Ed's Tech Tips

There is a new Flash based game on the web called Desktop Tower Defense. It is a puzzle / strategy game where you have to protect your desktop from invaders (aka creeps) from crossing to the other side by spending money on attacking pieces (towers with various abilities) and building a maze for them to follow. Strangely addictive yet stress relieving in round about way because it creates it's stress, but it is fun stress. The game is a little more involved than Tetris or Bejeweled, but not so much so that it can be easily picked up. The genius behind the game is the different levels and scenarios and comparing your score against others. You can also see the maps that they created and get inspiration for your next round where you know you can do better. 

In an age of 3D games, it is nice to see a 2D game that stresses creativity and versatility. The graphics are very basic, thus the reason for the url of the web site: handdrawngames.com. Paul Preece, the designer, has quit his day job and has gone into the game design business full time. Desktop Tower Defense currently ranks at just over 6,000 on Alexa. According to a report at Gigaom the game had 4 million unique visitors on 20 million page views in April. Those are pretty impressive stats.

Players have posted numerous videos on Youtube of their various matches. It is a great way to learn new maze patterns and tactics.  Here is one of my favorites:

 

I was asked about part 2 of my account about life with a MacBook today, so I thought I should continue so as not to leave my reader(s) in suspense any longer. She actually longs for an Apple computer, but is not sure she wants to spend the extra money on it at this point in her young life. Life is short and she may be impatient to save the extra money, however, since life can be short do you want to spend it futzing with Windows?

According to a recent article at ComputerWorld  "in the midrange, where lower-cost 13-in. LCD MacBook models occupy price ranges from about $1,100 to $1,500, you may be equally surprised. Apple's recently updated MacBooks (see the technical specs) more than hold their own on price/performance comparisons with other 12- and 13-in. LCD computers from Sony, Toshiba and HP."

 The article continues to say the following:

The desktop landscape may also be an eye-opener. Even though the likes of Dell, HP, Sony and so on have machines priced from about $500 and up, those prices don't include LCDs (in most cases), and they don't start to get hardware-competitive with the processors in Apple's iMac line until they hit about $1,000.

Because of the iMac's built-in LCD, it's actually less expensive, though some of the details (such as hard drive size and RAM amount) may be tilted in favor of the Windows desktops. If you know your way around PCs and want some extras, the Apple could in some instances be the clear value leader in this category.

But I must confess when I was in my young twenties I opted for a 10Mhz KayPro IBM clone running DOS with dual 720 KB disk drives, 512 KB (that's KB not MB which was unheard of at the time) and a Hercules amber monochrome monitor, because although I preferred the graphical GUI white monochrome Mac, I could not afford it. I do not recall the price differences, but it was like comparing a Chevy to BMW.

Who knows where my life would have led if I had just waited a little longer and saved up for the Mac. I might have been on the forefront of desktop publishing, instead of playing with CorelDraw on Windows 3.0 creating files that the printer could not read which forced me to take them to a Mac service bureau where they transferred my files to a Mac and made the magic happen to create the proper film negatives the printer needed. 

Let's pull off memory lane and get back to the present and talk about the Mac Migration Assistant. This clever little utility makes it a snap to transition from one Mac to another via a Firewire cable between the two. Everything is brought over from the old machine: bookmarks, email settings, documents, and applications. It did not work at first because there was an error on the G4 PowerBook's hard drive. There were some Thai or Vietnamese legal documents from Adobe with unusual characters in the file names. I could not even delete the files. They would go into the trash can, but could not be emptied. To resolve the situation I had to reboot from the System disk in the DVD drive and repair the disk. Afterwards the migration went smoothly and I was able to log into the new MacBook and be greeted with my old desktop.

There was only one application that did not behave well, Snapz Pro X, a screen capture program that is great for making screencasts, but it would not run properly. There were no errors, I just could not get it to capture the screen anymore. A Unversial version of the application does not exist yet.  It was a demo, so I deleted it. Everything else runs fine including Microsoft Offce X. It's not a Universal application, but runs via the invisible Rosetta emulation software that allows G4 compiled applications to run on a Intel Processor.

