My problem was when I wanted to post the current page I’m reading to either account. Ping.fm offers a bookmarklet, but it uses the current logged in ping.fm account, so I would have to continually log in and log out. I decided to put together my own bookmarklet that starts up a new mail message in my default email client addressed to the correct Ping.fm account. To get started, drag the following link to your bookmark bar:

Ping.fm

Once there, right click on the link, select edit and replace YOURPRIVATEPINGADDRESS with your private Ping.fm email address (just the part to the left of the @). Would you like to do it with GMail? Drag this link:

Ping.fm

And once again, right click on the link, select edit, and replace YOURPRIVATEPINGADDRESS with your private Ping.fm email address.

You can drag the links multiple times, editing the email address and the name of the link so you can associate each one with a different Ping.fm account.

I use Apple Remote Desktop or a KVM (Keyboard/Video/Mouse) switcher to administer several OS X servers and machines. When you’re working on machines in this way you can sometimes get confused on which machine you’re currently controlling. If you’re lucky you won’t do anything stupid, but there have been times when I’ve shutdown/restarted a server that I didn’t mean too!

Over Christmas break I wrote a little OS X widget call Show Name. All it does is show the name of the current machine. To start using it you just install the widget onto your Dashboard. Once there, it will show you the hostname of the machine you are currently using on the Dashboard.

Where things get interesting is when you drag it off of the Dashboard and put it on your Desktop. This way you can alway see what machine you’re on. To drag widgets off of the Dashboard, you need to turn on widget developer mode. On the Show Name widget, you can click the little “i” in the bottom right and check the box to turn it on. As soon as you click Done it will restart the Dock, so the Dashboard and the Dock will disappear for a second. To drag the Show Name widget (or any widget for that matter) out of the Dashboard and onto the Desktop, click on the widget and start dragging. Don’t let go of the button and close the Dashboard. The widget you are dragging will stay with your mouse pointer, and you can drop it anywhere on your Desktop. To put the widget back in the Dashboard, start dragging it, open the Dashboard, and stop dragging it. It will now re-attach itself to the Dashboard.

photo credit: fifikins

A couple of months ago I decided to expand my use of Twitter, and began following more and more people in the education community. This was awesome, until I realized I could not keep up with the barrage of data that I was being given. In November I started brainstorming ideas on how to keep up. I noticed in any of my twitter clients that they were not grabbing all the tweets that had been posted from the last time I checked. The reason being is the API only gives you the last 200 tweets, and for me that was about 40 minutes worth.

My first course of action was to write some software that would grab the tweets from my @mr_rcollins timeline, parse the info and store it in a MySQL database. Besides pulling out the data I was interested in of each tweet, I also stored the complete tweet. This became impractical, since in a month the complete tweets themselves occupied 4.2GB! I stopped storing the complete tweets which left me with a 20MB database after a 5 weeks of collecting, which was a lot more manageable.

The next step was to start parsing the tweet’s text for urls, resolve any shortened urls, and dump them into another table for me to peruse. While I got that software working, I came across ReadTwit.com. This is a great service that will take your timeline, parse out the urls, resolve shortened links, and give you a RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your favorite RSS reader (I use Google Reader. Now I just go through Reader like normal, and am able to tag/star important sites that are posted to my Twitter timeline.

Google has an obsession with speed. In fact, they have found that a .4 second delay in delivering search results causes a 30% drop in click throughs. They started working on Chrome to deliver a browser that is fast and secure. It also offers some other advatages such as isolating each tab or window into separate processes. This means if a tab or window crashes, it only affects that tab or window. Bookmarks can now be synched with your Google account, and extensions are starting to become available.

One of my requirements for a browser is the ability to run multiple profiles. I have one browser set for personal use and one set for professional use (I do try to separate the two, although it is difficult at times). Chrome supports multiple profiles, so now I can launch the default profile which contains my personal settings and I can launch a Mr_rcollins profile which contains my professional settings.

