I have a charmingly antique mobile phone – an iPhone 3G – not even a 3GS.  It .. has .. been .. getting .. slower .. and .. slower.  When iOS 4 came along I cursed the deep slowdown, but Apple worked on that and it did get better for a while.

But since then the  performance has continued to tumble.  Sometimes, simple actions were taking several seconds to complete. Even typing was very slow in some apps.

The answer turns out to be the number of apps in the phone.  After a period of gritting my teeth, and ruthlessly deleting every app that I didn’t absolutely need and use, the performance is now much better.

Worth a try if you have this problem and are waiting for the iPhone 5 to appear.

Roy

But I have some dozens of mapping programs of one sort or another, some I use regularly and many I’ve installed, tried and dropped, but kept the installer.

So what happens now?  I see endless ads for two mind mapping packages.  Everywhere.  I mean everywhere. Both are boring ads – the one with an expansive orange background and dull stereotyped map is especially so – and it’s not even a mind mapper really.

We’ve heard about the filter bubble the surrounds us in search, but not so much about the ads bubble.

Ads are OK generally, just so long as they’re interesting and don’t keep moving and flickering, or flood me with sound as I open the page.  I’d rather not have to pay for web services and if this is the price, so be it.

But what I’d like is a “don’t show me this again” service for ads.  You know?  Those panels that pop up when you first start using a piece of software.  ”Are you sure you want to delete this” – that sort of thing.  Ads could have a little checkbox to say “OK, noted, now drop that message in future”.

That’s what I’d like for ads.

I’m dreaming, I know … so how about “don’t show me this again for 7 days”?  Then, who knows, I might even see an ad that interests me.

Roy

This the top part of what we saw when we  put the front page of topicscape.com into WebSummarizer:

This is a useful way of taking in a new web page, and now appears as a link at the front of my bookmark bar.  Give it a try – it’s free.

Roy

My first reaction was “Great quote”; my next was to tweet “I’ll use it as my motto”.

But then I started thinking it through.

The first sentence can be right sometimes – often even – but it is incomplete.  To start with, it depends on how the words are used.

Genuine questions (not leading ones) don’t tell us what to think.  Expressions of personal concern or doubt, don’t either.  But the killer that shows the gap up best is that there are many uses of words that do tell us how to think: Written explanations of critical thinking, for example; descriptions of fallacy in argument; advice on decision-making; or a judge’s summing up for the jury all tell us how to think, not what to think.

“Pictures tell you how to think” then – how about that?  They certainly can – often.  Look at Exploratree – that must be one of the best visual approaches on the web to telling children how to think, and it’s one I’ve blogged about before.

But pictures can go the other way as well.  Data visualizations can present slanted interpretations that try to tell us what to think.  Here’s a case in point from A study of infographics:

Much as visual thinking is embedded in my work and play and while the quote sounds neat, that needs the application of a little critical thinking.

Roy

This is not hard to do, but a user question made us realize that we don’t have a lot of detail in the wiki, so we have now added a new article.

Roy

The files won’t be imported to Topicscape at that stage.  Instead you’ll see a summary report telling you if files with the same names are already in that Topicscape.  And you can press a “Show report” button to see the detail and decide what will be done, file by file.

For each file, the report shows the size in bytes, colors the size or date in red if they are different (in other words are potentially different versions), points out if the duplicate in that Topicscape is actually a missing occurrence file, and shows which topic it is in.  Then it allows you to control what to do next, one by one (replace, delete the external one or bring it in anyway).

This is really useful if you are tidying up multiple copies of different versions of documents that should already be in a Topicscape.

Roy

That is what Henry Lewkowicz of Context Discovery has set out to do, and he tells me he is 90% done (the English articles).  Here is one – a mind maps and context analysis of the wikipedia article on “Negotiation”:

You can see the map above in an interactive Flash rendering.  These summaries can be downloaded as RTF text or as mind maps in MindManager format.  Here’s a page showing the context analysis for Negotiation.

You can browse through the archive of pages done so far here.

Henry is looking into making this a public service and would like to form a group devoted to building libraries of topics and processes as a resource for mind mappers and learners.

There is another Wikipedia mapping services, and that makes an interesting comparison.  Though the map shows more breakdown, clicking on nodes for detail just takes the reader through to the appropriate section in the WikiPedia article, instead of giving the textual analysis right on the map, as Context Discovery does.

Here is WikiMindMap on Negotiation, and an image for comparison (click for a full-sized version):

The Context Discovery desktop software is not just about Wikipedia – it can analyse and map text generally.

Roy

Roy Grubb on Twitter

If you run a wiki, you may regret that Mediawiki is not quite so easy, especially if you have done any customization to suit your needs.  Mediawiki is great software, but it does take a little more work than just pressing an ‘update automatically’ button.

Recently, Mediawiki released two new versions in three days, and doing the same job four times (I tend two wikis) made me realize that a simple list of actions was going to be more useful than the collection of notes I’d worked with in the past. This won’t be applicable to everyone, but if you run a mildly-customized mediawiki on your site, I hope it will be useful.

This is for a routine update of version, not a major jump like, for example, 1.4 to 1.16 when you should consult the detailed reference page.