I was going to describe Parallels, the software that allow syou to run Windows applications alongside Mac applications. It is an amazing piece of software, but it will have to wait until Part 3.  

 

 

 

Full screen photo slideshows? What's the big deal? A lot of graphics programs allow you to view full screen slide shows. What sets PicLens apart is that it displays online photo collections from sites like Flickr, Google Images, Yahoo Images, Facebook, Friendster, Picasa Albums and others in a slick full screen viewer. It is a free web browser plugin which is available for Firefox and Safari. To use it is super easy. On a supporting web site, mouse over a photo and click on the play button and the full image smoothly appears on the screen. You can click the play button to automatically display the images or you can manually play view the images. Unfortunately there is no way of downloading an image via PicLens. However, you can click a button along the top on the left hand side to take you to the images page where you could then download the image or print the image.

Enabling your photo site to support PicLens requires adding a Media RSS feed. The instructions are fairly straight forward. So if you like viewing photos online, this is a very easy and elegant method of doing so.

A co-worker asked me for some options for online collaboration - web tools to help members of committee or task group to easily communicate with one another, edit documents, post comments and so forth from any where at anytime.

E-mail is rather inadequate and can be unwieldy. Everyone might not get a message, if the subject changes the messages can be difficult to organize. Different email programs treat attachments differently. Aggressive spam filters may even prevent the messages from getting through. However, even with all of these pitfalls, e-mail software is still used most often for collaborative projects because everyone has it, uses it on a daily basis and knows how to use it - at least the basics. Nevertheless, I am a proponent of exploring alternatives, such as the following:
 
1. A simple option is to create a blog. I know blogs are not what you might consider as a online collaborative tool, but blogs are easy to use (that's why millions have them and even more read them). Blogs do not have to be just for self-expression, marketing or political campaigning. In LifeType, the free open source blogging platform we use for Mount Blog, a single blog can be created with multiple user accounts with one person being the blog owner. You could post articles or topics and others could comment on them, so that not everyone would need a user account. You can upload a wide variety of attachments (doc, xls, pdf, images etc.). You can assign categories and tags. Everything would be search-able. The blog can be hidden from others and require a password to access it if you want to make it private using the secretblog plug-in.

2. Wiki's are very popular collaboration tools. The free form nature is a plus or a minus depending on how you look at it.  I have been experimenting with Xwiki on our file server as a possible staff intranet document management/collaboration tool.  It has numerous features, both basic and advanced. It can be as complex or as simple as you want. Xwiki includes support for traditional wiki syntax, as well, as WYSIWYG word processor style editing. It includes version control, PDF output of any page or series of pages, attachments, commenting, RSS feeds, full text search and rights management. Of course, Xwiki is just one of many wikis in existence. Visit WikiMatrix to compare a wide variety of free and commercial wiki applications.

 

 

3. BaseCamp is a popular commercial project management/collaboration tool. There is an open source alternative called ActiveCollab . I had set up sites for the finance committee and the Lyonsnetwork, but neither appears to be active now. It has many features and is active development.

4. A fourth option to consider is Google Documents & Spreadsheets. Not only can you upload Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, but the documents can be shared and edited by others. Google Docs in conjunction with Google's Mail, Talk and Calendar tools makes for a strong online suite of collaborative applications.

I could go on with other tools, but the above will give you a good start. The blogs are easy way to start, but a wiki has a lot of flexibility, as does Google Docs. BaseCamp or ActiveCollab provide a framework or structure for your group project. Either way, I think any of these tools go beyond email as an effective means of working with others online.

 

 

Google has added a very cool new feature to their Maps application called "Street View." It is currently only located in a few large urban areas: San Francisco, Miami, Las Vegas, Denver and New York. You position a gold human icon onto blue outlined area of a map and then zoom in to see a panaromic street level view. You can turn around 360 degrees and click on the directional arrows to move along the streets. Use the - and + keys to zoom in and out.

There is a new site called Streetviewr where you can view and post unusual photos or pictures of famous sites. Google uses a van equipped with cameras. It must have a very fast shutter, but some images still get distorted. 

