Archive for October, 2005
It seems that every geek worth his or her salt is giving Flock a spin. In case you’re not a geek, or have been buried up to your neck in Ruby code, or (God forbid!) offline for a few days, Flock is a pre-release Firefox-based browser that ties into “social” web-based tools like Flickr, del.icio.us, newsfeeds and various blogging platforms. In fact, it does a great job of tying all these things together. For example, you can tag something as a favourite site, and it appears in your online del.icio.us list, which can appear in your blogroll. Meantime, a click on the built-in blog editor and a special toolbar means you can select one of those Flickr images your posted recently and write a blog post about it, publishing it automatically. It auto-discovers most feeds, lets you read them (or even combine various feeds together) in a nice ad-free environment, and –of course– blog about them. Throw in a nice little tie-in to the new blogging service WordPress.com (a free account!), and you have yourself a handy little tool for wrapping yourself in the interactive glory that is Web 2.0. (For a nice little guide of its features, see a short tour at stream of thoughts.)
So, do I like it?
I’m really not sure. (How’s that for a definitive answer?) I’ve never been a big Flickr user (my stream now has a grand total of two images, one for testing ages ago, and another for this post), and lately I find that I use del.icio.us less and less –I tag sites, but hardly ever return to use those bookmarks. The blog editor is decent; I’m actually using it for this post. The feeds are well done, but I’m not sure it’s going to replace bloglines for me any time soon. And the bookmarking system is, for me, rather clumsy, albeit great if you’re using several different computers and don’t mind sharing all your marks with the rest of the world, seeing you sync these online with del.icio.us. (Although, to be fair, you can choose not to share your bookmarks, but you’ll be losing one of the most important –or at least hyped– abilities of the browser.) At least my favourite Firefox extensions work well, including Web Developer Toolbar, GMail Notifier, AdBlock and GreaseMonkey.
I’m giving this a spin for a week. Who knows? Maybe it will encourage me to become more “social”? 
October 23rd, 2005
I love it when I get a pleasant surprise for the weekend. Now, all things being relative (and keep in mind that I’m a bona fide geek), this is quite a wonderful one for me: I’ve just downloaded and installed a version of the free Open Source office suite OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta for OS X, a version I didn’t even know existed. (Windows/Linux users can skip ahead a few paragraphs.) It’s not easy to find from any official site that I’ve tripped across, but you can find it here:
http://ftp.stardiv.de/pub/OpenOffice.org/contrib/MacOSX/
The current offering is Milestone 130, which is (according to the OpenOffice.org 2.0 RoadMap) after Beta 2 and before Release Candidate 1. It’s almost a month old, and it needs Apple’s X11 (which is an add-on to Jaguar, but standard in Tiger), but heck, that’s better than nothing. In fact, in the few hours I’ve been using it, I haven’t tripped across any unexpected crashes or glitches, and the whole experience has actually been quite smooth.
Obviously, there are a few bugs and oddities to be found, not least of which is the whole font thing, where one has to manually install fonts before they appear in OOo. A tip: if you haven’t done this sort of thing before (I only know this from using Linux), go to File -> Wizards -> Install fonts from the web… and you can install a bunch of nice typefaces, although the Microsoft ones probably won’t show up. Then, to get the rest of your system’s fonts, call up X11 and in the xterm, type:
cd /Applications/OpenOffice.org\ 2.0.app/
cd Contents/openoffice.org/program
sudo ./spadmin &
After you enter your password, an administration program will pop up (give it a few seconds) and let you add fonts by selecting font directories and then those fonts which you want to install. Not exactly user-friendly, but hopefully this will be rectified by the time of the final release.
The first thing I called up was my D*I*Y Planner Widget Kit. Whew… it works perfectly, and I can now breathe a sigh of relief that I’ve chosen OOo to produce it. (I wasn’t sure what wrenches OOo2 might throw into the cogs.) All told, the whole experience with OOo2 is far slicker and more responsive than OOo1–especially when compared to NeoOffice/J– and there are plenty of handy layout aids, floating/docked toolbars, and drawing tools. While I did find the tools in OOo1 to be fairly clunky, designing forms with the WK seems to be much easier and more intuitive. While it won’t be completely replacing Adobe Illustrator for me any time soon, I can see where I’ll have the opportunity to use this a lot more in my day-to-day work.
As for the other programs in the suite –the word processor, the spreadsheet, the presentation program, the XML forms editor, the database and the HTML editor– I can’t say that I’ve looked at these in any detail yet. I’ve always been fond of the word processor, which actually encourages structure-based writing (unlike, say, Word), and the spreadsheet has always done exactly what I’ve expected it to do. The presentation creator, Impress, has a lot more PowerPoint-style features, has good Flash output, and also blends in the powerful tools from Draw. The HTML editor is as capable as any other non-professional WYSIWYG program (don’t expect Dreamweaver or GoLive), and while the database and XML tools seem quite impressive on first glance, I’ll have to spend more time with them before I can come up with a valid opinion. The native PDF export of the whole suite does seem to be noticably improved, now including hyperlinks and better compression, although it was certainly no slouch to begin with.
