Ed's Tech Tips

I recently turned 42 and decided that I need to get more serious about reducing my gut that has slowly grown over the past 15 years. I decided that I should take up running again. I ran cross country in high school and for fun afterwards competing in various 5k and 10k road races. I stopped because it became boring in flat hot Florida where I used to live. I had also started bicycling which is more enjoyable, however, it requires more time and a bicycle which I do not always have with me, plus my 15 year old hybrid bike is not what it used to be.

I now live in New England which has much more interesting terrain, plus there are devices that make running more interesting, such as, the Nike Plus iPod Sports Kit. It consist of a sensor that fits inside the left shoe of selected Nike+ running models (I have the Air Pegasus +25) and a small receiver that plugs into the bottom of a Nano iPod you carry or wear on your arm. It tracks accurately my progress (speed and distance, calories not so much) and provides vocal feedback (mid points, last 5 minutes, etc.) while playing my favorite upbeat tunes which consist mostly of classic rock selections (from the Beatles to U2).

When I am done with my run I can upload my results to the beautiful Nike Plus web site via iTunes which is the other half of the Nike+ Sports Kit. On the web site I can track my progress, set goals, challenge others, ask questions in the forum, find widgets for my desktop or Facebook profile and much more. I've added a widget to the sidebar on this blog.

I want to be able to run 5k and 10k races again and eventually work my way to half and full marathon distances. I've bicycled 100 miles before and my training rides were up to 60-80 miles a ride, so I think if I pace myself and establish my goals I will be able to achieve that distance and maybe further (ultra marathons maybe?). The Nike Plus web site will be a big help and bring some of the fun back into running.

Cuil, pronounced like "cool", is an old Irish word for knowledge and is also the name of a new search engine. Here is how they describe themselves on their About page:

...the world’s biggest search engine. The Internet has grown. We think it’s time search did too.

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

When I first tried it a few days ago it was rather sluggish, but that was when it was recently announced. It is now pretty snappy. You do get different results and in some cases better results. I like the layout which includes 2-3 columns. The results always have an image, a title and a small paragraph of text followed by the link. In some results you get a very useful category box that reveals related categories for you to search. Mouse over a term in a category to get a pop-up definition.

Some other useful features are the search term suggestions that appear as you type and quickly guess the term or phrase you are looking for. For large categories, like "Linux" or "James Patterson" you get tabs. The Safe Search feature is on by default. You can easily add Cuil to your FireFox search box. 

I like it and encourage you to check it out and I think you'll be surprised by how much more relevant information is out on the Internet. I think Microsoft jumped the gun too quickly buying Powerset and should have held out for Cuil which I think may give Google some competition unless Google buys them or can replicates their algorithm. Of course, it is no surprise that many of the founders of Cuil are former Google employees with Phd's in computer science.

POST UPDATE: After using Cuil for more varied searches, the results can be a real hit or miss. When it is working, it can be right on the money, but when it's not, it can be way off the mark. If Cuil is going to compete with Google they need to be more consistent. For example, I performed a search on "rss feeds via email". Google returned numerous results pertaining to what I was looking for, while Cuil just returned unrelated results that only pertained to "email". As I experimented I discovered that Cuil works well for names and single keywords, but give it a phrase or multiple keywords and it chokes

On Friday June 25th, a young 47 year-old Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon Professor in computer science, passed away after a 22 month battle with cancer. It was a battle he waged with style, grace, humor and forever the teacher, he used it as a opportunity to teach us how to better live life. He leaves behind a wife, three young children and a legacy that they can be proud of. It's not many people that can say that they achieved many of their childhood dreams and then went on to enable others to achieve their own dreams.  

Randy gave his last lecture at the university on Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed crowd. In his moving presentation, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals. For more, visit www.cmu.edu/randyslecture. Below is the video that millions have since viewed and has been turned into a book which provides more details and back story. Thanks to Google for hosting the entire 1 hour and 16 minute video - yes, take the time to watch the whole thing, you won't regret it. I highly recommend both. We would all be better off to follow his example.

