Category: @work

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Another good use for the iPad: one-to-one presentations

Anyway, that’s a unique thing the iPad can do, one-on-one presentations. And it’s a business application too. If you’re in a tech role at a corporation that has a sales function, get busy. You’re going to be using a lot of tablet computers, whether they’re from Apple, HP, Google or whoever. One person telling a story to another person, that’s going to be a big use of tablets.

iPad as a one-to-one presenter. Scripting News.

The iPad is great for “Let me show you something…” interactions. Of course it would be even better if the browser wasn’t crippled. The next tablet that comes along with a full OS, an easy to use interface, and an app store is probably going to be more appealing to business and education. Until then, this will do.

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Drupal’s Missing Edit Tab: A Checklist to Solve Node Editing Problems

From time to time a user may not be able to edit a Drupal node and you end up tearing your hair out trying to figure out why. Sometimes the solution is obvious, and sometimes it is not. This post will take you through some of the main reasons for the problem along with suggested solutions.

via User can’t edit a node – Drupal troubleshooting | fused.

So this crops up way too often for me: a user doesn’t see the edit tab when they should. It could be a lot of things and the linked blog post covers the possibilities (with pictures). From the mundane, a particular role doesn’t have edit rights to a given node type, to the exotic, the user’s role doesn’t have rights to the input filter used to create the node, this post covers it all. Certainly worth a bookmark.

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Tutorial on Building iPhone OS and Android Web Apps With AJAX

Developing for mobile devices has been a high cost, low return proposition for many years, despite the hype around it. The latest generation of smartphones powered by the iPhone OS and Google’s Android provide a much simplified solution: just build Web applications. This gives you a one build for all devices approach, which can lower the cost. Even better, these high-end devices all offer ultra-modern browsers supporting advanced HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. In this article, learn how to build Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax)-heavy applications that take full advantage of the capabilities of modern smartphones. You will learn not only how to get the most out of these devices, but also how to deal with the subtle differences between them.

via IBM developerWorks: Create Ajax applications for the mobile Web.

Good tutorial. It starts out with a trivial Java app to create content, but any other server side tech, like PHP, could be used. The mobile portion relies on HTML 5 and AJAX in iPhone OS 3.x+ and Android 2.x+ browsers. You’ll need the most recent Adroid and iPhone SDKs to put this together.

This article provides a good starting point to start looking at how to build basic mobile apps.

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TouchMouse Turns Your iPhone/iTouch Into a WiFi Mouse For Your Mac/PC

TouchMouse is a free application for the iPhone/iPod touch that, when paired with its accompanying control software on your Mac or Windows computer, turns your touchscreen into a mouse and keyboard.

Once you download the software to your iPhone or iPod touch and pair it with the server software—Logitech has versions of the TouchMouse Server software available for Windows XP, Vista, and 7 as well as Mac OS X—you'll be able to use your device as a mouse for controlling your computer.

via TouchMouse Controls Your Computer’s Mouse and Keyboard via iPhone or iPod touch – Remote Control – Lifehacker.

I’m using it right now to write this entry. Did I mention it includes text input too? It does take some getting used to, but I can see that it would make great addition to a teknoids toolkit. Imagine having the server on all of those classroom PCs and an iTouch in the hands of every faculty or presenter.

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Accessing Remote Filesystems With MacFUSE and sshfs

So, there I was looking for a way to directly access files on the development server with Komodo. Easy you say? Not if you need to use sftp/scp and public-key access. Turns out to be either really hard or just plain impossible. After a bit of kvetching to some online friends I was pointed to this article in the Komodo support forums. While I couldn’t get it to work in Komodo anyway, one of the comments did point me to a what promised to be a better solution anyway: mounting the remote filesystem as a volume on my trusty Mac. Now I have access to the what I need not just in Komodo, but in all my apps.

The solution is to use MacFUSE and sshfs to mount the remote filesystems using ssh for security. I hadn’t heard of MacFUSE before and was a bit skeptical about whether or not this was really going to work but it did. So here are the steps I took to make it work with my servers that require public-key access. Of course it works with plain old password access to servers, too.

  1. Run ssh-agent. It is part of the OpenSSH package and should already be part of your OSX install on the Mac.
  2. Export the SSH_AUTH_SOCK and SSH_AGENT_PID values returned when you run ssh-agent. This sets some environmental variables that get used by ssh-add in the next step to associate public-keys with your account.
  3. Use ssh-add <path-to-your-key> on the command line to add the keys you need to access your servers. Again it is part of the OpenSSH package on your Mac.
  4. Download latest MacFUSE .dmg from http://cod​e.google.c​om/p/macfu​se/downloa​ds/list. Your probably going to want the Leopard version which also works fine on Snow Leopard.
  5. Download and install the SSH File System for MacFUSE from http://cod​e.google.c​om/p/macfu​se/wiki/MA​CFUSE_FS_S​SHFS. On that same page follow the command line instructions to create mount points and launch sshfs.

That’s it. If all went well you should now see volumes on your Mac that correspond to the remote filesystems you mounted. There are a couple of things to keep in mind though. First, make sure that the account you used to log in to the server has read and write permissions for the directories and files you are accessing.  I know it sounds obvious, but I was accessing the files on a development web tree and didn’t have the permissions I needed to write files.

