pfaffman's blog
15 minutes of fame. For my dog.
Well, I don't normally post personal stuff here, but this is pretty funny. I sent these pictures of my dog Thor and his cat, Modi, to a friend of mine who works at a TV station. Yes. My dog has his own web site. Now he's a TV star.
Far Manager
The Desktop is Dead
On using reference managers
No More HTML Training!
How the Tech Guys Blew It
A continual question that we who think that computers can and will make a big difference---and improvement---in how people teach and learn in schools have to consider is why have we not seen these big gains? As Cuban and others point out, we have networked virtually every classroom in the country and have more computers what do we have to show for it? Where's the revolution? This piece proposes several answers to that question and some ways to jump-start the revolution.
Stone Aged Computing
In some talk somewhere I heard John Bransford use a "stone age" metaphor in some talk. I can't quite remember the context, but the idea (that I remember) was that it's often helpful to come up with the simplest possible way to do something. Here I argue that what we need are not more sophisticated computers and applications, but more ubiquitous access to computers and applications.
Transana: Qualitative Analysis software for audio and video
Transana is an Open Source package to facilitate analyzing audio and video data. Here's what they say about it:
Transana is software for professional researchers who want to analyze digital video or audio data. Transana lets you analyze and manage your data in very sophisticated ways. Transcribe it, identify analytically interesting clips, assign keywords to clips, arrange and rearrange clips, create complex collections of interrelated clips, explore relationships between applied keywords, and share your analysis with colleagues. The result is a new way to focus on your data, and a new way to manage large collections of video and audio files and clips.
I haven't used it. The favored platform is Windows. It could be worth a look, though. Thanks to Charlie Gee for pointing this out.
My Favorite Firefox extensions
- Flashblock
- I love this. All those annoying Flash movies (most of which are ads) are replaced by a button that you have to click to make them play.
- adblock
- Removes ads from pages that you tell it to.
- filterset updater
- Let's someone else tell adblock what to block so that you don't have to. Once or twice it's blocked things in a confusing way.
- web developer
- If you do anything with web development ever, you should check this out.
- viewSourcewith
- Let's me edit textarea's with my favorite editor.
- linkification
- Makes things that should be clickable, clickable.
- fasterfox
- This seems cool. If nothing else, it tells you how long it takes each page to load.
- customize google
- I think this is good. I'm not quite sure what it does anymore. I think it's what lets Google searches guess what it is you want to search for. That's cool.
- reveal
- Not so sure about this one. It will let you, for instance, enlarge part of a page. Probably not a must-have
- firefox showcase
- This is sorta cool. It's sorta like that Mac OS X thing that shows you a thumbnail of each window. This shows you a thumbnail of each tab you have open.
- Google Notebook
- I'm still not entirely sure about whether I'm going to like this, but it looks pretty cool.
Google Page Creator
Connie Campbell sent this to the Tennessee Trainers email list. Check out Google Page Creator. (See my stunning example.) This is more fodder for my argument that normal people won't need HTML by 2010.
