MrWoodleigh

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.

The New York Times ran an article in the Education section entitled Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops (free subscription required) that documents instances of school districts (and one independent school) retiring their laptop programs after they failed to deliver results.

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.

Musings on a snowy day…

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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Two recent product announcements have piqued my interest.

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).

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame writes entertainingly and sometimes sagely in his Dilbert.Blog.

His recent entry on the Israeli-Palistinian conflict is worth reading.

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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.

I guess everybody but me has figured this out, but blogs and social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, etc.) provide all the web presence just about any normal person needs.   I considered putting wikis in the list, but no — too geeky.   It’s the blog and the personal profile, baby.   They just work for people.  No need to learn HTML authoring software;  until recently, average people needed to learn that stuff to contribute to the web.  

On a related note, when I’m emailed a document (usually a Word doc or Excel spreadsheet) to add to the intranet at work, I just email it to docs.google.com (formerly writely.com) where it is automatically converted to HTML, visit docs.google.com, touch it up a bit (I like a little color), publish it, and link it up somewhere on the intranet.   True, I could have used Office’s "save as web page" function, but I can’t stand the HTML it generates and I have to locate the generated file(s) where our intranet server can see it.   Once the file is up on docs.google.com, I can share it with the author of the document and try to coax him or her to use the docs.google.com version instead of the original Office file as the source, but, I don’t usually succeed for reasons good and bad.  When I succeed, she or he can publish updates directly.   Immediate turnaround for the author and no work for me.

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Pando makes it easy to send a large file, such as a video, over the Internet. It uses BitTorrent technology. I tried an earlier version of Pando, which was tied to email, but didn’t find it natural to use. The new version, which sports additional interfaces, is quite easy to use.

Both the sender and the receiver need to install a Pando client, but it runs on Macs and PCs and is very easy (and safe) to install.

If you are a dedicated user of web services (Google Docs and Spreadsheets, GMail, TadaList, Wikispaces, Flickr, etc.) like I am, or a regular at various forums or online communities (MySpace, Facebook, etc.) like just about everybody else is, then you have lots of usernames and passwords to keep track of. Not I, some of you are thinking: I just use the same username and password everywhere. Well that may work for a while, but… What if your usual username is taken at some site where you are registering for an account? What if your password isn’t long enough at other place where you are trying to register? After a while, you’ll have a growing list of exceptions. And, let’s say that you resolve to follow that advice to change your password every so often (which, um, is sound advice). Are you going to visit each site?

Also, at many of those web sites, you need to create a profile, so you find yourself typing in the same information over and over again.

All of this makes you yearn for a single username and password that would log you into all these sites around the net. With this (and no doubt much more) in mind, Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal developed OpenID. OpenID is a system (now overseen by the OpenID consortium) where your set up an ID (in the form of a URL) and a password and use them to register at other places. Here’s a Winkled article about OpenID.

You can get an OpenID at myOpenID.com.

OpenID’s are now accepted at a handful of sites. I got me one and used it to set up an account with the wiki hosting site schtuff.com. Worked well. Now schtuff.com is listed on my MyOpenID.com under “My Stuff: Sites”. There’s more to this that I explained. Check it out, if you’re interested.

I wonder whether the concept will catch on.

Of course, this kind of centralization is a double-edged sword. What if somebody gets into your OpenID?