A question came up on the technet forums about monitoring the handle count of a process. This can of course be done just by a unit monitor but an alternative that may be useful in some situations is to use the Process Monitoring Authoring Template to create some base monitoring (process running) and the relevant process class. And then target the handle count monitor at the class that the authoring template creates. Here is a run through:
http://systemcentersolutions.wordpress.com/files/2009/11/process-monitoring.pdf

The official blurb:

Since 2001, OFFF festival has been held in Barcelona, becoming the globally recognized and trendsetting event it is today. The three-day festival showcases top digital artists, web, print and interactive designers, motion graphics studios, and new music adventurous. OFFF festival provides insight into all culture media platforms.

But OFFF is more than an event about any of these disciplines. More than a design conference, a multimedia trade fair, or a digital animation festival. OFFF is an enthusiastic celebration of a new visual culture.

OFFF is spreading the work of a generation of creators that are breaking all kind of limits. Those separating the commercial arena from the worlds of art and design; music from illustration, or ink and chalk from pixels. Artists that have grown with the web and receive inspiration from digital tools, even when their canvas is not the screen.

OFFF dreams about the future, and then writes the code for it.

Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Would love to visit or even better, take part in this some day..

Author: Shirley Ho
Source: download

Most people might think that all DVDs are created equal, so why not find the cheapest place you can find? The truth is, not all, dvd, DVDs are created equal. Never ever just go for the company with the lowest price quote. It cannot be more wrong. The list below serves as a guide on how to find professional duplication / replication services at a reasonable price.
1. One-stop-shop: By doing the authoring, package design, duplication / replication in one place, you can negotiate a packaged deal,, dvd, which will in turn save money. Keeping it all in one place will also cut down significant time in shipping and communication back and forth.
2. Get referrals on services: when you are in a time-crunch, the tendency is to go with the first or cheapest company that you can find. Ask around for referrals because with time and financial constraint, you have less room to risk, dvd,, dvd, for errors.
3, dvd, . Go local: Working with a company, dvd, cross, dvd, country, dvd, can be quite frustrating because of time zones and shipping times. In a time-critical job, it’s better to work with a local company who you can contact and meet face-to-face. Any problems can be resolved faster if you are just a few miles away. Keep in mind that most replication quotes do not include shipping time and charge.
4. Trust the pros: It might save you a few hundred dollars to author the DVD yourself, or have your roommate do it. Keep in mind that professional authoring houses and replicators do this day in and day out,, dvd, what they, dvd, can do in a few days without errors may take you longer to complete. A DVD not properly, dvd, authored causes more damages than the money you save, dvd, . This might be the worst decision you can make in order, dvd, to save money.
5. The artist’s touch: Find someone trustworthy with print experience to design your packaging may make, dvd, all the difference in retail, dvd, sales, dvd, . It is the first thing customers see even before opening the DVD. Make, dvd, your product, dvd, stand out among all the competitors. The payoff will definitely be worth the cost. Also remember that, dvd, a web design may not do well in print and vice versa.
6. Proof again and again: It takes time whenever changes are to be made to the master and artwork when it is already, dvd, in production. Printers often charge for additional print proofs and, dvd, additional stamper is needed if a problem is found in check disc. Either case it delays the schedule and increases the overall project cost. So do yourself a big favor, before you send everything off to the replicator, check all, dvd, materials thoroughly.
Shirley Ho is the co-founder of Hellman Production, a CD/DVD duplication replication specialist in Los Angeles. For more tips visit http://www.hellmanproduction.com and http://dvdduplicationhelp.blogspot.com

My publisher finally came back to me about my 2nd book. I’ve got a tight deadline, editing the manuscript and getting it back to them by next Monday (16th). So I’ve got a busy weekend, reading through the manuscript and making changes to all that I’ve written. That’s a 98 page Word document to read through.

But I’m happy.

Tamotion had started working on a set of music videos for Michoel Schnitzler’s first album. The album – and consequently the video DVD – is entitled “Di Neshuma Flam”.

The album is all in Yiddish and tells stories of Tzaddikim in past. Most of the stories are set in old towns and villages not of this century. We found a beautiful small village, a national park, Millbrook Village, NJ. This historical location has beautiful scenery and houses. We did a full day of filming over there.

The DVD is scheduled for release later this winter. Until then we will keep posting updates and take you behind the scenes of this production. See you soon.

