Playing with Technology

Firefox 3 = win

Jon Breitenbucher — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:38:10 +0000

In case you haven’t noticed the folks at Mozilla released Firefox 3 yesterday. I got the notice and downloaded it straight away. I’ve updated all the add-ons I can and am loving it so far. I’m actually writing this with ScribeFire (a nifty add-on for Firefox). So go forth, download, and enjoy.

Mac OS X Leopard: A cautionary tale

Jon Breitenbucher — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 18:41:20 +0000

I write this post not from my silvery MacBook Pro but from the G4 iMac in my office. Why? The tale begins over two weeks ago with the preorder of Mac OS X Leopard. I put my preorder in the day it was available and waited eagerly for it to arrive. Last Friday it was waiting on my doorstep when I got home. I took it inside and peeled it out of the shipping box and pulled it out of its shrink wrap. I opened up my laptop which was sleeping in its travel case and popped in the Leopard DVD. Restarted as requested and started the update. I then went to get my daughter from daycare. When I got back the screen said “Update failed”. “What,” I said. I restarted and ran Disk Utility to see “Invalid node structure” appear as the program tried to verify the disk. Panic set in. The machine would not boot. It was not visible to other computers in target disk mode, and I did not own Disk Warrior. I called Applecare after I determined I could navigate the drive in Single User mode, but they had no ideas on how to possibly repair the boot table or partition information. So the machine went to the Apple store where they determined that the hard drive needs to be replaced. This would all be mildly irrtating except I forgot to do the one thing I have always done in the past: backup the User directories on the machine. So now I am hoping the Apple service guys can pull data off onto an external drive I left with them. I’m not hopeful and I may lose a years worth of e-mail and documents (I was planning on using the drive with Time Machine for backups). So take my plight as a warning and backup before updating. It will make the process much less stressful.

Interesting Web based software

Jon Breitenbucher — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 20:28:43 +0000

TechCruch had a story today about Y Combinator (an interesting venture capital firm) and some of the software starting to come out of these ventures. Two applications caught my eye in the list: writewith and Snipshot. writewith is a collabrotive writing application similar in nature to Google Documents. I have been looking at these kinds of applications as I am involved in more and more ad-hoc committees where we are drafting some policy. I don’t really feel it is productive to e-mail revisions around endlessly and see an application like writewith as a natural tool for such work. Snipshot was interesting because I just think it is cool to edit my photos without the need for big bulky software. Don’t get me wrong; I love to fire up Photoshop but sometimes you don’t need the bolt cutters. Check them out when you have time.

Pipes in education

Jon Breitenbucher — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 20:17:03 +0000

See it is not about copyright.

I’m sure all of you are aware of Yahoo!’s Pipes product. I am very interested in it and how faculty can take advantage of it. However, I have not had the time to sit down and play with it. D’Arcy Norman has had some time to play with it and has a nice post titled Trying Pipes as a proto-Eduglu platform, which I encourage you to read.

I must be sick

Jon Breitenbucher — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 18:38:47 +0000

Why, because I have a copy of Windows XP on my MacBook Pro. I have had a copy of Parallels Desktop for Mac for quite a while. However, I never took the time to install a copy of XP. Well, the new Coherence feature finally made me take the plunge. That and the fact that I got tired of using the Diablo II character editor on Kathy’s Gateway and having to transfer the hacked characters back to my Mac. Now I can edit the characters in my copy of XP and the folder the data is in is shared so there isn’t even a need to drag and drop.

I really don’t like the entire Windows experience (when I installed my XP pre SP 1 OS I had to endure four hours of upgrades to get it to SP2 with all the latest patches), but I need to run GroupWise (I’m pushing to have us look at something else) and my character editor and this makes it convenient. Performance is great and coherence makes you almost forget you are using Windows. I’d say that if you can’t wait to see what Leopard holds then snag a copy of Parallels.

Yet another obstacle

Jon Breitenbucher — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 18:25:24 +0000

Office 2007 introduces a new document type, docx. Of course old versions of the office applications can’t read the new format and the converters for Mac won’t ship until significantly after the release of Office 2007 on Windows. Luckily some clever people have found a way around this. You lose formatting but then I ask everyone to send me things in plain text, so it’s not a big deal to me.

Another one slipped under the radar

Jon Breitenbucher — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 06:03:41 +0000

Wow, this one is old (in Web time) being from 2003. But we need to make sure the students check out Avid Free DV. Also, we need to have students check the Web based e-mail solutions I blogged about the other day.

Sometime in the near future I’ll post about Web time and the Web Science.

DSpace from NITLE

Jon Breitenbucher — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 05:16:34 +0000

Somehow this slipped under my radar. (The Liberal Education Today RSS must not be updating in my feed reader.) Anyway, NITLE launched a DSpace service this week. There is a little info about in Liberal Education Today and I’ll need to make sure Dave and Janet know about it. There might be some cool things we can do with this.

Replacements for GroupWise

Jon Breitenbucher — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 01:28:18 +0000

I’ve never been a big fan of GroupWise because it creates an uneven playing field. Windows users get lots of features that OS X users don’t get. Granted things are better with GroupWise 7 than before, but there are still differences. Plus we have not made GroupWise a standard app on the OS X machines and so not many faculty are even aware of it. Add to this the fact that it is not as easy to create rule based mailboxes and that it doesn’t have smart mailboxes or the ability to manage multiple e-mail accounts and you see that it pails in comparison to other applications like Outlook, Mail, Entourage, Eudora, etc. THe ability to manage multiple e-mail accounts is a huge deal for students and for me. So I am always on the lookout for something that would create a level playing field and that has the cool integrated calendaring of GroupWise (really the only feature that I think Mail is missing).

The other day I heard about some possible alternatives on TechCrunch. The ones that I think would be most likely to meet our needs are BlueTie, Zimbra, and Google. All three offer calendar and e-mail. BlueTie and Google seem to be free. BlueTie offers file sharing, Google offers Google Docs and Spreadsheet for on-line collaborative documents, and Zimbra has an impressive list of partners and compatibility options. I’d really like to see us investigate these services in the future.

What would be good additions to Moodle

Jon Breitenbucher — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 01:09:38 +0000

After looking at some of the things on Solution Watch, I see a few that would be great additions to Moodle. The functionality of Gradefix, mynoteIT, NoteMesh, Diigo, Google Video, and Flickr added to Moodle would allow for some really cool pedagogical uses of Moodle. I’ll have to comb through Moodle.org and see if any of this is in the works.

A great series of articles on Web 2.0 in the classroom

Jon Breitenbucher — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 00:49:43 +0000

I’d never heard of Solution Watch until it came up on digg today. There is a series of three articles looking at Web 2.0 in the classroom and covering things like Blogging, Flickr, Podcasting, etc. It has a nice list of software that I really need to look at and see what might be applicable for us.

Blogging class

Jon Breitenbucher — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 20:37:13 +0000

Talking about creating a blog.

One thing to do is include an image. To do this you go to upload and browse for the image. Once it is uploaded click to use thumbnail and link to image and then drag to post.