Second, I leave it to those more skilled than I to figure out how to make all of this survive sleep mode or a reboot. Putting your Mac to sleep drops the net connections and they will not come back on waking up the machine unless you take extra steps. I’m not sure what happens to environmental variables on reboot because I haven’t rebooted since I did this, but I’m sure they will disappear to. If someone takes a crack at scripting all of this to keep going through sleep and reboot, let me know in the comments below.

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CK-12 Big Winner in CA Free Textbook Initiative

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today released the first report of California’s free digital textbook initiative – which outlines how high school math and science textbooks submitted under the first phase of the initiative measure up against the state’s rigorous academic content standards. Of the 16 free digital textbooks for high school math and science reviewed, ten meet at least 90 percent of California’s standards. Four meet 100 percent of standards, including the CK-12 Foundation’s CK-12 Single Variable Calculus, CK-12 Trigonometry, CK-12 Chemistry and Dr. H. Jerome Keisler’s Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach.

via Gov. Schwarzenegger Releases Free Digital Textbook Initiative Phase 1 Report .

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Hewlett Foundation Awards $1.5 Million Grant for Open Textbooks

The third and last of Monday’s news developments also comes in the digital textbook arena — but from the free, rather than for-profit, perspective. The Community College Collaborative for Open Educational Resources said the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation had given it $1.5 million in new funds to expand its work, which focuses on increasing the number of free, online textbooks and training community college instructors on how best to use such books. Its main resource, the Community College Open Textbook Project, has dozens of college members and seeks to significantly expand the number of freely available digital textbooks it makes available.

via News: Textbook Bonanza – Inside Higher Ed.

Would be really nice if CALI could come up with some grant money to fund development of our open education resources projects including eLangdell and the Legal Education Commons.

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J. Saltalamachia on Using Classcaster and Podcasting In Her Torts Class

The written student evaluations from each class have been overwhelmingly positive regarding all technology, but the podcasting was a particular favorite. Students revealed that they listened to the podcasts on iPods as well as work computers. They could listen during their commutes, which in our urban environment frequently took several hours each day. One student told me that she was planning to listen to the entire set of podcasts while she was running the New York Marathon. I once even overheard several of my students bragging to students in other sections about how their podcasts were available after each class. Classcaster statistics revealed that my 2006 Torts pages received 4657 hits, while the 2007 page had 7662 hits. On occasion my page has been one of the most frequently used in the entire Classcaster system. Because I did not require a password, students at other schools were also able download the lessons. The lesson I recorded on “exam writing tips” before the 2006 mid-term exam was one of the most popular of all time.

Podcasts, PowerPoint, and Pedagogy: Using Technology to Teach the Part-Time Student

Be sure to take a look at the results of the survey on page 898, showing that 97.7% of her students listened to the podcasts, while 67.4% ran the CALI Lessons she recommended.

Prof. Saltalamachia makes use of Classcaster’s relatively unique telephone podcasting system to record her class summaries so that “[w]ith a cell phone and a laptop, I could do this anywhere without needing any help from the school’s IT Department.”

The blogs, with podcasts, mentioned in the article are here and here. The podcasts are part of an archive of nearly 20,000 (yes that is twenty thousand) hours of recorded lectures and summaries that are housed in Classcaster. The Classcaster podcasting and blogging system is available to faculty, librarians, and staff of CALI member law schools free of charge.

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Table Wizard Not Going to Cut It on CALI Website

Now, as for linking with nodes – that is not supported at this time. Is this your primary question? I’m going to assume that it’s the main issue you’re facing and turn this into a feature request – at the moment, there’s no way to define relationships between Table Wizard-managed tables and tables integrated with Views by other modules (such as the node table). Supporting that will take some work…

via Allow relationships to other views-enabled tables | drupal.org.

OK, so we imported CALI Lessons into Drupal as nodes. Now I’ve got the table that tracks when folks run those Lessons. It has about 4.4 million rows and contains what is effectively relational data: ids for Lessons, People, etc, and run data: time of run, questions answered, etc. So we were hoping to use Table Wizard to surface the data in Views2 and combine it with Lesson node info to produce nifty pages for people to see the Lessons they have run. But as noted above TW doesn’t support building relationships between TW-managed tables and existing Views tables, so no way to link the nid in the LessonRun table with the nid in the node table or the uid in LessonRun with the uid in the users table with the nifty Views2 interface. Looks like I’ll just need to code it in.

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DocStoc Launches Document Collections

Popular document sharing service DocStoc just launched a collections feature, which lets users package documents around a particular topic. DocStoc has already created close to 50 collections, including “Starting a Small Business,” “Advertising Online,” and “Traveling on a Budget,” and is opening up the platform to users to add to existing collections and create their own.

via DocStoc Launches Document Collections.

New feature includes 2 legal collections, “Filing a Patent” and “How to File a Lawsuit“.  With any luck somebody will wade through the docs and put together some more legal collections and maybe even some with an eye toward legal education.  Wait that would be me and law school outlines.