My ipod Touch turns out to be a great little wireless network finder. It displays a very readable list of all the wireless networks it detects and places a little lock symbol next to any that are password protected.

Here are some links for configuring Mac Mail and Outlook It’s not hard to find Google’s instructions for many other email clients.

I just installed Vista on my HP tc4400 Tablet PC and I’m going to use this entry to keep track of performance tweaks.

• Turn off most of the visual effects.   Right-click on Computer and Choose Advanced Properties, then click on Performance Setting.
  • Choose Adjust for Best Performance.  Hit Apply.  Things will get ugly.
  • Using the checkboxes turn on what really matters to you.  The most important one to turn on, assuming you don’t want ugly, is Use visual styles… — it’s at the bottom.  I turned on Smooth edges of screen fonts, too.
• Disable Services.  Type services in the Start Search box to bring up the control panel.
  • Certificate Propogation: Used with Smart Cards, which most people don’t use.  Mine was set to manual, but it was started.  I disabled it.  There are two other services related to Smart Cards, but mine were set to Manual and not running, so I left them alone.
  • Offline Files: A nice service, if you use it.   I don’t mirror my network files on my tablet, so I disabled it.
• If you have a USB flash drive, use ReadyBoost.    Vista will set up a disk cache on a USB-attached drive.  You use as much of us as you want, leaving the rest for files.   I used a 512MB drive that was gathering dust.   I devoted 444MB, leaving a little space for files.   To turn it on, right-click on the drive icon under Computer and chose properties off the menu.   When the properties sheet pops up, look for the ReadyBoost tab.
• Remove items from the Run list.  Start Regedit. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\
Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. What you can remove varies a lot, depending on what you’ve installed.  You need to look up what each program does.  I was able to remove:
  • Quick Time
  • Tunes Helper.
• Replace the bloated Adobe Reader with FoxIt or a similar PDF reader.

A few years ago I was excited at the prospect that OpenOffice would by my office suite of choice, but I ran into two significant problems.

1. I didn’t like using it as much as I liked using Microsoft Office. I was reluctant to admit it to myself, but I finally had to.
2. The version that ran on the Mac was horrid. It was butt ugly and slow, and required an X server.

I really hadn’t looked at it since, but recently I put together a Ubuntu (Linux) system in my office and started playing with the email reader Evolution (which is a pretty good replacement for Outlook in Exchange shops), I needed something to process Word and Excel attachments, so I downloaded OpenOffice. Boy, is it nice now! The clunkiness I remember is gone and the user interface is more natural to those of us who have used other word processors and spreadsheets. I haven’t checked out the presentation tool.

But what about Macs? At long last there are promising developments. After years of little development, a real effort is being waged to create a version of OpenOffice that will run directly on the Mac desktop (and not on X). The first Alpha release came out very recently. It’s a long way from being ready, but it’s something.

This make sense to me, not because laptop programs are a bad idea (says the guy who is rolling one out at his school), but because these programs have been sold as a way to raise student achievement as measured by SATs and other standardized tests.  It’s fairly easy to show that laptop programs don’t raise scores. In fact, it’s pretty easy to show that almost anything schools try don’t raise scores (the main exception being studying to the test — that has been shown to make a difference).

The best way to raise "student achievement" (other than studying for the test) is to admit better test takers.

In general:

1. People who advocate for laptop programs should be more careful about what they claim.
2. In general, schools engage in a lot of magical and/or sloppy thinking.   They are embarrassingly susceptible to snake oil peddlers.  
3. Laptop programs are expensive. It’s good that they are receiving scrutiny. It’s also good to hold people who make claims accountable.

So what are my claims?  I think young people (and most especially girls) would benefit from learning to comfortably use (and take care of) a portable computer.   I believe it’ll foster the confidence they’ll need to explore future technologies, some of which will be different than anything we can now imagine. 

I would like to measure the benefit I claim, but it isn’t easy.  Assessment that misses the mark is worse than no assessment at all.

Need to back up your laptop files or stash some large files someplace? Check SteamLoad out. They are offering 25gb of storage. They provide a web interface for downloading and uploading and a downloadable PC application for file synchronization.

