Ed's Tech Tips

2008 is just around the corner and you may have already bought a calendar for the new year or may be expecting one under the Christmas tree, but you may not have sen on elike this. Here is a free simple compact calendar from David Seah that will make planning projects and events in the new year that much easier. From David's blog:

The problem with traditional calendar design is that they chunk time in months, not continuous days. I generally am thinking of things like:

• How many days are available, including weekends?
• When are critical deliverables?
• How much calendar time is needed to finish a task?
• What are the specific days we have to work around?

One way to do this is to use a long timeline, like a Gantt chart. All the days line up one after the other in a long horizontal format, which makes it easy to see how long something takes; distance is directly equatable to duration. The drawback of the Gantt chart is its lack of compactness.

The advantages of the Compact Calendar:

• The days are all packed together visually, so "distance" corresponds directly to time. This makes visually estimating how much time you need much easier, an visual advantage shared with the Gantt chart.

• The calendar for an entire year can fit on a single piece of paper, with plenty of room for notes. You can also just print out a section of it, for short projects.

• It still largely retains the monthly calendar format, with days of the week in columns, so it's a bit easier to use than a Gantt chart.

• Saturdays and Sundays are shaded differently, so we are not as tempted to plan our work schedule on them.

• It's easy to count weeks too. "Unit weeks" tend to be the building blocks of longer-term projects.

• You're forced to break up project tasks to fit into each 5-day work period. Gantt charts, by comparison, tend to draw long lines through the weekend because that's what lines want to do. Even if you don't work on the weekend, from a visual perspective it seems to imply that you should be working. This has always bugged me, from the perspective of visual gestalt and information design.

• Because we retain the days of the week in the same column, it's easy to mark recurring events that are tied to them. "Oh, every Friday we have a company meeting." Easy to see where they'll be; not so on the Gantt chart.

 You can download the calendar in Excel and PDF formats and in different country versions.

YAML stands for "Yet Another Multicolumn Layout", which is a little understated. It is an extensive CSS framework for creating a wide variety of web page layouts that work with a variety of different web browsers. It takes a lot of guess work and hassle out of developing a custom web page design or template. I used it for some of the class and club web site temapltes and just recently for the new upcoming Alumnae Quarterly Blogazine. The Blogazine layout was inspired by a WordPress theme, but I use LifeType which utilizes a superior Smarty based template system. To save time, I use a basic YAML fixed 3 column layout for the basis of the template and built it up from there. Check out the cool online YAML builder which allows you to dynamically create a page layout online.

Another tool you may want to consider is Yahoo's YUI Grids CSS although it may not offer as many layouts.  There is a online YUI Grids builder, too.

These are great tools for saving time andletting you concentrate on the design and content of your design. Don't reinvent the wheel.  

 

Yes, improve your vocabulary while helping to feed the world and reduce hunger on Freerice.com, sister site of Poverty.com. The programmer developed the game to help his teenage son prepare for the SAT and to fight hunger. From the site:

FreeRice has two goals:

1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

This is made possible by the sponsors who advertise on this site.

Whether you are CEO of a large corporation or a street child in a poor country, improving your vocabulary can improve your life. It is a great investment in yourself.

Perhaps even greater is the investment your donated rice makes in hungry human beings, enabling them to function and be productive. Somewhere in the world, a person is eating rice that you helped provide.

 

 

With the writers strike going on and a subscription to basic cable, I've been poking around the web for some decent television content. I guess I am more of a TV watcher than I would really like to admit, but I was born in the '60's and grew up watching television. Although I do have hobbies like reading, playing guitar and cooking along with a wide variety of household chores I like to relax in front of the tube occasional or do some of those chores, such as, folding laundry while watching some television. Some of my recent favorite shows include Heroes, House, Journeyman, Desperate Housewives, Battlestar Galatica, Bionic Woman, 30 Rock, and Two and a Half Men.

Speaking of 30 Rock, I had not really watched the show which is hilarious until I watched it on OpenHulu.org. Hulu.com is the joint project between Fox and NBC and is still in private Beta. I just got my invite last night and checked it out. There are a ton a shows and a few movies on this site. It has a nice layout, it is easy to navigate and has a nice unobtrusive Flash video player. The commercials are short, 10 seconds instead of the 30 seconds you find on the main television network web sites. If you cannot get access to  Hulu, then check out OpenHulu.org which has much of the same content. Hulu allows you to embed video in your web site and that is what OpenHulu has done. Unfortunately, he has a lot of annoying banner ads, but you can enable full screen mode when playing back a video.

Another online television option is Joost, which unlike Hulu, is not a web site where you watch videos, but a peer-to-peer application that you download and can watch 20,000 shows across 400 channels. Unfortunately, it does not work on PowerPC Macs, but it will work on Intel based Macs and PC's. It has a very cool interface. Much of the interface is transparent and layered so that you can explore different channels wile watching a movie or show. There is even an API that allows developers to create widgets for the interface. For example, you can blog within the program while you are watching a video.

Another application you can use to download a wide variety of video content is Miro, which I have written about in the past. Miro, which was known as Democracy. Unlike Joost which has struck deals with CBS and other studios Miro is an open source program that acts as a guide and organizer for a wide variety of online video. You can subscribe to podcasts and have it automatically download your favorite shows, but set limits on how much space the videos can take up on your hard drive, because video files are huge.  It also can act as a bittorrent client for downloading large video files. 