Before doing any of this, backup your database file and all files on your wiki.  Chances are your CP (Control Panel) will have functions to do this.

Get new the new version of mediawiki and upload it

• Download the latest release from http://dumps.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/ If you subscribe to the MediaWiki Announcements Digest, the email will contain an explicit link that takes you straight to the right download.  It will be a file named along these lines:
  mediawiki-1.1n.n.tar.gz
• Make a temporary directory called gz in the www directory of the site housing your wiki.  You could do this directly in the www directory, but I like to keep it clean and separate until I’m ready to swap directories.
• Upload the .tar.gz file, e.g. mediawiki-1.16.4.tar.gz to new directory gz.
• If you have command line access to your server, do this (modifying the version 1.16.4 to be the one you’re updating to):

$ tar xzvf mediawiki-1.16.4.tar.gz

• If not you may be able to run it like this:

In /gz/ make expand.php containing (e.g.):

<pre>
<?php
system ("tar xzvf mediawiki-1.16.4.tar.gz");
?>
</pre>

Again you will need to replace the version number 1.16.4 with the one you’re updating to.

Run that e.g. http://www.yourdomain.com/gz/expand.php

Now you will have an expanded directory inside /gz/  called something like mediawiki-1.16.4 and you will prepare this before committing your wiki.

Customizing the new version

• Next, copy your own required wiki folders like ../wiki/extensions and past uploaded images (../wiki/images) to the corresponding location in the temporary wiki directory (e.g.) ../gz/mediawiki-1.16.4/extensions etc.  If possible, use the File Manager function in your CP (Control Panel) for this, it’s way faster than FTP or other desktop-to-online software like Beyond Compare.  Of course if you have command line access, that will be fast as well.
• And rename or delete the config directory.

For the remaining low-volume individual copies, I find Beyond Compare very convenient.  It lets me compare items in the old and new versions and repeat my customizations in the new version without keying errors.

Skin customization

You probably have your own logo image at the top left of the wiki.

• If the special logo is defined in LocalSettings.php as e.g.

$wgLogo = "{$wgScriptPath}/mywiki-logo.png";

then copy ../wiki/mywiki-logo.png  to
../gz/mediawiki-1.1n.n/ mywiki-logo.png

otherwise copy (e.g.)
../wiki/skins/common/images/wiki.png  to
../gz/mediawiki-1.1n.n/skins/common/images/wiki.png

• If you use a special background image, copy that to the new directory (e.g.)../wiki/skins/monobook/headbg.jpg  to../gz/mediawiki-1.1n.n/skins/monobook/headbg.jpg
• If you use a different-colored background, then in .. /wiki/skins/monobook/main.css   find

body {
       font: x-small sans-serif;
       background: #f9f9f9 url(headbg.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat;

Change f9f9f9 to match desired colour at foot of headbg.jpg

or just copy main.css from /wiki/ to /mediawiki-1.1n.n/ using software like Beyond Compare to check that nothing else has changed.

• Copy ../wiki/LocalSettings.php  to  ../gz/mediawiki-1.1n.n/LocalSettings.php
• Check if new ../gz/mediawiki-1.1n.n/MonoBook.php has any differences from existing one other than Adsense, Analytics and StatCounter code if you use these in the wiki.  If so, add code for those three items.

If not, copy modified ../wiki/MonoBook.php  to  ../gz/mediawiki-1.1n.n/MonoBook.php

• To keep control of appearance, I remove all skin options other than Monobok.  To do this, I change all skin php files in /skins except monobook.php to xxxxxxx.php_ so that they do not appear in user preferences.  You could just delete them.

Rename folders to start change to new version

• Rename e.g. ../wiki/  to  ../ wiki-1.16.2/ where the number is that of the old version.  Your old directory will therefore be preserved in case of problems.  Your wiki will briefly be unavailable at this point, but the next operation will bring it back.
• Move e.g.  ../gz/mediawiki-1.16.4/ to ../wiki/Again use the Control Panel, and it will be very fast.

Check that wiki still works.  The database has not been updated yet, but it will be using the latest code.  If it doesn’t you can reverse the last two operations while you investigate.

Run update

Depending on your hosting plan, you may need to ask the ISP support service to run the update process.

• You can send a message along these lines

Hi,
I want to update my mediawiki on mysite.com.  Will you help as follows please:
update.php is in
/home/mysite/www/www/wiki/maintenance/
will you run this from the command line for me please? :-
php update.php
Thanks.

• But if you have command line access to the server, you probably don’t need me to tell you, but all you need to do is something like

$ cd www/www/wiki/maintenance/
$ php update.php

Now check to see that the update has taken effect modifying one of these URLs as needed for your wiki:
http://www.mysite.com/wiki/index.php?title=Special:Version  or

http://www.mysite.com/wiki/Special:Version

Again, check the wiki’s operation, this time test viewing and editing articles, and uploading a file.

Roy

Click the image for a larger one, and more detail of Quickzoom.

Roy

The article in Wikit about on-line graphic organizers for students has been updated with third source for these useful tools for introducing methodical thinking, LexIcon Interactive Graphic Organizers.

This is in addition to the superb Exploratree:

and Holt Graphic Organizers:

All are accessible on line, to assist students in acquiring critical thinking skills.

Roy