Let’s face it: education without interaction is about as effective as shouting origami instructions at a lumberjack who is cutting down trees. Sure, your informative lessons will come in handy when the product of their work finally becomes paper, but it will be long forgotten and ultimately worthless by then. The only way a student is going to learn is if they can put their hands on what you’re teaching, walk the journey with you, and attach a positive interactive experience to the lesson.

This is a follow on from my server problems post from yesterday…

Regarding the general issue, misiaq came up with a great suggestion, which was to use watchdog. It’s not going to “fix” anything, but if I get a reboot when the general issue happens, that would be much better than having the server sit idle for 5 hours until I  wake up. »

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I’m pretty sure last night’s problem was caused by a disk failure in the RAID array. The system is working now, but it might go down sometime today to get the disk replaced. Hopefully they won’t do what they did last time and wipe the bloody lot! »

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WordPress 4.5 “Coleman” has been released.

I just applied it to the five WordPress sites I manage by manually triggering the auto-update and everything went through fine.

There are some updates to the standard themes that you will need to manually trigger for update, but there was no drama there either.

I fully expect a rash of little updates to get released over the coming days as new bugs are spotted. »

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I saw a tweet this morning that pointed me to this article.

Google To Challenge Amazon, Microsoft In Cloud Computing War

This comes hot on the heels of this article.

Google dumps ISP email support. Virgin Media takes ball, stomps home

KeePass 2.32 has been released. You can download it from here.

You can read about how I use KeePass and KeePassX2 on my Mac, Windows and Android devices here.

Cheers

Tim…

UltraEdit 23 for Windows has been released. Followers of the blog will know I’m an UltraEdit junkie, so as soon as I got the email telling me UltraEdit 23 had arrived I installed it instantly. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread!

The glaring hideousness you are presented with is a ribbon! For ***** sake! Hasn’t the whole world spent enough time moaning about the Office ribbons already?

Followers of the blog will know I’ve been a long time user of the editor UltraEdit.

I got introduced to UltraEdit about 15 years ago. At the time everything else around sucked. I paid my money and was hooked pretty much instantly. At that point it was a Windows-only product. When I later ditched Windows in favour of Linux at home, I went through a succession of crappy editors and was never really happy. I eventually started running UltraEdit on Linux using Wine and it “mostly” worked.

In my Writing Tips series I wrote about Copyright Theft. I had a quick look through my blog and the first time I wrote about my stuff getting stolen was in 2006. I’m sure it had happened before then and it has happened many times since. Most of the time I try to deal with it privately and give people a chance to sort their lives out without publicly branding them a thief, but sometimes circumstances bring the worst out of me.