Archive for February 2006

OpenOffice Gets Some Good Press

Posted by: rkassissieh
February282006



The SF Chronicle recently featured OpenOffice on section C page 1 and the home page of its web site.

Open-source programs offer alternatives to Microsoft Office
Some find they work fine, others say they lack some features.
Full article

We quietly make OpenOffice available on all of our PC workstations and recommend that people install it at home when they prefer not to pay for Microsoft Office. However, with increasing public attention, perhaps it is time to start promoting it more actively. Sometimes, it is a lot easier to introduce a new technology to a school upon a wave of popular awareness.

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Camino Turns 1.0

Posted by: rkassissieh
February252006

Even though I missed the release a couple of weeks ago, let me now acknowledge the release of Camino 1.0! It is very cool to find that the reasons why people love Camino -- speed, appearance, and simplicity -- were the main intents of the project's founders. Also note that the Camino project has already released a universal binary, so that early adopters of the Intel Macs can fly at top speed.

OM: What are the main differences between Mozilla Firefox and Camino?
MP: The core difference is in philosophy. We want to make the best Mac-native browser, not just one that happens to run on Mac as a port. The browser internals are very similar to those of Firefox (the Gecko rendering engine) but the front-end is pure Mac OS X native. We also support many Apple technologies that Firefox does not, including Address Book, Bonjour, Keychain, Spotlight, etc.

OM: I miss all those Firefox extensions. Any plans to add extension support?
MP: We recognize this is a problem for our users, but extensions only exist because of the cross-platform UI layer upon which Firefox is built. It’s that same cross-platform UI layer that makes Firefox feel “wrong” on Mac OS X. Camino’s use of Cocoa for the user interface makes it fit in with the rest of the platform, but prohibits us from using extensions. We feel this is a trade-off worth making. That said, we are investigating ways to allow non-user-interface extensions to register and work correctly.

Source: Om Malik

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OS X "Virus" Hysteria

Posted by: rkassissieh
February222006

At the risk of unleashing a massive virus attack on University High School, let me admit that we stopped installing antivirus software on our Macintosh computers three years ago. Our copy of Norton at the time requires root privileges to install correctly and incessantly bugged (pun not intended) users with requests to authenticate in order to update virus definitions. Add to that hassle the fact that Norton never, ever identified a single virus for us, probably because none existed at the time.

The responses of the press and grassroots sources differ widely on the impact of new worms that target iChat and Bluetooth users. So far, it appears to cause more trouble to have antivirus protection than not.

I sincerely hope that we do not end up either wasting loads of time maintaining Mac antivirus software that does not work properly or responding to virus/worm attacks that cause significant damage. At least it is easier to re-image a Mac system than Windows -- let's hope we don't reach that point.

The up side is that we recently bought Computer Associates antivirus software, that appears to offer both a Mac version and an easier update system than some other products. Proof will hit the pudding in June.

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Faculty Platform Choices

Posted by: rkassissieh
February172006

It's amazing how much platform choices still dominate discussions about educational computing. I thought that by now we would be discussing how to use the tools rather than the capabilities of the tools themselves. However, marketing being what it is, educators are constantly having to adapt to new tools with new capabilities, some needed and others gratuitous.

The discussion about Windows-versus-Mac-versus-Linux is especially vexing, since none are particularly well-suited to educational computing. The discussion got going on ISED-L last week. Greg Kearney proposed the idea that we spend far too much time and money living with Windows, and Jim Heynderickx reponded that the real investment for a user is in the time and effort it takes to learn and adjust to a new/changing operating system.

I am more firmly placed in the Heynderickx camp, though I lament the effort it takes to deal with the vulnerabilities of poorly designed and overfeatured operating systems. But we have reaped benefits from giving the people what they want, one user at a time.

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DVD Region Problem with Mac OS X

Posted by: rkassissieh
February162006

A teacher came to me yesterday unable to play a DVD from Spain because OS X required her to switch the region code for her software, with the ominous warning, "You will only be able to change region four times." Is this related to digital rights management (DRM) or other copyright issues?

The workaround was to install VLC, an alternate media player that plays the region 3 DVD without complaint. The only catch is that you need to keep the Apple region warning in the background, or else it will eject the DVD. Thanks to Miguel Guhlin for the idea (he likes it for MP3-independent podcasting). Too bad about Apple, whose support of some (unknown to me) legal issue makes their DVD player relatively unusable.

Does anyone know why VLC chose the traffic cone for its logo? It is a warning sign for the potholes caused by DRM?

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Small Updates to Favorite Apps

Posted by: rkassissieh
February082006

Camino and Cyberduck have both released minor updates, giving me the opportunity to mention how much I love these two applications. Camino is my preferred Mac browser, faster and more Mac OS-looking than Firefox. It has enough of the features I like in Firefox, such as tabbed browsing and embedded search bar. Cyberduck is my current FTP program of choice for PERL scripting, allowing me to automatically launch my text editor to edit a file.

The main improvement I have noticed in Camino is stability, since I upgraded from 1.0a to 1.0b. The bookmarks bar and browser tabs match colors better than they used to. The release notes also explain why I used to periodically lose all my favicons! Cyberduck also improved stability and enabled inline file renaming, which I had missed.

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