06.30.05
Posted in Macintosh, Books at 9:02 am by Lisa Spangenberg
Maybe Steve Jobs is the boss of me.
As my faithful readers (all six of ‘em!) know, I’ve been somewhat distressed over Apple’s decision to remove Wiley books from all Apple stores. Mostly, I’ve been distressed because the book The Spouse, Michael Cohen, wrote with his brother Dennis Cohen, The Mac Xcode 2 Book came out just in time to be banned.
The book has been doing OK, anyway. Since The Mac Xcode 2 Book came out last week, it appeared briefly in the top 1000 rank of Amazon’s books, and showing up in Amazon’s list of best selling computer books at around the low 20-30s (it shifts rapidly) and selling well in local stores.
But then yesterday I received the regular Apple Developer’s Association mailing, issue 443, June 24, 2005,which, you can see, includes a description and link to Wiley’s page on The Mac Xcode 2 Book.
Having the book listed in one of Apple’s newsletters, and on Apple’s site, might be even cooler than seeing it in Apple’s stores. I’m confused as well as smug (as a spouse, I’m entitled to a modicum of smugness), but also grateful; thanks Apple, and thanks to the people who’ve bought copies, and of course, the top notch editing and production folk at Wiley.
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06.28.05
Posted in Blogging, Development, Books at 9:13 am by Lisa Spangenberg
The Spouse, also known as Michael E. Cohen, has started a new blog IDE of the Tiger. Michael’s been writing code since the days of punch cards, and using Macs since they were Lisas. I suspect, given his professional interests in multimedia, QuickTime, and instructional software, that there will be some overlap between our blogs. Dennis Cohen, Michael’s co-writer and brother, has been programming even longer. Dennis is new to blogging though, but I’m hoping he’ll participate too. In fact, I may have to post something about Apple’s WebObjects now included in Tiger along with Xcode and all the other Apple development tools, just to get things started.
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06.27.05
Posted in Development, Macintosh, Books at 8:18 am by Lisa Spangenberg
You can now read All About Dennis and Michael Cohen’s The Mac Xcode 2 Book here. Show Steve Jobs he’s not the boss of you, and buy a copy.
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06.26.05
Posted in CMS/LMS, Pedagogy and Scholarship at 8:21 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
I freely confess that numbers and I do not get along as well as, say, letters and I get along. I started using a spreadsheet for grading calculations very early on in my teaching. In a graduate pedagogy class I noticed a lot of concern about the numeric and mathematical aspects of grading. For instance, how one converts a series of letter-grades for papers, raw scores for quizzes, exams, all of which are weighted with various percentages, to a final letter grade. No one ever actually explained it to us—not in any of three different graduate level pedagogy classes.
I like spreadsheets, though I admit that I did give some thought to how I would calculate grades when I set up my assignments and syllabus at the start of the quarter. I wish I’d had this very useful tutorial by John Selvia on using the Appleworks spreadsheet for grades when I started.
I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about the “Grading Tool” that LMS or Learning Management Systems like Web-CT and Blackboard and Sakai all seem to have. I’ve looked at lots and lots of such tools. Most of them do the job quite nicely, but they’re difficult to set up and frequently so confusing to the teacher attempting to use them that teachers don’t use them. That’s true of me as well; I looked at the LMS tools for grading available to me, and decided it made more sense to just use the spreadsheet. Part of the problem in the Humanities especially, I think, for many of us, especially grad students, is that we have at best a dim understanding of the math, or really, arithmetic, we need to calculate grades with true facility. We know quite well how to assign a letter grade to a paper; it’s integrating the quizzes, the exams and other grades that’s difficult. Another problem is that grading tools seem to be designed by and for people doing grading in the sciences, where they tend to have raw scores, or numeric grades rather than letter grades. That means we have to have a numeric scale for the letters, and then convert them to numbers, possibly even weighted numbers.
There’s no simple solution; yes, better design of grading tools would be good, better Help systems too, but also I think there’s a need for user training that goes beyond what button to click and which options to select. We need to do a better job of teaching grad students, like me, how to do grading, how to do assessment, if you want the jargon, and not just by sitting in a class room chatting about it. We need practical, mentored experience in creating the grading structure, the assessment tools (quizzes, or exams, for instance), experience that goes beyond norming to actually using the numbers. I had a discussion a few years ago with a Psychology faculty member who said Humanities faculty engaged in “fuzzy grading.” Maybe so. I’m not sure that’s a fault, though. I learned a great deal from teachers I worked for, but I’m fairly sure that they weren’t intentionally teaching me how to grade; it was more that I deliberately observed how they did what they did. I wish they had been part of those pedagogy classes, though as I write this I realize none of them use the grading tools either.
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06.23.05
Posted in Silly, The Unix Command Line at 11:11 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
We all know Unix, even with the very user-friendly OS X GUI, is the realm of the serious user, especially when it comes to using Terminal, the OS X application for using a command line interface. But thank goodness that along with all the Unixy goodness OS X inherited from BSD, we also got the Unix joi de vivre. Yes, you can do Stupid Terminal Tricks in OS X. As far as I know, none of the following is specific to OS X; just use the local command line for your particular flavor of Unix.
- Open the Terminal application (Applications / Utilities)
- type
cat /usr/share/misc/flowers
- Press Return.
- You should see a list of flowers, and what they mean.