Recently, I’ve been doing work looking at accessibility implications of electronic assessment (e-assessment for short). E-assessment covers any use of electronic means, often a web interface, to ask questions of and gather information or evidence from a user in order to provide some form of assessment of their levels of knowledge, skills or competencies in  a particular subject or activity.

From a technical perspective, this is related to electronic survey accessibility, which in turn could easily be seen as a real world instance of accessible web form design plus accessible navigation; and therefore covered by a subset of WCAG 2.0. However, it’s not as straightforward as that.

I’d initially thought e-assessment was a tool mainly used in colleges and universities – my bias being partly due to working in that sector, and also my impression that the tertiary education community seemed to be responsible for much of the research and development into e-assessment, such as that funded in the UK by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). But I’m now aware that there’s a much, much wider scope of use – in schools, by professional standards bodies, organisations assessing employee capabilities, lifelong learning.

Despite this diversity of use, there are common constraints which can affect how accessibility of e-assessment is approached.

Balancing accessibility and fair competency assessment

E-assessment is about objectively measuring whether someone has sufficient knowledge/skill to meet a certain level of attainment. All candidates should have an equal chance of being objectively assessed, and accessibility barriers should not obstruct a disabled candidate from being able to demonstrate their competency. This can lead to problems when trying to figure out for example how to provide appropriate text alternatives for a graphic that forms part of a question, or choosing between drag-and-drop or radio buttons as a question type.

The e-assessment author should know what knowledge and skill is being assessed, so that should be at the forefront when thinking about accessibility. Are someone’s powers of visual interpretation of a photo, diagram or video being assessed? If so, is it reasonable to exclude someone who can’t see by not describing the graphic or providing audio description for a video? Is manual dexterity a critical part of the skill being assessed? If so, is it reasonable is it to exclude someone who has a tremor, or is unable to use their hands by utilising a drag-and-drop style answer selection? These are questions that have to be answered by the assessment author before effective accessibility solutions can be applied.

The problem occurs when the method of assessment requires a capability that isn’t necessary for the skill being assessed. So, in the above example, example keyboard-inaccessible drag and drop questions are rarely justifiable.

Assessment Environment

The assessment environment also presents accessibility challenges. In theory, e-assessment presents many accessibility wins, by supporting flexibility of delivery – alternative formats become easier to generate based on personal preferences – and easing maintenance tasks. In practice, flexibility can be difficult to achieve in a controlled environment. There is the question of the extent to which the interface used to present the e-assessment to candidates is accessible. Can a disabled candidate navigate through the questions, understand each question, and select and input an answer without undue difficulty? This should be assessed, and any issues acted upon, in advance.

But, also, will a candidate who needs a particular assistive technology or accessibility solution be able to use their own computer and AT? Or will they have to become familiar (potentially at short notice) with another AT that has been provided to them at the last minute, may be unfamiliar and might not be exactly suitable for their needs? The latter situation means a disadvantage for the disabled person being assessed. How do you provide the assessment environment – which might  be a special locked down browser – with sufficient accessibility support? Can you justify refusing to allow someone to bring and use their own computer and AT on the grounds of fairness to others taking the assessment?

The inaccessibility of the assessment enviroment was the central focus of the Latif vs PMI court case, where a ruling found in favour of a blind person claiming discrimination by a professional association.

Assessment creation

We’ve been doing some work looking at the extent to which e-assessment software supports accessible assessment authoring using W3C ATAG as a reference. This work highlighted some of the potential issues that an author might unwittingly introduce, through insufficient or obscure accessibility prompting by the authoring tool. These issue can be managed short term by author training and support (general accessible design and the specific issues surrounding the authoring tool they use) and a suitable quality assurance process before assessments are presented to candidates. Longer term, of course, we need improved authoring tools.

But, at a recent event on e-assessment and accessibility held by Becta, I became more aware of the complex chain of organisations involved in the supply and delivery of an electronic assessment. At a university, a lecturer is likely to be responsible for creating and delivering their own assessments; but elsewhere there are organisations which are responsible for managing and validating the assessment process. They, or a third party, might author assessments which are then provided to schools and other organisations to administer to students.

So if the original authors are not aware of accessibility issues, there is a long chain down which a request for accessibility information – or adjustments – must pass; and there is no guarantee the request will get to the end of the chain. More informed procurement processes may help to ensure that organisations ask for, and receive, e-accessibility in an appropriate way. But the short term requires people administering e-assessments to make doubly sure in advance that they are aware of any potential accessibility barriers present, and takes steps to manage their impact.