Part of Randy's legacy is the Alice Project. Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. It happens to be appealing to female students, because it helps them focus on successful storytelling and learn about programming without realizing that they are doing so. Many colleges and high schools have adopted the program. It would be cool to see Mount Holyoke College adopt it as well. For more information and FREE download: http://www.alice.org

This past weekend my 17 month old granddaughter and I took our maiden voyage and a few additional trips on a bicycle together with the aid of the new iBert child bicycle seat. Unlike older types of seats that put the child on the rear of the bike behind the adult where the child has to either stare at the adult's back or look to the side, the iBert puts the child toward the front of the bicycle just behind the handle bars. This way the view of the child is greatly improved and thus the bicycling experience for the child, as well as, the adult pedaling the bike. The iBert offers a better center of gravity and removes the mystery of what the child is doing behind the parent.

I've used both styles of seats and I like the iBert. WeeRide offers a similar style of bike seat, but the child's legs are not lifted forward and the adult has to pedal with his knees sticking out. 

The iBert is fairly easy to attach to your bike and it fits many styles of bikes as is attested to in the iBert photo gallery. A single mounting bar bolts on to your handle bar stem so that when you turn the seat turns with you. It did not fit my bike because my shifters and brake handles were right over where the legs go, so I installed it on my on my daughter's bicycle. I had to slightly raise the stem to allow the braket to be bolted on. Also it is a tight squeeze between the seat and the iBert. When you stop you need to be able to touch the ground from the bicycle seat since there is not much room to stand over the top bar of the bicycle frame.

It does take some extra effort to bike when you have an extra 25 or so pounds on the bicycle in front of you. Plus, you cannot really stand up to power down on the pedals. Still, it's a fun time. Yesterday, my granddaughter grabbed my finger and pulled me over to our bicyce helmets and wanted to go for a ride. It's a great opportunity to introduce your child to a fun activity which may be a primary form of transportation for them when they grow up as oil supplies dwindle and cost increasingly more. At the same time it encourages the habit of wearing a bicycle helmet. As my granddaughter grows up she will not remember a time that she did not wear a helmet to ride a bicycle. As parents and role models for your children, wear your own bicycle helmet. How can you make a good argument for helmets if you do not wear one yourself? Plus, they can prevent serious head injuries.

Tags: bicycle, children. seat, helmets, recreation, family

Big Buck Bunny is a very well done short animation video created completely with the open source 3D design and rendering program called Blender. The Blender Foundation, the non-profit organization created to support the software, helped to produce the movie short with a professional production company as an effort to improve the software by pushing it beyond what the hobbyist community could do. In the end they created a great promotion for the software as well as helped to spur various improvements in it's development including the rendering of fur and grass. The video is free to download, but you can also purchase it on DVD or Blue-ray disk. In addition, because it is open source and released under the Creative Commons license, all of the models and music created for the animation are also freely available to developers and designers who would like to experiment with them or use them in their own projects. The next project that the Foundation is working on is a 3D game based on the characters in the movie called Apricot.

Open source projects like these are a real boon to budding digital artists or students since the tools and the materials or content are available for free. Well, almost free. You'll need the high speed bandwidth to download over 7 GB of data file. The finished movie is much smaller depending on what size you download. Plus, you'll need a computer capable of running the 3D software, which by the way, runs on Mac, Windows and Linux platforms.

Here is demo video of the game:

I listen to a number of podcasts and most of them are geared toward technology as is PRI's The World Technology Podcast , but this one stands out. This is how they describe themselves:

The World's weekly Technology Podcast brings you all the latest and greatest news from the fields of global technology and science.  The World is a US-based international news and analysis program co-produced by the BBC World Service, Public Radio International, and WGBH Public Radio in Boston.