Here is a goofy video Google produced to promote Street View:

 

 

 

We have another reason to hate spammers. It was brought to my attention Friday that spammers had set up pages or advertisements via our e-cards trying to sell vicodin, prilosec, levaquin, ringtones, etc. The spammers attempted to recreate full pages or redirects and were sending out links to the pages.
 
I deleted the spamming cards in the e-card database and proceeded to make it much more difficult for spammers to use our e-cards by doing the following:

1. Limit the amount of time a card is available from forever to 7 days.
2. Limit the type of HTML tags that can be used in the body of the e-card preventing the use of javascript, redirects, links and so forth. There is a php function called strip_tags which does the trick.
3. Utilize two of the most effective and popular anti-spam services that are used in the Blogging and Photo Gallery comments:
   • Bad-Behavior: which stops spam links and spam robots before they can even see a page.
   • Akismet: which is a spam filtering service developed by the creators of WordPress. So if the spammer gets through the first defense, this service scans the content of the fields being submitted.

Bad-Behavior and Akismet are highly regarded and very effective separately. When combined they are even more so. The beauty and simplicity of PHP made these updates possible along with the fact that everything is open source. 

In addition to the above, I changed the WYSIWYG editor from FCKeditor to TinyMCE  which works in both Windows and Macs. FCKeditor did, too, but it did not work with Apple's Safari browser. TinyMCE also appears to load faster. I also brought back the preview function which hopefully will now display an accurate preview. I also added a noscript message to inform visitors that they need to enable javascript in their browser in order to utilize the e-cards.

I will monitor the e-cards more closely. I do not normally look at the content of the cards sent, but I will now periodically scan them. However, I feel that with the new measures in place we should continue to maintain the e-cards since they are a popular feature on the web site. If necessary, I will add a CAPTCHA ( Completely Automated Public  Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) to the e-card form.

I wish that Bad-Behavior was around when we were running the phpBB bulletin board because it may have helped. 

It's only been a few days, but I thought I would write about my switch from two computers, a 15" G4 PowerBook and a Dell Pentium 4 Windows XP Pro desktop.

First impressions are very positive. The unit is very compact. I like the magnetic latch, there is no button to push or a latch hook to break like on my sister's PowerBook. The black matte case reveals that my finger tips are more oily than I thought. The space bar and the touch pad reveal a shiny sheen on them. Also, for those that are obsessive about everything matching will be disappointed that the power adapter and remote control are white. I bought the black version because I thought it hold up better in the long run.

Getting back to the track pad. It is wider than the one the G4 PowerBook and the problem of right clicking has been ingeniously resolved. It used to be that  you had to press the ctrl key and click the track pad button to get a right click effect. Now I just have to tap with two fingertips. I also scroll up, down and across with two fingertips. This is a cool feature.

As for the glossy screen, you might think that it's reflective quality would be distracting, but it is not. It appears to make the screen brighter and improve contrast. The wide aspect ratio makes switching from a 15" screen to a 13.3 screen easier to adjust to. The only thing I needed to change was the layout of my Dashboard widgets. I can use the free virtual desktop utility called VirtueDesktops to give me multiple work spaces if the screen appears too crowded. (Note: VirtueDesktops is no longer under active development due to the inclusion of Spaces with the release of the upcoming Leopard, OS X 10.5.)

The keyboard with the chiclet keys is easy to use. I sometimes hit the wrong key, but then again that could be due to me not being a good typist. The keyboard should be easy to keep clean with the wider spaces between the keys.   

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Often times there is so much new in technology that I must admit to feeling overwhelmed and not knowing what to blog about first, second or last. However, something is better than nothing and hopefully it will prove helpful or informative to, first, the alumnae readers and then to the general public.

Apple's world wide developer's conference (WWDC) is taking place this week (June 11-15) and Steve Jobs announced during his keynote address that the Apple Safari web browser has been ported to Windows. Why and who cares, you might ask? Well, Safari is the default browser for Mac OS X, which also runs on the new iPhone. Safari has 5% of the browser market, while FireFox has 15% and Microsoft Internet Explorer has pretty much the rest. Poor Opera, for all of it's versatility and speed just has not been able to catch on in a significant way, but it continues to be developed. (If you have a Nintendo Wii, you can get Opera for it. Apple wants more developers, web designers and software programmers, to become familiar with the browser and keep it in mind when building web sites. It's rather annoying to come across a site that only works with Internet Explorer. On a Windows PC, you can switch browsers, but on the iPhone (starting at $499) there is only Safari. 