The extreme circumstances under which e-assessment takes place means that developments like better accessibility profiling of users and assessments will hopefully have a positive impact, but a contextual and pragmatic approach to accessibility is essential. Thankfully there are people on the case helping to raise awareness, including Becta, and also Techdis, with their guidelines for accessible assessments.

Went to sleep with some questions : Just how off tangent am I from the goals and purpose I had set out about teaching? Am  I asking the right questions? If I had the right thought 1-2 years ago, how much of that belief would still be relevant in the context of the rapid change and increased channels those change have brought to amplify or execute that thought?

In trying to put it in words the contents of a fuzzy dream that seemed to stretch hours: You are standing at the leading edge of thought. It is true because you wonder;you will be the generation that witnesses the crossover to the intergalactic civilization. You are the last of the analogue/atom age. Choose your battles and efforts not from the perspective of what’s gone wrong but what needs to be.

The sleep osmosis crystallized some of my thoughts. I’ve been struck intermittently in the last 2 weeks with  headaches, feeling anger, fear or worry. I know when I feel that way I am getting out of alignment with my purpose. It’s not that my instincts were wrong but my need to step-up after I understood the first premise of my instincts seems to be accelerating. I’m moving in the same direction just the premise of what I thought I knew to go in the direction of where I’m going gets re-educated.

I had set out to create an e-learning platform to extend my availability and my reach for my ESL students because not only do I feel time is running out for them it’s running out for me too. Besides, I had started feeling very uncomfortable with my traditional idea of classroom teaching; my thoughts and insights may be forward but my delivery was not.

What had caused me great worry was the fact that no one else sees the speed at which we are moving. I worry because I know it takes time to develop deep-knowledge skills; validating, analyzing, critically think, self-directedness, higher order thought, etc. The fastest way I know how to is to try and seed their frames of thought so I can append other new thoughts to them. But even that I am failing desperately as they think I am “story-telling” and not preparing their brains for learning.

I started crystallizing my feelings that the big shift of the beginning of the 21st century will be in the discovery of multiverses or intergalactic civilizations. To quote Michio Kaku, we would be going from Civilization Zero to Civilization One.  If I am 32 now and the students we are concerned for are anywhere between 5 and 25, in 20-30 years they may no longer live the way we had to contend with. We, are the last of the Analogue Age.

We, “the last of the analogs”, grew up in a world where imagination was taboo, abundance was peppered with a sense of guilt and new freedom brought new anarchy, new disillusionments and new forms of chaos.  Who knew how to tap pulse using the old dial phone? I did. But have these young people we are teaching even seen a dial phone? They think dialing means punching in numbers on a touchscreen or a numberpad.

We resist this so much because we wanted to “restore” the old order. And the reason we wanted to was because we did not grow up understanding the contexts of the New Order.

By 2030-2040 we would be too old to matter much and the reigns of leadership will be handed to those born around 2000. Their children, those born around 2015-2020 will benefit when the transition becomes fully digital.  At the rate technology is advancing and cost to produce more is dropping, the content design and delivery architecture for learning would look completely different by 2015 to 2020 to what we call “e-learning” right now.

Perhaps I am seeing my whole premise all wrong; that I don’t have to teach higher-literacy. Perhaps I am the last of the analogue age. This digital generation would not need higher-literacy because they are audio and visual design content consumers. The technology to design content for their “download” and assimilation hasn’t fallen low enough, partly because the adoption isn’t high enough. But all that could change in 6 months, you’d never know.

I’m starting to imagine that  soon I will be able to afford powerful digital authoring tools. How that is going to happen without a substantial income, I don’t know but trust in the Law of Allowing. – By 2015, school textbooks would be too expensive an option. Training and learning publications will go the way of newspapers. Who is going to fill the void in learning and training  ( a delivery of knowledge and practices, archived and delivered)? There is simply no time to rebuild, organize and manage an institution the scale of schooling and publishing put together in order to create content and delivery because those who have enough higher order thinking to conceptualize, author and produce are already between 25 to 65.  The pool of analogue intellectualism is shrinking. The work of archiving thousands of years of human knowledge, thought and experiences will take decades. Yes, we have google, but we don’t have the systems in place for the digital-age consumers to know how WE made sense of information BEFORE the Information Revolution. Information without the sense to make anything out of it is pretty useless.

