Many Shaw Cable-modem customers are having problems connecting to website at the University of Alberta using Internet Explorer. It is not clear what the problem is however there is a work around. One common symptom is that when attempt to visit a website that ends in “.ualberta.ca” you get a message that says “gateway error.” It is not known if this affects all of Alberta or just Edmonton.

If you are a Shaw Cable-modem subscriber, are using Internet Explorer, and are having difficulties access websites that end in “.ualberta.ca” or “.talonline.ca” try these steps:

1. Open Internet Explorer
2. From the Tools menu select “Internet Options”
3. Click the “LAN Settings ” button
4. Remove the check mark next to “Automatically Detect Settings”
5. Click the “OK” button
6. Click the “OK” button

These instructions were provided by James Woodward at the UofA.

If you are experiencing this problem but are NOT using Internet Explorer, or are NOT a Shaw cable-modem customer, I would like to hear about it. Please post a follow-up comment here.

CaSTA 2005: The Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis will be at the University of Alberta (in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) this year. The conference will last for five days with one day each dedicated to technology and tools for linguistics, anthropology, digital editing, information science, and slavic studies.

The price is dirt cheap. $50 for the conference and $70 per workshop/day. If you want to attend for just a single day, they only charge for a day but let you go to the other conference events on that day as well.

I am hoping to clear my calendar to go to either the linguistics workshop on XML corpus construction or the information science workshop. See the program for details.

Tim Bray, co-inventor XML will be there and give a talk about the future of the Internet.

The staff from the CBC who are currently locked-out of their jobs by CBC management, have started a website called CBC Unlocked containing their own content. It is interesting to compare the content of the CBC website with that of CBC Unlocked and Google News makes that easy. Google News Canada now indexes the CBC Unlocked content and it shows up right beside similar stories from the “official” CBC website (where news is coming from unedited feeds, management, and probably some contract sources).

In Edmonton, the CJSR radio station is carrying CBC Unlocked radio content each day and it is turning out to be a mix of interesting and not so interesting.