newquisk's blog

Wired.com has launched a new Geek Dad Blog dedicated to the intersections of technology, geekiness, and fatherhood.

I just found a podcast dedicated to all things Drupal: the Lullabot Podcast. It talks about the ongoing development work on the CMS, popular modules, deprecated practices, and interviews with people and companies using Drupal professionally.

I discovered it via the Drupal account on Twitter, once again showing that the microblogging service can actually be useful.

Come see the winners of the Leopard Shorts Digital Media Competition tonight (Monday, May 7), at 7 p.m. during the English 340 Narrative Film Festival in Oechsle Hall Auditorium! The competition was sponsored by ITS, Apple Inc., and the Cosmic Cup Coffee Company.

Some folks have put together a Drupal distribution designed for use in education. It uses the latest Drupal build, and I'm thinking of throwing an install of it on one of our test servers to see how it looks compared to Soapbox, which is running an older version of Drupal and which doesn't have quite so many bells and whistles (and optional modules installed).

Sun's going to help create a Mac-native version of Open Office. There are already two Open Office options for the Mac; the first is an X11 port that tends to be slow and clunky, and the other is the NeoOffice Java port that is faster and sleeker, but doesn't lags behind the Open Office feature set. IMHO, it's also not as fast as Open Office running under Windows or Linux.

This new Mac-centric version would be build using Carbon (not exactly sure why they're using that instead of Cocoa) and would run natively on the Mac, meaning we should see significant speed and performance improvements.

Penn State's Terra Incognita blog interviews UCLA's Ruth Sabean about why the university decided to adopt Moodle as their LMS: Part 1 | Part 2.

Asked "What was it that you and the evaluation team really liked about Moodle?", Sabean replied:

First, it is important to recognize that there are things that we liked about a number of open-source applications including Sakai, and there are things that we saw as disadvantages with Moodle. On the aggregate through, we felt that Moodle was a better choice for us and how we want to leverage the benefits of open source and the community that surrounds a project.

What is Web 2.0?

A wave of new Web sites (as well as some not so new ones) that focus on the user experience, focusing primarily through three areas:

• Socialization: The ability for users to interact with one another, easily sharing collective information.
• Collaboration: The ability to work on long-distance projects in a variety of ways.
• Web Services: Almost all Web 2.0 have "Web services" through which they share their information with other sites.

Just to give the Open Office folks some equal time, ODF Add-in for Microsoft Word is an Open Office tool for converting and saving Microsoft Word XP/2003/2007 documents.

Alan Johnson and Rob Duncan told me about this useful add on for Microsoft Office: it allows the XP and 2003 versions of Office to open files created using the 2007 version of the office suite.

I don't know if a corresponding tool exists for the Macintosh versions of Office; a quick search of the Microsoft Mac site didn't turn up anything. It hasn't been an issue for me yet, but I imagine it could be as the year goes on.

[insert obligatory geeky comment/rant about using Open Office instead of Microsoft Office here].

Here's an AP article that's useful as a follow-up to the recent poll "Through what do you PRIMARILY listen to music?": High fidelity takes backseat to portability.

The general gist: a growing number of people are ok with degraded music quality as they switch their music collections from vinyl and CDs to MP3s and other digital formats.