I downloaded and ran it in Windows XP Professional. It looks very similar to it's Mac OS X sibling. Apple's biggest claim is that it is so much faster, but I could not really tell. Network speed is a bigger factor in how fast a page appears. However, I do use Safri often on my G4 Mac, because it is much faster than Firefox. While it has some some nice features (such as the find feature, bookmarks manager and RSS reader) and a minimalistic interface I do not know how well it is going to compete against Firefox on Windows with it's open architecture which allows for a wide variety of extensions. However, I just read that iTunes gets downloaded a million times a day and that there are 500 million users worldwide, so if Apple can get a fraction of them to adopt Safari they will be making some headway.

If you are a web designer you should definitely install it and add it to your collection of browsers to test your pages against - I hope that you do that. Also, I guess if you are in the market for the iPhone, you'll want to download it, too. Web developers can tell what browsers visitors to their web sites are using, so the more people that are using it, the more that they willl take it into consideration when designing their web sites.

In addition to promoting Safari, Apple touted additional features in Leopard (the next version of the Mac operating system) which will be released in the Fall. The new features include improvements to Finder (finally) and the desktop. Finder is looking more like iTunes and the Quick Look will be a time saver. Even though Microsoft spent 5 years on Vista, OS X is still going to inspire envy in Windows users. The Apple web site has been redesigned as well.

While Apple has updated Safari, Camino 1.5 from Mozilla has been released. Camino is a cousin to Firefox that uses the native OS X interface and therefore runs faster than Firefox. It uses the same Gecko HTML rendering engine, but does not support Firefox's extensions. Still it is a nice browser to use and with this latest update it is now pretty much on par with Safari, as far as, spell checking, RSS notification and use of tabs. The newly redesigned Camino web site is very nice, too. I love the flash graphic they use to highlight the new features which goes to show you the high level of professionalism that is now a part of free open source software.

 

The end of the fiscal year is drawing near. That is the time I consider new hardware upgrades and replacements for the Association. I try to replace machines every 3-4 years for staff. The older machines then get rotated into student workstations to be used by part-time student workers. Some older machines get stored away to be cannabilized later for spare parts to keep the others running.  The oldest of the old get recycled or donated. I may make some upgrades, such as, increase the RAM or switch out old CRT monitors for newer slim LCD screens. Nineteen inch LCD screens can be had for less than $200 now. Not only do they consume less electricty, but they take up so much less space on the desktop. Unfortunately, the additional space does not necessarely lend itself to a clean desk, it just makes more room for more papers and such.

I wait until the end of the fiscal year, because the longer I wait the more bang for the buck I can get. Plus, I have more time in the summer to configure, install and test the software. For the past couple years we had gone with Dell machines. However, this year I did not think that Dell had the best prices. I broke ranks last year and purchased an inexpensive Acer notebook on a test basis which is used for travel, as a loaner, for presentations and so forth. It has worked very well. Unfortunately, you cannot buy direct from Acer and they do not offer a long extended warranty with onsite coverage like Dell or others do.  

Pricegrabbber and CDW, both have great online tools for comparing different makes and models of computers. I was looking for notebooks in particular this year. The prices of notebooks are very competative with desktop models now and they have numerous benefits:

• Smaller footprint: they take up so much less space and can used on a lap or any table, desk or flat surface. 
• Portability: staff can work from home or while travelling to different events or the notebook can be taken across campus for note taking or presentations.
• Built in battery backup: if the power goes out, you do not loose anything.
• Wireless networking: the Association office now have wireless access points at either end, so no network outlets or cables are required. Wireless network adapters do not come standard on desktops. Plus, wireless networking is avilable at many locations throughout campus, including the library and Blanchard.  

