma-desktop
rm ~/.kde/share/config/plasm* -fv
plasma-desktop &

This stops the Plasma desktop making the desktop disappear, then removes the config files associated with Plasma, and finally starts the Plasma desktop as if it were the first time you are running it. This seem a bit drastic, but KDE Plasma has a lot of configurable pieces and if it goes sideways it’s a heck of lot easier to wipe it out and start over than it is to try and back it out.

November 22, 2013November 23, 2013

An idea that would make GitHub really interesting for Open Law

Successfully architected solutions do two things: First, they rely on existing open standards rather than reinventing the wheel. They rely on some of the internet’s greatest hits, things like OAuth and REST, and store data in formats born in the internet age, formats like GeoJSON and markdown. No licenses, no SDKs, just data. Second, they’re built as a dumb core with a smart edge. Upgrading a standard is a monumental task. Upgrading a tool is trivial. But more importantly, there’s room at the edge for experimentation, and with readily available libraries, amazing vehicles of empowerment like geojson.io, something that nobody knew could exist six months ago, suddenly start appearing over night.

Ben Balter :: That’s not how the internet works

First, go read the article, it’s really good and packed full of interesting points. I’ll wait.
Welcome back!
Now imagine the CFR stored as data on GitHub.1» A GitCFR repository would be open to all and exposed to the APIs of GitHub. Besides using GeoJSON to locate fire hydrants in your neighborhood you could use GitCFR to find regulations relevant to the manufacture of those fire hydrants. Any API call would return just a specific piece of the regs that could be displayed as the app builder desires.

Of course any of this would require that the GPO set up a system for loading the CFR to GitHub so we don’t have to worry about issues of authenticity. While anyone can grab the bulk XML of the CFR from the GPO’s FDsys website and load it into GitHub, it really needs to the be done by the GPO so that developers can rely on the authenticity of the data.2»

I know, your first question is “What format?”, but that doesn’t really matter. It could be be JSON, Asciidoc, Markdown, XML, anything so long as it’s regular and structured.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5

That said it would certainly make for an interesting weekend project to throw some section of the CFR into GitHub and see what can be done with existing API calls.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5

October 11, 2013

Why Email Is A Fail #768

One of the failings of email is the ease with which topics get stolen. The subject drift in email threads is often stunning. And it then clouds the original questions which don’t get answered.

I understand why this happens. A question or statement in a message triggers a thought that is somehow related to the topic so a reply is fired into the thread.

And boom!

Before you know it an email thread has gone from A to F without getting the discussion needed around A. Then someone needs to step up and redirect back to A. But what about C? That was a good topic too, but it’s lost now.

There must be a better solution. Maybe a threaded forum that made it easy to branch the topic to another discussion would help. Anything would be better than my email folders.

October 9, 2013

The Debate Over Digital Textbooks Goes On and On

[W]hat’s going on here? A few things:

1) Most educators don’t know squat about IT. …
2) The management standards just aren’t there yet. …
3) The content makers privilege DRM protection over usability. …
4) The price is prohibitive. …

Debating the Digital Textbook Issue—Again « TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

The article looks at a couple of recent pieces on the ongoing debate about the actual value of digital textbooks. While I think there is a future in digital course materials, it is likely that the current models of providing digital textbooks are doomed mainly for the 4 reasons cited in the article.

I believe the future of digital course and learning resources isn’t in the poor replication of the print books on DRM locked proprietary platforms that place profit over education but in the creation of new all digital resources created with education and learning in mind, not investor profits.

September 12, 2013

A Law School News Site: Diamond in the Rough or Beach Glass?

Recently while sifting through my project folder I cam across the bits and pieces of a law school news feed aggregator. I had started the code and gathered a dozen or so feeds with an idea of pulling together news from law schools around the country. Like many other weekend projects I had roughed it out and set it aside. The discovery of the code seemed like a nudge to do something with law school news feeds and so a site was born. I’m inviting folks to take a look and let me know if they think is some thing useful that should be further developed or not.

First a disclaimer: This is a personal project and is strictly “nights and weekends”. It is hosted on one of my personal servers. It is not related to any work project I’ve got going.

Let me introduce Law School News, a news reader for law school news feeds. The site gathers news items from the feeds of about 114 US law schools and presents them in an easy to read fashion. Various pages provide lists of feeds and channels to get news on specific schools and topics. Basic search functionality is available.