So, I imagine, something like the Apple Tablet, a supersized  Iphone,  would dominate markets, being far more affordable to the masses then that it is now. People will be able to download lessons and podcasts on anything, anytime, anywhere. The difference between one learning to another is simply design.

If an author has great content but not design and the content is meaningful enough to warrant someone to pick it up and redesign it for him, it will happen. If a complex idea needs to be stepped-down to be redesigned and remastered to make its meaning more digestible,  it will happen. We are seeing the birth of mass amaterization :what do you think it’s for? It’s to hone the skills of those who can understand the old analog wisdom and help with the work of remastering them for the visual, multiple styles of digital learning.

The most successful learning authors are those who are best at understanding how those born between 1990-2010 learn and design content for that. The years between 2010 and 2030 will see a massive archiving of the distillation of thought from the last of the analogue world. All the knowledge of mankind compiled in the last few thousand years will be made available for all future generations. All thought and knowledge will be hyperlinked and connected for origins,context, etc. E-learning is not going to be about stand-alone “for me” business models regurgitating hard copies onto flash pages. E-learning will be the means for a  massive last generation human effort in archiving all of human learning and thought. Perhaps we don’t need to teach critical thinking, after all. Those who can,should do and teach only to those who are inclined towards this mass-storytelling of our time.

Perhaps all we need to do is start to reverse-engineer all our thoughts and experiences of learning and then write them as stories.  By 2030, efficient systems to archive all these thought processes, of how we learned what we learned, how we knew what we knew, what sparked our first learning, how did we get from there to here, what made it harder or easier for us would be written down would become a reality. The job for those algorithms and machines is then to hyperlink our content to other authors who will provide more context to the “What” we mentioned. And from that context, another round of archiving will pick up the similarities and patterns of thought/knowledge among a  significant number of authors and synthesize all that into one thought for the next round of editing. Compressed wisdom. These machine-designed archiving would be like academic referencing on Speed.

When reading Howard Gardner’s FIVE MINDS FOR THE FUTURE, I was assuming that I needed to teach non-native speakers of English the skills to become authors and archivers for the years 2010 and beyond. I think now I was mistaken. Those skills, to find, validate, correlate, synthesize, leverage, problem solve and create new (content, architectures, etc) will always be scarce and highly prized. While algorithms and machines will come in place to help us archive and find and link to each other, Story-tellers will continue to have to correlate,synthesize etc…higher order thinking (wisdom) will always be the domain of  storytellers. Even as the collective wisdom of a civilization increases due to the available knowledge, highly-developed metacognition, perhaps to the point of being prophetic, will always be the post for the next level of wisdom to be achieved.

These deliverers of wisdom and knowledge will also need the savvy of stepping down their knowledge to organize all that information in a way that can be digested by the next generation before the machines can archive and produce the next body of knowledge to be found, linked, correlated, synthesized, leveraged, solve further problems for new innovations, etc.

Perhaps some of us “forward-thinking” teachers have been backwards-thinking. We look at this crisis in anti-intellectualism and digital-graphics consumption as a decline in humanity because we want to restore them to the sort of skills we had to acquire to make sense of this mass of information of the world we grew up in. We wanted our children to inherit these thinking skills. But what if it were not necessary  because, like in the movie The Matrix (Keanu Reeves), learning could be downloaded digitally, complete with all the links and wires and hierarchies to obtain “deep knowledge” in the matter within minutes or hours?

There is one short generation of story-tellers and archivers from the analogue world to prepare the ground for the mass digital transcribing. The job may fall in the hands of those born between 1960 and 1990. Who will enable the many tiers of storytellers, editors and content designers and architectures? There is no time for a formal recruitment to organize and manage them. Will we suffer the fate of clashing egos and waste precious time? Or would we be able to churn out stories in a symbiotic ecology?

The first round is to produce as much content and story out there. It is the job of the next tier to collate, edit, archive so on and so on. What do you think?

A few days later……………

The thing I love about blogging is that it makes me focus on a thought long-enough to attract the answers my questions were asking.

