The ITS Coffee Break begins with news of the first-year student technology guide, an update of ongoing work on the network redesign project, and latest about our progress importing Fall 2007 course data into Moodle. Moving on to Tech News, hosts Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley look at MIT's virtual residence halls within Second Life, discuss the new Leopard edition of the Mac OS X operating system, and check out the new Windows version of Apple's Safari web browser.
Getting the Podcast
There are several ways to get the podcast:
- Download the MP3 directly
- Subscribe to the Soapbox podcast rss feed using an aggregator (you only need to do this once; subsequent shows should download automatically)
- Subscribe to the Soapbox feed via iTunes
Show Notes
ITS News
- Technology guide for new students.
- Work continues on the network redesign project.
- Fall 2007 courses should be available in Moodle by the end of Friday 6/16.
Tech News
- MIT's Virtual Dormitories for Freshmen
- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2143/mits-virtual-dormitories-for-freshmen
- Students at MIT can take up residence in the virtual equivelents of their college dorm rooms over the summer.
- Leopard Features
- http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/06/11/leopardnew/
- Stacks: Browseable lists of files; seems to work like my right-clickable Dock folders do now.
- Quick Look for viewing popular file types; I expect this to be very useful at work, when I need to view fills but don't need to launch Photoshop to do it.
- New Finder will allow searches across multiple Mac; this would be useful now when my primary computer is a PowerMac desktop and I'm working on my work MacBook Pro laptop, but might not be as handy when my primary home computer becomes a mac book.That said "Back to my Mac" search allows you to look at computers even when you're on the road, across the net, which is very cool.
- Spaces — multiple virtual desktops — is nothing new for Linux users (and even Mac users who've tried one of the many third party or Unix options. This is integrated into the new OS though, and I see this as being very handy — I expect to have "Web", "Writing" and "Audio/Video" spaces as soon as I have Leopard.
- Apple brings Safari to Windows
- http://www.apple.com/safari/
- Apple's "one more thing" at the Worldwide Developers Conference was a beta release of Safari 3 for Windows.
- No one is sure if this is a new front in the browser wars, an attempt by Apple to familiarize Windows users with Safari ahead of its iPhone release, or just a Windows blip that will fade away in a few years.
- One things for sure, it's a beta. Security problems have already been reported, and its been reported to crash in a variety of Google apps (like Google Reader and Google Docs).
- Safari On Windows A Security Risk
Help News
- Workshops
- Still only Moodle workshops; we're working on a full schedule of workshops (including more advanced Moodle workshops and non-Moodle workshops like Dreamweaver, Audacity and iMovie) for July and August.
- View the schedule or register for a workshop.
- Feedback on Learning
- We want to know how you like to learn new programs and techniques: workshops? online tutorials? cheat sheets?
- Send feedback to itsblog@lafayette.edu.
Contacting the Podcast
- Questions, comments and suggestions can be sent to itsblog@lafayette.edu.