I put the emphasis on "global" and "international" because that is where the big difference is with this program. You get a global perspective. For example, many tech pod-casts reported and commented on Bill Gates stepping down from the day-to-day operation sf Microsoft. Many pundits focused on the history of Microsoft, the pros and cons of Gate's leadership and they speculated on the future of the company. However, PRI is the only one that went outside of the U.S. and asked people what they thought of Bill Gates. I was surprised to learn that he is greatly admired and respected in China, despite the fact that many computers there are running counterfeit copies of Windows. 

On the same show I learned about an obscure new language called NOL, which strives to become an Esperanto for the Internet and Cell Phone age. It features a compact grammar and vocabulary that is ideally suited for text messaging, while at the same time bridging the cultural barriers of language.

The show just celebrated it's 200th episode. It is very informative and entertaining. While it has not garnered the same popularity CNet's Buzz Out Loud or This Week In Technology, I encourage you to check it out. I think as Americans, we would benefit from a more global perspective.

Recently I have had to clean up "comment spam" in the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly blogazine. At first glance it looks harmless enough, but the comments do not add anything to the conversation. Here are some examples:

• This is a great article!
• This is a heartwarming article.
• Thanks, what an inspiring story.
• I really like the different viewpoints.
• These are interesting travel opportunities.
• And so on.

Then there is a web site link to a business offering a product or service for sale, such as running your car on water, travel agencies, or safety videos. This type of spam originally appeared in Internet guestbooks, where spammers repeatedly fill a guestbook with links to their own site and no relevant comment, to increase search engine rankings. If an actual comment is given it is often just "cool page", "nice website", or keywords of the spammed link. This ruined the idea of having a guestbook on many web sites. It was not worth the trouble to maintain.

Given all of the negative connotations of spam, I do not know why a legitimate business would use it to market themselves, which is why many don't, but there are still those that are lured by the low cost and big promises of spam marketing. However, it can easily backfire since many of these web sites and email addresses will be black listed by anti-spam site. 

I have a variety of measures in place to prevent spam, but Comment spam is difficult to prevent if human beings are the ones submitting it with benign messages.

If you want to learn more about how to avoid comment or blog spam check out the excellent article on Wikipedia which features numerous links.

I'm writing this blog post from within the new Flock 2 Beta web browser. I've written about before, because it included some cool features especially options pertaining to social networking. At the time I did not adopt it, because I was not that much into the social networking scene. However, I'm starting to use Facebook, Flickr, Delicious and Twitter more often via different applications or extensions with Firefox.

Flock has recently released the beta of version 2 of their social networking browser which is built on top of Firefox 3 and takes advantages of many benefits and improvements of Firefox while further integrating the applications I am finding myself using more and more.

The RSS reader is pretty nice and has links to blog, bookmark, email or Digg an article. From within Flock I can easily upload photos to Flickr, as well as follow Twitter in the sidebar, post an article to my blog or keep tabs on updates in Facebook without having to be on my Facebook page. Flock seamlessly brings all of these different services and much more within easy reach.

Read more at: Flock 2's Beta Edition: Good, And Only Getting Better - Open Source Blog - InformationWeek

Tags: web2.0, browser, flock, social networking

Wu-Tang Clan's RZA has partnered up with ChessPark.com to create WuChess.com, a different kind of chess site. From their About page:

Designed for chess enthusiasts addicted to hip-hop music, WuChess.com is the place where your favorite music, movies and celebs will be all while you get your game on. WuChess members will get exclusive offers such as MP3s you can't get anywhere else, playing a surprise celebrity guest, access to one of a kind video clips and many more surprises. This is hardcore chess with half the stuffiness.

WuChess understands that it is important that today's youth develop life strategy skills, so to help their efforts a portion of WuChess revenue will be donated to the Hip Hop Chess Federation's scholarship fund.

Unfortunately, the site is not free. It costs $48 a year, but given that chess unfortunately does not attract a large numbers of fans it is to be expected. However, it looks like an interesting community. I wish it was around when I started a chess club at my daughters' high school. You can read more about the site and RZA in a recent New York Times article. 

