Rocket Science

For as much grief Apple has received over the antenna issues on the iPhone 4…once they made the decision to offer all iPhone 4 owners a complimentary bumper or case, they did the right thing.

When I picked up my phone on launch day, I got an Apple bumper case to make sure I could protect it–turns out this was a good idea.

What Apple did right, they automatically issued a refund–I didn’t have to do anything to get it. On July 22, I got an email with…

Thanks, Apple!

While reading about Systematic Screening and Assessment, I got turned on to another concept, Evaluability Assessment. It’s another method that can be used to triage which programs should undergo full evaluation. (Note: I’ll use program and project interchangeably.)

Evaluability Assessment is described as, “A strategy that can be used to determine the extent to which a program is ready for full evaluation.” (Trevisan and Huang, 2003) And it has been described as a method to “assess the likelihood that prgram activities will reach mesuarable progress toward program objectives; and assessthe extent to which evaluation information is likely to be used by program management.” (Whorley, 1979)

I interpret this as the “reality check”–what I’m interested in in most projects is the project reasonable and is it likely to have a reasonable outcome.

Leviton and Gutman (2010) caution that, “EAs are a preevaluation activity, designed to maximize the chances that any subsequent evaluation will result in useful information.” (Which probably means I want to use them in a way for which it was not devised.)

I think the steps of the process that are most interesting to me, are the outcomes from Steps 6, 7 and 8.

6. Describe Stakeholder Perceptions of Program.
7. Identify Stakeholder Needs, Concerns, and Differences in Perceptions.  Differences in perception, needs, and concerns can indicate misperceptions of the program and intent, or a program that is not sufficiently meeting the needs of one or more stakeholder groups.
8. Determine Plausibility of Program Model.  Data from program staff, documentation, and stakeholder interviews are used to determine plausibility of the program.  That is, data are analyzed to determine the extent to which the program is properly implemented, sufficiently developed, and activities appropriate, to reasonably predict that desired outcomes will be met.

References

Leviton, L. C., & Gutman, M. A. (2010). Overview and rationale for the Systematic Screening and Assessment Method. In L. C. Leviton, L. Kettel Khan, & N. Dawkins (Eds.), The Systematic Screening and Assessment Method: Finding innovations worth evaluating. New Directions for Evaluation, 125, 7–31.

Trevisan, M. S. & Huang, Y. M. (2003). Evaluability assessment: a primer. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 8(20). Retrieved August 8, 2010 from http://PAREonline.net/getvn.asp?v=8&n=20

Wholey, J. S. (1979).  Evaluation:  Promise and performance. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute.

When I created the pie charts for yesterday’s post, it took me much longer than it should have to find how to enter the titles on the pie charts.

The answer…open the Formatting Palette from the View Menu.

I could change all sorts of formatting options by clicking on the chart or viewing the chart toolbar…but I couldn’t change all of them that way. To do that, I needed to open up the Formatting Palette.

Thanks again, Microsoft.

This post details some of the things I’ve learned while examining how to run WordPress 3 multisite (Network) for OEIT.

Peter and I decided not to migrate the individual sites now, pending a further investigation of how to handle the hostnames and Shibboleth integration.

Read more…

I’ve had a case where I need to run WordPress and Drupal side-by-side.

My preferred method is to run WordPress in a sub-directory of the Drupal installation.

So the server’s document root is set to: /var/www/html/oeit/. The Drupal instance is in: /var/www/html/oeit/drupal/. And the WordPress install is in /var/www/html/oeit/haiti-oer-symposium/.

Aside: We already have a rewrite rule in place because our Drupal installation was coded to require the subdirectory <server document root>/drupal. Yes, that’s not ideal. But the rewrite rule has been a heck of a lot easier than going through and changing the custom theme and testing it out. I’m not a Drupal developer, nor do I see a particular need to become one right now.

With the rewrite rule, I needed to be able to let the WordPress rewrite rules take precedence in the /var/www/html/oeit/haiti-oer-symposium/ directory. That actually gives part of a clue as to how the problem is solved.

I originally looked for stuff like “integrate wordpress and drupal” or “run wordpress in subdirectory of drupal”. Ultimately I ran across the suggestion to have Apache ignore anything going to the haiti-oer-symposium sub-directory.

I added the following code to our .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/haiti-oer-symposium/


Here’s an explanation from rick_deckard about how this is doing it’s thing…

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^blog

…

In that case it says
If the request URI does NOT (!) BEGIN (^) with “blog” and the requested URI does not map to a file or directory, then rewrite to invoke drupal.

Put another way
If the request URI is for my blog or a file or a directory, serve that straight up, without handing me off to drupal. So in the case of your blog, it passes you through to WP

…

[And this proved to be key...]

As for the leading slash – run the HTTP Live Headers plugin in Firefox to see what the server thinks your actual REQUEST_URI is (or use phpinfo() on your /blog directory). In my case at least, it does not want the leading slash.

[Our server did require the leading and trailing slashes.]

Source: rick_deckard

So, is it better to know what you’re doing, or just get lucky with copy and paste?