The feeds included in the site represent about half the law schools in the US. I gathered feed URLs by visiting every law school website and attempting to locate an RSS or Atom feed. I used the links to law school websites found on the LSAC Law School Links page to get to each school’s site. Once on a site I looked for a RSS feed link on the homepage or checked the school’s news page. I did not make any effort to hunt down the feeds if they were not plainly visible. Many schools had more than one feed and in those cases I selected the one that appeared to be a general news feed.

Please note that if you look at the feeds list and see that a particular school is missing it is because either I couldn’t easily locate a feed or the link for the feed didn’t work properly. I have not made a list of schools without feed or with feeds that didn’t work properly. If I missed your school’s feed, let me know in the comments below.

As for the future of this project, who can tell. I would like to expand the coverage to all of the feeds that schools have and that would move beyond news into events, blogs, and library information. And I could certainly wouldn’t mind some help, especially with the tagging of feeds and items. If you’re interested in helping out, let me know in the comments.

September 9, 2013

Did You Know A Swollen Battery Could KO Your MacBook Pro’s Trackpad?

Who would have thought that a swollen battery would knockout my MacBook Pro’s trackpad. Not I, but it is true.

Over the past few months I’ve been having odd issues with the trackpad on my 15 inch, late 2008 MBP. It would often start out a session fine but get less responsive until it just refused to click. Swipe gestures were fine, but clicking was like tapping on a counter top, nothing happened. The reassuring click was gone. This progressed until the trackpad no longer clicked at all. To make matters worse plugging in a mouse didn’t help. The USB mouse’s behavior was erratic and useless.1»

I figured I was looking at either some sort of costly repair or a challenging DIY project to replace the trackpad. So my Internet research began. A search for “macbook pro trackpad broken” yields all sorts of interesting results, most resulting in the replacement of the wonky trackpad. A few reports seemed to indicate that recent software updates to OSX were at issue and suggested software fixes. Those didn’t work. I figured I was looking at a pricey repair, but I kept digging mostly with an eye toward a DIY repair.

Then it appeared, a couple of mentions that battery issues could be the cause. Reports that removing the battery got the trackpad working again. Finally a post or two indicating that aging MBP batteries had a tendency to swell. Since the battery sits directly below the trackpad, the swell pushes on the trackpad and prevents clicking. The pressure is also registered as a continual hold on the pad causing unpredictable behavior or the computer and cursor and messing with input from external devices like a USB mouse.2»

I flipped my Mac over and took out the battery, plugged the MBP into the wall and booted it up. And the trackpad worked like it was brand new. Now I just need a new battery, not a couple hundred dollars of repairs.

I’ll note here that the MBP is not my primary computer these days. Most of my work gets down on a Linux workstation with the MBP use for testing and travel.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5

The swollen battery will also pop the battery cover out of place. I had noticed this on my MBP over a year ago but assumed the cover was broken, not being pushed out of place by the battery.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5

August 29, 2013

More Small Colleges Go with CIO to Oversee Libraries and IT

More than a tenth of college chief information technology officers are also in charge of campus libraries, a sign of the rapid digitization of scholarship and the desire of small colleges to consolidate administrative functions.About 12 percent of CIOs oversee libraries, according to annual surveys by the Center for Higher Education Chief Information Officer Studies. The surveys suggest the arrangement is appealing mostly to smaller colleges at this point. “You get smaller institutions and a good percentage are community colleges,” said Wayne Brown, the centers founder.

via Small colleges are putting the same administrator in charge of IT and libraries | Inside Higher Ed.

As this trend continues, I wonder if we’ll see it spread to law schools? Many law school IT operations live inside the library as it is, so it would make some sense. Of course it also raises the possibility of having the law library ultimately run by a non-librarian.

August 16, 2013

Same on the Outside, New in the Inside

Just a quick note to mark the changing of some of the back end of my blog. I’ve upgraded to WordPress 3.6. That was straightforward and seems to have gone well. I know there are a slew of new features included i WP 3.6 but I haven’t gotten to those yet. For a variety of technical reasons I moved the hosting and DNS of the domain and blog to Linode. With the move to Linode I switched web servers too. This blog is now running on the Nginx web server instead of Apache. I’ll probably have more to write about that switch in the coming weeks.

With these changes I bumped the version number of the blog to 6, so this now officially the sixth incarnation of my blog. I’ve been using WordPress since 2005 and you can find all of versions 4 and 5 going back to February 2005 on this blog. I’ve been blogging since October 2000 and have most of the archives of those blogs handy but offline at the moment. I’ll be bringing them all back shortly.

More soon.