It has been said that "information is power" and now sites like OpenCongress are utilizing Web 2.0 Internet technologies to shift power to the masses and bring about a revolution in participatory politics by making it very easy to learn and follow what is happening in the halls of Congress. That may sound like a lot of hyperbole, but I do not think it is. The Internet is changing our democracy and hopefully for the better.

I've written about Barack Obama's web site and how effectively it has been used to create an online community that has motivated him to not accept public financing for his presidential campaign, because he has been able to reach out to millions of small donors via the Web.

From the OpenCongress About page:

OpenCongress brings together official government information with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress.

For most people, finding out what's really happening in Congress is a daunting and time-consuming task. The legislative process is frequently arcane and closed-off from the public, resulting in frustration with Congress and apathy about politics.

Small groups of political insiders and lobbyists know what's really going on in Congress, but this important information rarely makes its way into the light. The official website of the library of Congress, Thomas, publishes the full text of bills, but we can do much more to inform ourselves and make our government accessible. Now, with OpenCongress, everyone can be an insider.

OpenCongress is a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement. OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation.

OpenCongress brings together, for the first time in one place, all the best data on what's really happening in Congress:

• Official Congressional information from Thomas, made available by GovTrack.us: bills, votes, committee reports, and more.
• News articles about bills and Members of Congress from Google News.
• Blog posts about bills and Members of Congress from Google Blog Search and Technorati.
• Campaign contribution information for every Member of Congress from the website of the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org.
• Congress Gossip Blog: a blog written by the site editors of OpenCongress that highlights useful news and blog reporting from around the web. The blog also solicits tips, either anonymous or attributed, from political insiders, citizen journalists, and the public in order to build public knowledge about Congress.

There is even a Facebook Application to help you track bills through the House and Senate.

I am a fan of Mr. Potato Head and Indiana Jones, so for Fathers' Day I received the Taters of the Lost Ark version of Mr. Potato Head. "Complete with bullwhip and gold-colored idol in hand, this silly character can sport his jacket and fedora. Press and release the fedora to hear three different short segments from the “Indiana Jones” theme song – or hold it down to hear it play straight through."

Last week I received a new device, the AMOD AGL3080, that I think will really enhance our travel photo galleries. It is a GPS Photo Tracker that assist you with geotagging your pictures so that you can show exactly "where" you took a picture by recording the GPS coordinates or longitude and latitude of the location of where the picture was taken.

The device is relatively inexpensive considering what it does. It costs about $70 from Amazon. Not only is it one of the cheapest trackers, it is one of the few that is Mac compatible. It is the size of mobile pager, if you remember what those are. It takes three AAA batteries, has three LED lights on it and two buttons, a power button and a flag button.

To use it, you simply power it on, wait for the satellite icon to blink, clip it to your belt and then start taking pictures. Make sure that the clock on your camera is set correctly. You then come back to your computer and download your photos. In addition to iPhoto I like to use a free photo management application called JetPhoto. I use JetPhoto for all of the Alumnae Association photo galleries and use it to upload pictures to Fickr as well. There are versions of JetPhoto for Windows and Macs and it supports geotagging manually or with a device such as the AMOD AGL3080. After your pictures are imported into JetPhoto, you then connect the AMOD to your USB port and import the GPS file, which is a text file that contains line after line of time stamps and coordinates. No drivers are required and if you are using JetPhoto, you do not need to install any additional software.

JetPhoto synchronizes the location data with the time stamps on the pictures. You can view the photos on a map and easily tweak the locations which are for the most part accurate within a few feet or yards. You can press the flag button to flag a location where you shot a picture, but you do not have to and just let the software match the photos with the locations.

Jetphoto can export your geotagged photos to a Google map photo gallery or to KMZ or KML files which can then be imported into Google Earth. I took a walk around campus on Thursday and shot photos of various dorms, academic buildings and some buildings just off campus in South Hadley. Within minutes I had the images in a Google map photo gallery. The satellite photos are out of date. Since the images were taken, the new dorm has been constructed, the soccer fields and track have been rebuilt and the tennis courts by the lower pond no longer exist.