Windows and Linux users can take advantage of the more recent OOo2 Release Candidate, or can grab StarOffice 8, the commercial offering from Sun that’s built atop OOo2, but with added goodies like more fonts, a clip art gallery, plenty of templates, a better dictionary/thesaurus, and so forth. (Psst! If you sign up for an account on the Sun website and select your area as “Education/Training”, you can download the full unlimited StarOffice 8 suite free of charge, saving yourself $70. Don’t lie, now. And you didn’t hear this from me.) Those interested in this product can also find a decent (albeit Linux-centred) review of SO8 at NewsForge.
October 9th, 2005
Back in 1986, during my last year of high school, there was a radio trivia contest to win tickets to a concert. I didn’t have much money, but I really wanted to go see this particular group, so I sat myself beside the radio one Monday morning, phone in hand, and waited. Now, my head has always been overflowing with completely useless information –probably more so at that time in my life– so I knew I stood just as good a chance as anybody else. Finally, they asked the question: “What was David Bowie’s theatrical rock-star persona backed by the Spiders from Mars?” I dialed as quickly as I could, but (hampered by my old rotary phone, no doubt) I was not the first, and so didn’t win the tickets. For three more mornings, I did the same, each time knowing the answer, but failing to be the first to call. On that Friday, however, the question was much harder: “Whose band did Canadian singer Gowan borrow for the recording of his Strange Animal LP?” This time I won the tickets. (The answer, by the way, is Peter Gabriel, who was recording in the same studio around the same time.)
I was proud of my accomplishment, elated by that vindication of the sheer width and breadth of the mostly impractical data stogged tight into my brain. It seems a little foolish in retrospect, but the accumulation of knowledge was –for me– the most distinguishing facet of my self-identity.
Back then, information was far less transitory. I remember reading and studying endlessly, trying to retain every nugget of information I could, whether it was useful or not. Now, I have become lazy. When a question is asked and I don’t know the response, a quick search on the Net will generally take me directly to the right information. The question answered, the details then drop away from my mind, and I usually forget it completely. I suspect most people do this nowadays, relying upon the Net far more than memory. When someone dials a friend from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, are they really choosing their most knowledgeable friend, or simply the fastest with Google? Who would you phone?
I have a very large library, encompassing thousands of books and covering hundreds of topics (many quite obscure), and I’m very proud of it. The problem is, sometimes I neglect to use it. The other night, I spent the better part of an hour Googling for information about tree identification. I found lots of bits and pieces, but little of any coherent and wide-ranging coverage. Then I realised… there were several books on the bookshelf behind me concerning that very topic. Yes, I can be oblivious at time, but in this case I think it was more a matter of how technology is changing the way I seek and retain knowledge. My need for a “quick fix” led me to a search engine, and not the shelves.
All of this makes me a little concerned for students today. True, the Internet is probably the best resource possible for scholars and teachers: the world’s largest conceivable library, with mostly free access to almost any snippet of information mere moments away. But with so much data, so free-flowing, has information become a mere tool, like pencils and erasers, fit for the moment and then quickly discarded once beyond its utility?
One might make the point that there was no guarantee that students would remember information culled from a paper encyclopedia, or that they might retain information of no pertinent and practical usage. But information was harder to come by, and –I believe– dissected slower. They say that in 1900, we encountered 1000 pieces of significant information per six months. In 1960, it was within one week. Today, it’s within one hour. How much knowledge can we actually retain when our “seven plus or minus two” short-term memories have to constantly filter, direct and trash most of that data?
It also begs a question: which is better, the instant access to vast quantities of lower-quality (on average, that is) information, or the more difficult access to rarer quantities of high-quality information? A Google search, or the hefty Encyclopaedia Britannica up on the library shelves? The accumulated and often erroneous perspective of thousands of writers, or the careful crafting and fact-checking by a skilled few? (This, of course, is one of the main reasons given by the Britannica company for continuing to use their rather costly work instead of the Net at large, and especially the Wikipedia.)
I wonder how long will it be before each student carries PDAs that display answers to any common question at the click of a button? (The time is almost here, I know.) Where, then, will that lead the education system, and how can it adjust to the notion of near-instantaneous research replacing memory?
I’ve been spending a lot of time recently wondering about this, how our educational tools might better compensate for new ways of learning, filtering information and retaining useful knowledge. Many minds far greater than mine are occupied by these same thoughts, I would guess.
Hmm… perhaps I can Google for them….
October 7th, 2005