In the Victorian era, suitors wooed by encoding messages in bouquets and nosegays of flowers; each flower conveyed a particular meaning or sentiment. Sometimes suitors communicated by the simple if somewhat daft system of listing flower names verbally—assuming, of course, that both suitors were using the same codebook for the language of flowers. If you haunt used book stores, you can find many guides from the era, some of them with the “sentiment” and either a hand-colored image of the flower, or a pressed flower, or a space for the young lady to press a keepsake from her wooer’s floral message.
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06.22.05
Posted in Books at 3:54 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
Michael Cohen and Dennis Cohen’s book, The Mac Xcode 2 Book is out. I’ve actually held it in my hands, and now, thanks to the wonders of Amazon, you too can buy a copy. It’s a shame Steve Jobs decided to withdraw all Wiley books from the Apple stores, because this book really really belongs there.
Right now, Dennis and Michael’s The Mac Xcode 2 Book is the only book available about Xcode 2. Xcode 2 is the IDE for Tiger/Mac OS X 10.4, and, while their book assumes you already know something about programming, it’s a good, fun, and exceedingly readable yet thorough introduction to writing code on the Mac, using the free tools that come with Tiger.
I should have a page up soon with more information about the book, and about Xcode 2, and, with any luck at all, some updated information about the new tools in Xcode 2.1 for porting to MacIntel, but in the meantime, here’s a review from Amazon from someone I don’t know—but who’s clearly spent some time with the book.
It’s about time someone wrote a programming book that shows the reader how to get things done with the tool at hand while staying halfway engaging. This book goes far beyond that, believe me. It’s loaded with useful info and is a good read as well. The authors show how all of Apple’s tools work, both by themselves and with each other, to meet the needs of the broad range of developers. Beginning coders will learn the important development basics they’ll need to know, while the advanced folks get a rundown and real-world examples for Xcode features and techniques that will help them to streamline their development processes and refine their products. All the while, the pages are full of entertaining explanations and examples. The book presents useful tips to those engaging in small, medium, and large development projects without favoring any particular approach, avoiding the “methodology wars” that often color works on software development. Great resource.
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06.14.05
Posted in Macintosh at 2:56 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
Since applying the Mac OS X 10.4.1 Security Update 2005-006 (#3), the Airport reception on my iMac was unreliable; I’ll have a strong signal, then, suddenly, for no apparent reason it drops down to almost no signal, and eventually, all the way down to no signal at all. This was more than a little frustrating, especially when it happend eight or more times an hour.
Thanks to this article at MacFixit, I seemed to have solved the problem. Here’s what I did:
- Open System/Library.
- Remove these two cache files (either by dragging them to the desktop, or compressing them in place).
- /System/Library/Extensions.mkext
- /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache
- I didn’t even have to reboot; the problem was apparently solved, but I’d suggest rebooting, just in case.
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06.13.05
Posted in Software at 3:32 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
Since The Spouse has a brand-new one of these, I get the previous model, the gorgeous iMac G4 Flat-panel, still under Apple Care. I spent part of the weekend transferring data from my iBook, and setting up applications. I’ve been using my twelve inch iBook for most of my own work for so long, it’s dizzying to have more screen real estate; I really like it. I’m literally seeing things in new ways.
I already knew NetNewsWire 2.0 was a fabulous RSS aggegator, but the support for synching two copies of NetNewsWire via .Mac is totally cool. I can read RSS feeds, and subscribe to them, from the iBook or the iMac, then painlessly sych my subscriptions, read posts, even the open tabs, via .Mac, with a single menu item. Safari too, under Tiger, makes it very very easy to synchronize bookmarks between the two Macs.
I used Buzz Andersen’s nifty PodWorks to transfer my iTunes playlists and files from my iPod. Plus I discovered that Mellel has a new plug-in that supports Spotlight.
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06.10.05
Posted in Macintosh at 4:57 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
Because The Spouse is writing this
, we’ve purchased an Apple Airport Express. I’ve been interested in the Airport Express right from the start, and I have to say, it’s even better than I’d expected.
The first one we bought was a dud; it just wasn’t working, so I took it back to the Apple Store, who exchanged it without a problem, and I walked home with a new one ten minutes after I arrived at the store. Once we had a working model, the setup was less than ten minutes. It’s connected to the stereo receiver in our living room, using a standard RCA to Miniplug cable (the jack supports an optical connection as well). We took the option in the Airport Setup to have the Express dedicated to broadcasting music through the stereo— we could have also used it to expand the range of our Airport Base Station, but in a two bed room apartment, that seemed a little foolish. There’s also a USB port, so you could use the Keyspan Express Remote Control, or share a USB printer, and a standard 10/100 Base-T Ethernet port.
Why do I like it? For the past couple of years, I’ve done most of my writing on my iBook, on the couch. With the Express, I can wirelessly play my iTunes music, both my purchased songs and songs I’ve ripped from CDs, through the stereo. That’s pretty nifty, but what’s even cooler, is that since my computer is authorized on my spouse’s iTunes account, I can also play his iTunes songs, remotely or locally. And we can stream music from any of our computers to the living rooms speakers.
Plus, since the Express is tiny, it’s exceedingly portable— we can take it with us on our next trip, and share an Ethernet connection wirelessly, with up to ten computers.
I can see myself borrowing the Airport Express to take to campus and plug in to the classroom, to be able to play through the built-in classroom AV system without having to arrange for an AV person to bring special equipment and string long annoying cables.
I bet Airport Expresses are going to be very, very popular in the dorms this fall.
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