I’ve found that Chromium launches faster than any other browser I’ve tried. After using it for two weeks, it feels so much quicker than Firefox 3.5.5.
Although Firefox has been my default browser for several years, every so often I try out alternative browsers. A couple of weeks ago I started to use Chromium (developer builds of Google’s Chrome browser) for OS X and it has now become my default browser.

Google has an obsession with speed. In fact, they have found that a .4 second delay in delivering search results causes a 30% drop in click throughs. They started working on Chrome to deliver a browser that is fast and secure. It also offers some other advatages such as isolating each tab or window into separate processes. This means if a tab or window crashes, it only affects that tab or window. Bookmarks can now be synched with your Google account, and extensions are starting to become available.

One of my requirements for a browser is the ability to run multiple profiles. I have one browser set for personal use and one set for professional use (I do try to separate the two, although it is difficult at times). Chrome supports multiple profiles, now I can launch the default profile which contains my personal settings and I can launch a Mr_rcollins profile which contains my professional settings. I’ve had Firefox set up for this for over a year and it works pretty well.

I’ve found that Chromium launches faster than any other browser I’ve tried. After using it for two weeks, it feels so much quicker than Firefox 3.5.5. You can learn more about Google Chrome here;. I use the Techcrunch Chromium Updater to grab the latest builds for OS X since Google hasn’t released an official beta yet for OS X.

What I’ve done now is to create a folder called Flagged for each one of my email accounts. Now when I get a message I need to act upon it later, I’ll move it to this Flagged folder.

Sometimes I will just forward the message to my Remember the Milk account, but that’s a post for another day.

They also offer a private hosted version, but there isn’t any pricing available on the website.

Although some school districts will be wary of using a product that would allow their students to chat throughout the district, I think the advantages would outweigh these concerns.

Uses in the school include after hour editing assistance, a student could send the link to a document they’re working on to their teacher, and both can work on the document. Also, any group projects could use it for notes, planning, todo lists, etc., available to all the members of the group.

I struggled with this one for about a month before I finally dug into what was wrong and how to fix it. It all started when I reinstalled because I couldn’t get BootCamp installed because of volume fragmentation. Since then, my applications, specifically Mail.app and Adium, weren’t remembering passwords even if I checked the little “remember” box.

Basically, for some reason, the keychain file at ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain was now owned by root instead of by me. To check and fix from the commandline ($ is the command prompt):
$ ls -l ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain
-rw-r--r-- 1 ryan admin 781380 Apr 8 11:17 (*deleted...*)

My username is ryan. If it says anything else, use the following to change the ownership:
$ sudo chown ryan ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain

It will ask for the administrator password, and then change the ownership of the file. I don’t think repair permissions in Disk Utility would fix this problem.

In the back of my head I had always wanted a shorter domain, and with more and more mobile technologies being put into use, it only made sense to try to find a shorter domain name that we could use to supplement our current two. Trying to find a shorter .com/.net/.org was futile, so I started looking at alternative top level domain names, and settled on kcs.me. Now you can go to http://kcs.me/ and it will automatically redirect to our main page. I haven’t started integrating it into to many other services, but I do plan on setting up our email accounts so you can use @kcs.me for any current address and it will work. We also have a custom 404 error page that let’s us setup keywords as shortcuts to commonly used web pages on our website, such as the user’s personal portal page (their MyCatPage, kcs.me/my) and staff home pages (kcs.me/collinsr).

For your school or business, have you thought about additional domains or am I just being weird?

To get started, log into Google Docs and under the New button, one of the options is Form.

From there you can create your form. I only needed two pieces of information, their name and which class. For the user to enter their name I created the first item as a text field in which they would enter their name (and Google makes this easy for you since that’s what the first item defaults to. I did set it to be a required field though. For the class list I used a dropdown field. Each choice I labeled with the date of the class, the class title, and the time of the class. I didn’t go into great depths like a description of the class since that is emailed to the staff and available on the Technology Staff Development site in Moodle. Now the staff can easily sign up for classes, I can quickly find out how many people are in each class, and I can remove the class when the sign up deadline is past or when the class is full. The spreadsheet can also be used to take attendance.