At the first lecture of the new Semester I succumbed to a little rant about academic dishonesty. One of my students (thanks David) alerted me to this great Slashdot | Cooperation in CS Education? thread in response to this question:

"The college I currently attend, like most colleges, is on a form of 'Academic Honesty Policy'. It has been explained to me in various ways, but mostly it boils down to: If you catch someone's code out of the corner of you eye, that's cheating, and you need to come up with your own 'original' ideas. I'm a CS major, so I write a lot of code, and I imagine when I get in the work force, I'll be writing a lot more. The difference is, in the workplace, I'll be in a team of people. I won't have control and I'll have personnel and political issues to deal with in addition to my job. So far I've had one class that actually demonstrated this principle, and I'm pretty much finished all my CS courses. I know the college has to do this so they can somehow grade 'my' code and assess my performance. Isn't there a better way? A way that students can be taught to work as a team yet still be able to tell who is pulling their own weight and who is not?"

There's some gems of advice/opinion/info in some of the posts in that thread. Must let me colleagues know.

developerWorks: Web architecture | XML zone : An introduction to RSS news feeds

RDF Site Summary (RSS) is catching on as one of the most widely used XML formats on the Web. Find out how to create and use RSS files and learn what they can do for you. See why companies like Netscape, Userland, and Moreover use RSS to distribute and syndicate article summaries and headlines. This article includes sample code that demonstrates elements of an RSS file, plus a Perl example using the module XML::RSS.

Thanks for the link Don!

In Brian Carnell & Knowledge Management, Seth I am sure speaks for most of using Conversant when he says:

I have to admit to being a little jealous of Brian Carnell, but mostly I'm just very impressed. He's just one man, but he's built a collection of ultra-high quality, content-rich web sites with Conversant. In fact, it's hard to believe that one person has done all that.

I would like to aspire to Brian's capabilities with Conversant and I am determined to improve www.smeed.org since he has shown us how much untapped potential there really is in Conversant.

In fact, I'm toying with the idea of setting some student project(s) that somehow uses Conversant to its full potential. I must also polish off the http://www.arspentia.org site and prepare it for the next set of group projects in CAD - Macrobyte willing.

On the AppleScript - Web Services page, Dave [Scripting News] gets the credit he deserves:

Web Services applications communicate using XML-based protocols, such as XML-RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). The SOAP protocol is a working standard defined by the WC3, an Internet standards organization. XML-RPC is a UserLand Software open specification.

Although my RSS formatted weblog view of the most recent weblog day is working OK, the Advanced Query Page generated version isn't. Bummer! I'm not aware of changing anything - other than documenting how I set it up - so I'll need to investigate. Aside: I've noticed that documenting code sometimes breaks it ;-)

If nothing else my debugging of this should help to contribute to the F.C. Support: RSS Generation in Conversant documentation effort.

Pete Barrie and I are considering the Cygwin for our Low Level Programming class:

Cygwin is a UNIX environment for Windows. It consists of two parts:
* A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a UNIX emulation layer providing substantial UNIX API functionality.
* A collection of tools, ported from UNIX, which provide UNIX/Linux look and feel.

Today Pauline and I celebrated our 23rd wedding anniversary. It's hard to believe that these years have flown by so quickly. The last 23 years have brought so many wonderful moments and memories that I can't wait for the next 23! Love you always Pauline.