The local evening news had a special virus warning tonight. Not especially unusual - they occasionally warn people about a Big Windows Virus that went around the week before. But Nirmala began the segment “This is the first virus to infect Apple’s Oh Ess Ecks… It’s spread through the ‘I-Chat’ instant messaging application… Be sure antivirus software is installed and up to date…” (I-Chat was in big letters on the side of the screen)
Read MoreForgot to post this yesterday… This batch of Faves was automagically assembled and referenced through the magical wonderousness of FD’s Flickr Toys…
I’d tried Adium before, looking for a usable multi-protocol chat client so I could talk to my contacts on AIM/.Mac as well as ICQ, MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk. I only have one or two contacts on each non-AIM protocol, so don’t want to be running separate apps for each. Adium was cool, but quirky, and it never “clicked” for me. It was annoying, with the silly duck icon, quacking alerts, etc. so I reverted to iChat (after trying Fire again - I swore by Fire before iChat was released).
Read MoreIn the latest round of updates to Blogbridge, they added support for hosting groups of feeds as OPML files. They also just added a service that renders every OPML file as a javascript, ala Feed2JS. So, you can easily embed any group of feeds from your copy of Blogbridge, into any web page, by putting in a simple javascript element. This is a pretty cool set of features. Yet another reason why I love Blogbridge :-)
Read MoreI just grabbed a whiteboard for a couple minutes to start fleshing some stuff out for EduGlu. Here’s a quick and dirty whiteboard photo. It’s pretty rough, very incomplete, and barely legible. But, in the spirit of doing the whole shebang Out In The Open, here it is.. If only the SMART Boards we have laying around here were hooked up…
It’s awesome that people are talking about, and referencing, and critiquing EduGlu. Keep the conversations going! I do need to clarify a couple of things about it, though…
I hadn’t heard of this one before, but I stumbled across Deepest Sender while poking through the Firefox extensons database. It’s a XUL app, so should run nice and fast. At first blush, it looks like a pretty handy way to quickly post stuff. It took maybe 10 seconds to configure to point at my WordPress blog here.
The editing interface only appears to let you select one category, though, but nicely handles keyboard input to select a category quickly.
Read MoreI’ve been waffling back and forth between Safari and Firefox over the last few months. The flexibility of Firefox keeps drawing me close, like a moth to a flame, only to be burned because it doesn’t “feel” right. Safari does. I’ve been slowly adding Themes and Extensions to make Firefox start to look/behave better, and it’s close. Darned close.
The thing that might push it over the threshold for me was the addition of the All-in-One Mouse Gestures extension, which combines a bunch of stuff (including Mouse Gestures) into one nice package. In Safari (and every other Cocoa app on my system) I’ve been using CocoaGestures to add powerful mouse gestures to tasks like tab switching, closing tabs, etc… But on Firefox, I had to keep reverting to the keyboard (or moving the mouse to select a tab - much more efficient to just flick the mouse and have that motion translated…) Heck, I haven’t even found a keyboard combo to switch tabs in Firefox yet…
Read MoreTo prevent myself from backing away from this, I’ve gone ahead and requested a new project on Eduforge.org to host the mythical EduGlu application development.
I’ve got no idea what this thing might be - not even what language it will be written in - but I’m sticking a flag into the sand to say I’ll help build this sucker.
It’s going to have to be a spare time / after hours project for me, since I’m already way booked at work. If it turns into anything, I’ll try to address any issues that come up there. That’d be a good problem to have, though.
Read MoreI’ve been giving some thought to the “school aggregator” that grew out of the discussions around Northern Voice. What kinds of things will it have to be able to do? Types of interfaces? Explicit and implicit data and metadata? How to manage caching of items, and manage displaying the potentially hundreds of thousands of bits of content that will be pulled into the system over the course of a year? And how to present cohorts/classes/years within this? How to allow students to add multiple data sources, and tag it for use in whatever class context(s)? How to let students and teachers mine the aggregated data to get what they need/want? Lots of stuff to chew on here.
Read MoreI thought I’d dodged this bullet. No such luck. This is a particularly insideous one, in that it is 2x exponential. I guess it’s my turn to be a good sport, so here goes…
One of the extracurricular activities after Northern Voice included a quick excursion led by Jon to The Railway Club (a couple of blocks from Robson Square). We wound up sampling the überbrü - the Open Source Beer.
Brian had written about überbrü a while back, and I was intrigued by the idea - an open recipe for a brew, for sale only in local micrew bars (or at home).
Yet another good conversation, lubricated by a surprisingly good beer.
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