There are some drawbacks with notebooks, which include:

• Notebooks are harder to repair or upgrade: However this has become less of an issue. Most desktops have integrated motherboards with video, audio and networking built-in and the entire motherboard has to be replaced, although an add-on card could be substitued if it fits. Some of the mini or micro desktops cannot be expanded. Memory and hard drives, the two most common upgrades are fairly easy to replace on a notebook. PC card slots and USB ports allow for other upgrades, but notebooks are so full featured I cannot think of anything I would need to add
• Notebooks can be stolen: This happened to one of our staff. It happened over a weekend. Her office was open when there was an event in the building. Somone swiped the notebook. Therefore, the end users must be diligent about locking up the notebooks or keeping them with them. There is now a lojack service for notebooks, just like what you can buy for your car, but it costs extra each year. 
• Notebooks can more easily be broken: This is true. Spill something on the keyboard of a notebook and the entire machine may be trashed, whereas, on a desktop computer, just the keyboard can be replaced for as little $10.  Also, a notebook can more easily be dropped or bumped. A cracked LCD screen is vey expensive to replace. However, that is why I bought a 3 year extended accident on site service plan for each notebook. Drop, spill or whatever, service usually arrives the next business day to repair the problem.
• Notebooks have smaller screens: This is true, but the flipside is that a smaller screen translates in less weight and greater portability. The wide screen format with higher resolutions help diminish the smaller size, but I rememeber when 14 inch desktop screens were the standard. Now, there is nothing smaller than 17", 19" and 20" are much more common. 

So if I did not get a Dell or Acer, what did I get?

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Note: This article may not apply to most alumnae, but if you are a network administrator or own or run a small to medium business where you need to manage multiple computers and printers, read on.

Many of you probably have a free web based email account, such as, Gmail or Yahoo Mail. These services are free because of the advertising that is displayed alongside the application. Most of us are willing to accept the ads in exchange for the free online services, at least I know I am.

However, when it comes to ad supported desktop applications, that's a different story. Such applications are often referred to as adware and are a nuisance and are not worth the ads they push in front of us. But how about a desktop application that runs in your browser that features ads, but offers a free service that could otherwise cost hundreds of dollars? And what if you could rate the ads which happen to be related to your hardware and software that you manage? This is the case with Spiceworks, which does the following:

• Inventory and report on your company's hardware and software assets automatically.
• Monitor and troubleshoot the hardware and software on your network.
• Run an IT Help Desk for your company that's easy to use.

It takes less than 5 minutes to get up and running (well almost, more on that later). No agents. No scripts. No manual. No hassles. Just download Spiceworks and go. And, Spiceworks is really free. No trials. No time or device limits. Simply free. All thanks to sponsorships by top technology vendors.

At the Alumnae Association I have over 30 computers to oversee, along with half a dozen printers and numerous software packages and licenses. Originally, there were hand-written records to maintain which I was not overjoyed to inherit and I soon looked for an alternative. I came across a web service called TechAtlas which allowed me create an electronic inventory. Unfortunately, it is a subscription service and in order to inventory a machine I must do so from each machine. Mac and Linux computers, along with printers, had to be manually entered. In Spiceworks, I enter the IP addresses or range of addresses I want it to examine along with the Windows domain administrator name and it automatically pull the hardware specifications of the machine and the names and version numbers of the software installed. I can also see things like how much free space is on the hard drive. On printers I can find out how much toner is left.

Spiceworks has a variety of reports and it allows me to add new ones. The only thing I have to manually input is how much the item cost, when we purchased it and the location of the device if I have not already indicated that in the name of the device which I try to do. Unfortunately, my predecessors named computers after the planets or the months of the year which does not tell me anything about where it is located and who uses it.

In regards to the 5 minute setup, that is basically true if WMI (Windows Management Interface) is setup on the machine and the firewall allows it to communicate with other devices. If it is not then I have to go around to each machine and enable it. On two-thirds of the computers I had it disabled for some reason.

It looks like Spiceworks is going to allow me to be more effective at monitoring and managing all of our hardware. I applaud Spiceworks for their creative business model which saves me money out my budget for other items like new hardware upgrades which will be covered in a future blog post.