Tyler Vann-Campbell's Weblog

Has anyone else heard of this?

College professors are now converting their lectures to podcasts and posting them for students to pick up at their leisure.

What a great idea! Sure, I can hear the skeptics saying, “Students are going to skip class even more now,” but my theory is that the set of students who miss [...]

I love programming languages. It’s almost obscene, but there are few languages that I won’t pick up and find some use for. The possible exception being COBOL.

Anyway, loving languages as I do, I find myself reading a lot of language documentation. Every so often a language (and it’s documentation) will stand out. [...]

Did you ever notice that when you open up your Trash folder in GMail, it gives you “Recycling Facts” where your “Web Clips would normally be?

I did today, and clicked through to see a few more, after a while this came up.

You can make a lovely hat out of previously-used aluminum foil.

Good to know [...]

It’s been said that the definition of beta-testing is as follows:

Beta Testing — The act of placing your mission critical data into the safekeeping of completely untested and unproven software systems. In olden days, virgins were used to beta test volcanoes.

If you feel like taking such a risk, I have a GMail contact retrieval script [...]

I promised that I’d post pictures from my recent sailfishing trip to Isla Mujeres, even though they’re not tech, politics, or USF buzz. PETA members should beware: I took pictures of these fish without asking their permission.

On the streets of Isla Mujeres.

Looking hip while touring the island via scooter.

This fish took [...]

Those who read here frequently know that I’m not often political in nature, though as part of my 15 minutes, slate.com once quoted me in a post about Kofi Annan.

Some things are just too good to ignore though. Like GWB in all this hot water about domestic spying. Back in the old days, when [...]

In 1938, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman accidentally ingested a chemical while studying fungus on wheat grains. The chemical was lysergic acid diethylamide-25 and the rest, as they say, is history. He turns 100 today in good health, and continues to advocate the legalization of his invention for its “medicinal purposes.”

If you’re ever up for a SCOTUS confirmation hearing and you really want a Senator on your side of the field, quote him or her as part of a joke. Trust me, it works:

Do you agree that Casey is a super-precedent or a super stare decisis, as Judge Luttig said?

ALITO: Well, I personally would [...]

After one of the longest held oppositions in the GNOME community, Fedora Core 5 will ship with Mono included.

Could this be the end to the longstanding debate between the opposing views of “Mono is the self-actualization of the Linux desktop” and “Mono is the Beast of Novell, sent to destroy us.”

In the interest of [...]

I’m a little late to this party, but SOAP rocks. I’ve dabbled in PHP and database-driven websites before, and running a blog kind of assumes you know more than a rudimentary XML-RPC.

But SOAP means that my PHP code can interface with a database on another machine via an ASP script with no worries about [...]