The purpose of buying the device is to use it during some of the Alumnae Association travel programs. In the past I have tried to get staff to manually map where photos were taken, but they could usually only generalize where they had been, whereas the AMOD will be able to pinpoint thier location down to the street corner they were standing on. By being able to map the photos, it will make them more interesting. I would anticipate that once camera manufacturers reach the practical limit of th enumber of megapixels they can squeeze into a photo sensor, they will start including GPS into their cameras, along with WiFi and Bluetooth. There are a couple examples, one from Ricoh and another from Navman, which is a combination GPS navigator and camera.

Here’s a Japanese TV show segment about an amazing bicycle parking tower in Tokyo with a robotic elevator that can automatically store and retrieve 9400 bikes. Itis safe, secure and fast. A bike was retrieved within 22 seconds. When do you think we will see something like this in the United States?

A bicycling idea that is more likely to catch on in America is a citywide bicycle program in Paris France, involving 10,600 bikes in a bid to cut gridlock and give citizens a greener way to get around town. The program, named Vélib — a blend of vélo (bike) and liberté — allows users to swipe their credit card and take and return a bike from one of 750 stations in the city. Already cities, such as, Boston, New York, Montreal and San Francisco are looking to replicate the concept. Learn more aout it in the video below:

Let me be up front, I am a Democrat and Obama supporter, as well as being a techno geek nerd. So, naturally I take notice of how my political party and candidates are making use of technology and the World Wide Web.

The Democrats are taking full advantage of the web. They have recently launched McCainpedia, a Wikipedia like site that details his political positions of the Republican candidate from a Democratic perspective. They are using Mediawiki, the same software used by Wikipedia.

The Democratic National Convention has an attractive web site built with an open source content management system called SilverStripe from New Zealand which I think might be a very promising CMS for the Alumnae Association web site. SilverStripe has a tightly integrated administrative back-end and a ton of built-in features, such as, a built-in image editor, support for development and production versions, a forms builder, web traffic reporting, searching, blogging, commenting, widgets, membership management, work-flow control, menu editor, shopping car, image gallery and much more. The drawbacks of the software are that it is relatively young and does not yet have the add-ons or community that Drupal, Joomla or Plone has, but they are off to a running start and are showing great potential.

It's great to see the Democratic party utilize open source software and when the Dems win back the White Office and additional seats in Congress, maybe the open source movement will be further championed in the federal government. One can dream, right?

I also reviewed the web sites of Obama, Clinton and McCain. I think Obama has an excellent site and is taking full advantage of what the web has to offer, more so than his opponents. He is on every major social network (Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Digg, and Twitter) and then some that I was not aware of, such as Eons, BlackPlanet, Glee, MyBatanga, AsianAve,  and FaithBase which target certain social demographic or ethnic groups. I am not going to link to all of them. You can go to he Obama web site and scroll down to the lower right hand corner for the links.

There is even a my.barackobama.com social network component within the web site  where you can post your own blog, join groups, look up local events and find friends. You can even subscribe to notifications on your cell phone, as well as, download wallpapers and ring-tones.

Why do I share this with you? I think we can draw some inspiration from Obama's web site, not just politically, but technically for the Alumnae Association web site. I think they do a lot of things right which relate to the type of things we would like to do on our web site. The company behind the Obama web site is Blue State Digital. They use ExpressionEngine which is not open source, but is available in free and paid versions ($99.95 and up). 

I've been doing the Twitter thing, but my activity is sporadic. Sometimes I go days without posting anything. However, it is intesresting to read what others have to say. Still, I have managed to pick up a few "followers" - that is Twiiter-speak for people that subscribe to my Twitter postings.  One of my recent followers had a link to the following web site in her Twitter profile: Beedogs.com.

The site is about dogs in bee costumes or more precisely,  it "is the premier online repository for pictures of dogs in bee costumes." This goes to show you that you can have a web site that is just about anything. This is just one particular humourous niche that I would not have thought of.