It’s crazy how much better my networking experience is at home than it is here on the campus where I work.   It’s that way for a lot of people now.   Of course, it used to be quite the opposite.  You were stuck with dial-up at home and would head into the office (or onto campus) in order to gain access to a broadband connection.   These days, the bandwidth available to you at home can be equal to or greater than the bandwidth available to your entire company or school, and of course you have to share it with all your colleagues at work.  So now people go home to get more done.   That seems nuts, but it would be expensive to provide 100 people at the office the same amount of bandwidth they have at home — or so it seems.

Maybe I should have started with this question: Do the people working in an office or sharing a campus need all that bandwidth?   Of course they do.  Everybody needs bandwidth now.   More and more, the resources that matter to people, no matter what they are doing, are out there, in the cloud.   Fewer resources are inside their computers, on a CD-ROM, or on the servers maintained by the local IT staff.

I am the local IT staff and I don’t use the stuff we provide as much.  For example, I keep most of my documents at docs.google.com now.   That means

1. I don’t use the copy of Office purchased for my computer.
2. I don’t use the fileserver around the corner in our climate-controlled server room
3. I need more bandwidth

Similarly, we (the IT folk) have started using a wiki at wikispaces.com for our internal documentation.  Once again:

1. I don’t use the copy of Macromedia Contribute purchased for my computer
2. I don’t use the intranet web server around the corner
3. I need more bandwidth

Now, relative to most of the people I work with (and even many of the students who attend here), I’m an early adopter.  But even those who only use Word, Internet Explorer (or Safari), and Outlook (or Entourage) and store everything they produce on the local fileserver are spending a lot more time on the net reading web sites and watching video stored on web sites..  Of couse our students are spending a lot of time at MySpace and Facebook, and downloading everything that isn’t nailed down.

The fact is that people don’t rely on their local network to the extent they used to.  If they still do, it’s probably because they "grew up" doing so and have no particular reason to change.  

So, should I be shifting IT dollars that I traditionally spend on copies of Microsoft Office and on servers and spend it on bandwidth and on services provided by other people’s servers (out there in the cloud)?   Does the IT mission shrink back to what it was long ago — providing access to specialized applications and private data — with the additional responsibility of providing a fast connection to the cloud, where they can find the rest of what they are looking for.

I guess I’m talking about a form of outsourcing, but not the kind where somebody on the inside is replaced by somebody on the outside, at least not directly.  The Web cloud now provides many of the things you used to have to go to your corporate network for, and we’re only at the beginning of the shift.  

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Apple’s iPhone sounds so cool. (Oh, the product may have to be renamed since Apple didn’t quite lay claim to the name iPhone before going public, but that’s another story). What impresses me most is how Apple managed to come up with something that is so different from all the mobile phones that have come before: it is the mark of Steve Jobs, who isn’t satisfied to be a mere player. If he can’t enter a market with distinction and with pinache, he’s not interested.

I expect the iPhone (or Apple Phone) will sell well among Apple fans and among programmers (if they provide a good programming interface: it runs a variant of Mac OS X), and perhaps among smart-phone types, at least those who aren’t toting Blackberries. Not sure about the Blackberry crowd.

On the other end of the spectrum, Microsoft announced an interesting product called Home Server, which basically takes the solid Windows Server 2003, a workplace workhorse, and wraps it in an easy-to-use web interface, and sits it at the center of a home network. What problem does it solve? It provides disk storage that is easy to add to, easy to connect to, and easy to share among computers. It also backs up the computers connected to it. If the price is right, I’d jump at the chance to have one, especially if it plays nicely with Macs (and it’s supposed to).

In October, I mentioned Libya’s agreement with One Laptop per Child (OLPC), the non-profit group working on an inexpensive laptop for children in developing countries.

Intel is now developing a laptop for school children, the Classmate PC, which will be more powerful and sell for more than the OLPC laptop. It will still cost far less than a conventional laptop. The Classmate PC will run a simplified Microsoft Windows operating system. The OLPC laptop runs on Linux.

Here’s a review of the Classmate PC.