 

I know it might be too late for this suggestion this holiday season, but it is actually applicable throughout the entire year for birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, baby showers, bar mitzvahs, etc. Tell your friends and family to create a wish list on Amazon.com.  Wish Lists are a great way for people to let others know the things they would most like to own. They also make it easy to ensure that the gift gets sent to the right place and that the recipient doesn't receive more than he or she wants. Set an example and create one for yourself, too.  It does work. My sister looked at my list and sent me a couple Ken Follett books and the awesome CD from Paul Potts, the cell phone salesman that won the Britians Got Talent competition singing opera.  Simon Cowell was one of the judges and he could not say anything bad about this guy. Here is the video of his audition which blew me away. 

 

Now if you feel that you or your friends or families have everything they need or want then check out  redefinechristmas.org.  "Redefining Christmas is a simple idea to make our holiday gift giving more meaningful and more charitable. Instead of the wasteful gifts we sometimes give, consider giving your friends and loved ones donations to their favorite charities. And ask that they do the same for you." You can purchase charitable gift certificates for a wide variety of charities listed on justgive.org. You can even create a Wedding Registry on the site.

 

This weekend I decided to practice what I preach by buying another hard drive for my Power Mac G5 at home. It had a single 160 GB internal hard drive but no backup drive which I tell people never to do, but I was doing it myself. Trusting a single drive with all of my documents, photos and music despite the fact that it is not a matter of if your hard drive will fail but when.

The ideal setup would be a second internal hard drive that I could configure as a mirror to the first drive and then an external terabyte firewire drive that I could use for Time Machine backups and additional storage. However, I do not have the budget for a ideal setup. Instead I had about hundred dollars I wanted to spend. CompUSA had some weekend only deals on some Western Digital And Seagate USB 2.0 500 GB external hard drives for only $119 each. However, I would have preferred Firewire connections because they offer better performance. You may be asking how is that possible when USB 2.0 is rated at 480 Mbps and standard Firewire 400 is 400 Mbps? The answer is that differences in the architecture of the two interfaces have a huge impact on the sustained throughput.

• FireWire, uses a "Peer-to-Peer" architecture in which the peripherals are intelligent and can negotiate bus conflicts to determine which device can best control a data transfer 

 Read and write tests to the same IDE hard drive connected using FireWire and then Hi-Speed USB 2.0 show:
  (More)

It's a little ironic that a magazine that promotes capitlism is highlighting what you can get for free on the web, but then again some of the best free stuff comes from some of the biggest internet companies, such as, Google and Yahoo that use the free products and services as bait for you to view the advertising. I am not crazy about the slide show style presentation of the articles but he author highlights some very useful sites. Check it out for yourself.

This is a clever web site created by a collaboration of European Mac software developers that were inspired by the Pixar animated movie Ratatouille, which by the way is a great movie. You can save up to 70% off on some cool software. I've written about a couple of the programs before, PulpMotion and CSS Edit. There's only a couple days left so go check it out. You might find good Christmas gifts. There are some very strong web and multimedia applications, such as, RapidWeaver and iStopMotion.

 

I have written a couple times about e-books and I recieved an email from Asia Lu listing her top ten favorite free ebook web sites. I thought it was a pretty good list and thought I would share with you. Thanks to Asia for compiling the list. By the way, most of these services should work with the new Kindle ebook reader from Amazon.

1. Project Gutenberg: This is one of the first sites to promote ebooks. If it is in the public domain you'll probbaly find it here.

2. Asiaing.com: Over 2,000 free ebooks & free magazines. Most of them can be downloaded directly. I love the slogan: "Knowledge shared, power gained!."

3. The Online Books Page: Listing over 25,000 free books on the Web. The site is hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Library.

4. PSU's Electronic Classics Site:Classic works of Literature.

5. PlanetPDF: Classics works of Literature.

6. University of California, eScholarship Edition: The eScholarship Editions collection includes almost 2000 books from academic presses on a range of topics, including art, science, history, music, religion, and fiction.

7. University of Adelaide Library's collection of Web books: The collection includes classic works of Literature, Philosophy, Science, and History.

8. AvaxHome.ru: Some new ebooks. Rapidshare download links. Copyright is a problem.

9. The National Academies Press

Read more than 3,000 books online FREE!

10.You! Everyone has his own favorite ebook website. Maybe It's already on the list. Maybe not. It doesn't matter. The most important thing is that you love eBook.
 

My and daughters and I were featured in an article on GPS cell phones in the December 5th issue of the New York Times in a special edition of Circuits. There are numerous articles on a wide variety of GPS related electronics including devices for your dog, car, camera and bicycle. It's not every day that your name starts off an article in the New York Times:

ED GRAY’S two teenage daughters wanted cellphones, but the answer was a firm parental no — until Mr. Gray learned about a service that changed his mind...

I knew the article was coming out soon, but I was first made aware of it actually being in print from an alum of Mount Holyoke College, Ellie Landowne '56 who sent me an email after she saw my photo in the paper. While numerous articles had been written about the GPS phones, not many have focused on who is actually using them and the related location map services from providers like Sprint and Verizon. The reporter came across this blog and found a short article I wrote this past summer on the subject.