On this edition of the Coffee Break, hosts Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley discuss the upcoming Moodle Hack/Doc Fest being held at Lafayette, let faculty know when they can expect spring courses to appear in Moodle and announce ITS's recommendation regarding installing the new "Leopard" version of Mac OS X. Misadventures with the 10.4.11 version of Apple's operating system lead off Tech News, followed by news of the new Firefox 3 Beta and commentary on Facebook's new 'social ads' system. In Help News, they discuss problems with sending messages to Yahoo! mail accounts, talk about new Moodle documentation and workshops.
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
- Moodle Hack/Doc Fest
- Lafayette's hosting a Hack/Doc fest for NITLE schools January 8-10.
- Moodle Course Spring 2008 Load
- Spring 2008 courses will be created within Moodle on Monday, Dec. 3. Faculty will be able to access their courses. Students won't be enrolled in their courses until two weeks before the start of the spring semester, or around mid-January.
- ITS Recommendation Regarding Leopard
- ITS has been testing Apple's Leopard version of the Mac OS since its release and has discovered several incompatibility issues with Leopard and applications used on campus. For this reason, ITS will not be upgrading college-owned Macs to Leopard until the incompatibility issues have been dealt with.
- http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~its/news/leopard
Tech News
- Don't install Mac OS X 10.4.11
- Lots of problems reported with this update, so don't install it unless you a) have done a backup b) have lots of time.
- Mozilla.com: Firefox 3 Beta 1 Released
- Beta release (don't use this for production!) incorporates easier bookmarking, tagging of bookmarks, improved UI, native forms for OS X and Linux (Gnome) desktops, mailto support for webmail, 300 memory leaks plugged.
- http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0b1/releasenotes/#whatsnew
- Chronicle: Facebook's 'Social Ads' Raise Privacy Concerns
- New ad system lets external web sites communicate a customer's preferences back to Facebook, which can then serve you adds (e.g. rent a movie from Blockbuster, Blockbuster tells Facebook, Facebook serves and an for “Live Free or Diehard” 'cause you like action movies.
Help News
- Delays to Yahoo! Mail Accounts
- Several Lafayette email users have reported delays in sending messages to Yahoo! Mail accounts. The problem is not unique to Lafayette. According to the article, Why Yahoo Can't Deliver Email, the amount of time messages to Yahoo! Mail accounts are accepted is sometimes as low as 60% due to some Yahoo! mail servers not being properly configured to receive email, which causes a bottleneck.
- http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~its/node/438
- New Moodle Docs
- Upcoming Workshops
- Moodle Quickstart, 3:30 p.m.-5:00 p.m., Wed., Dec 5
- Moodle Quickstart, 9:30 a.m.-11:00 a.m., Thu., Dec 13
- Register online.
Contacting the Podcast
- Questions, comments and suggestions can be sent to itsblog@lafayette.edu.