I may not be so far-off….The Future of Education by Futurist Thomas Frey.

v2.imerisia.gr – τεχνολογια , gadgets
Η νέα σειρά οθονών για υπολογιστές W30 Color Pop της LG ξεχωρίζει για τον πρωτότυπο και εξαιρετικά λεπτό σχεδιασμό της -με πάχος μόλις 37 χιλ.-, ενώ είναι διαθέσιμη σε μια μεγάλη γκάμα χρωμάτων. Εκτός από την ενδιαφέρουσα ποικιλία χρωμάτων, οι νέες οθόνες της LG διαθέτουν πλαίσιο με γυαλιστερό φινίρισμα και δύο διαφορετικούς τόνους απόχρωσης. Επίσης, είναι διαθέσιμες σε widescreen format και μέγεθος 18,5? και 21,5?, με αναλύσεις 1.366 x 768 και 1.920 x 1080 αντίστοιχα, ενώ διαθέτουν αναλογία αντίθεσης 30.000:1, εξασφαλίζοντας υψηλή ευκρίνεια και ποιότητα εικόνας.[next]

I totally know now why there is no book about the anxieties of parenting… Well, I guess there could be a book about it and I would never know, because I am a parent and don’t have time to read anything other than notes from the schools and a 2nd grade reading book with my daughter … But I’m pretty sure that there is a gap between the books of how to have great kids/how to be a great parent and how to fix your kids/how to fix poor parenting.  But I decided the other day, while sitting in the Driver’s License Testing area waiting for my daughter, that it is my time to shine… fill that void in the book world, write my book and pack my bags because Oprah will be booking me soon..

Writing a parenting book… Not just any parenting book, but a book about parenting that will change the world because all of the secret things that people conveniently forget to tell you will be revealed.  I know you may be asking what qualifications I have to write such a book and my answer would be … “None.”  Nope, no qualifications at all.  In fact, my pen name will be Unqualified Mom….but that’s not the point.  I just decided that writing a parenting book would easily be a top seller without much effort…. here’s why…

First of all, I don’t know one single parent who has time to sit down and truly read a parenting book.  Now maybe when you are expecting your first child  … or maybe when you are expecting your second child and the first one is in school or napping, but if you have more than two kids I can pretty much guarantee a parenting book becomes nothing more than prop to even out a wobbly table.

Secondly, parents want to be good at what they do so and if nothing else, they want to look like they know what they are doing… possibly even create an intimidation factor for the kids, so they will load up the book shelves with parenting books that would impress any grandparent.  Therefore, a parenting best seller need nothing more than an appealing title and an eye catching cover…. maybe even an interchangeable cover to match any decor.  It could be filled with substance but if it sells just because of the outer images, then why bother…

While sitting in the driver’s license testing center waiting for my daughter to take her road test the other day, I tossed a few book titles around in my head….  “Parenting for the Book Smart” (I’m pretty sure Parenting for Dummies is taken) … no……..”Have a New Kid by the End of this Book or Decide not to Have Kids by the End of this Book”….. no…….. “Kids…. Who knew?”….. no….. then finally… the one that Oprah will promote… ” The Parenting Code (Momma Never Told You but I Will)”.

This was the winner because of the gimmick factor and also the great possibility that Oprah would actually probably expect me to answer some questions about it….  so, for those who are parents and are truly wanting to read a parenting book (I still don’t think it is possible), I will add a bit of parenting wisdom and it won’t really matter what I say because it will totally in code form. (I figure if you have time to read it then you will have time to figure out the code.) The code will make it seem more intellectual and mysterious… taking it totally to the number one spot on the New York times list.

The little tidbits of wisdom I give will be all about those little things no one told you about being a parent because if they did then, just like the Shakers (Google it), civilization would die… yes, you read that correctly… if people were told about all of the sleepless nights, the anxieties, the worries, etc then there would be no procreation… so my wisdom would enlighten many and help them deal with the realities of the parenting life.

All of this came to mind that day because, try as someone may have to tell me to expect this, it just sank at that moment ……that as they grow and spread their wings and fly into adulthood you still ache when they ache, rejoice when they rejoice, and would fight tooth and nail to keep them safe…. Though the idea of a more convenient daily routine was enticing, I still think I would be okay driving her around for a few more years, but it was not to be.  Despite forgetting to turn on the ignition during her driving test, my daughter passed the road test and is now a licensed driver.

I was told that life would never be the same again.. (See if you can figure out the code in that sentence)

So this is the only qualification I have to write a parenting book on the “silent code” to keep civilization booming… I am a parent and I always will be… no matter how old they are.  ….Now that I think about it though, I would hate to be the cause of the end of civilization.  So therefore, maybe I should focus on the “Parenting for the Book Smart.”

And for the record, my daughter got her license last Tuesday….. And she totaled the van last Wednesday.  So I am definitely qualified!

Philippians 4:6-7

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus”.