Technology

The latest post at India, Ink about using templates in document formatting software made me feel a little guilty, but reminded me why I actually miss LaTeX a little bit. I really don’t understand styles and templates in MSWord, which I used to format my most recent couple of papers, and while it is nice to throw together a handout without having to wrestle with LaTeX, I missed its clarity of structure when dealing with sub-sub-sections and captioning figures and including citations (BibTeX, I miss you so….) The point at that we ought to learn to use our tools is … Continue reading Design of Text Documents

It’s almost become a cliche to say that we have so much information now that our biggest challenge is finding the relevant pieces, not making sense of them. And this is a fairly representative article cheerleading for the new technologies that will help with data search, focusing on data mining and the construction of a federated solution that can normalize across very different data sources with different base formats. But this is also a representative article in the misleading way that it blithely says what technologies will allow us to do, with no discussion of where we are now on … Continue reading Data Boom

Of course, having decided to try browsing via RSS feeds a few days ago (and, btw, I am loving the convenience of seeing which of the pages I read regularly has new content), Slashdot has to link to a whitepaper describing the security risks in subscribing to RSS and Atom feeds. They’re what you would expect – the standard potential for the site owner to insert malicious code in the feed, along with concerns that, because of the ability to put third-party feeds in what might be an otherwise trusted site, feeds allow insertion of exploits into new realms. The … Continue reading Security Holes

An interesting pair of articles about the privacy implications of Web 2.0 applications came through on Slashdot and Digg respectively last week. The first linked the Louisiana State University in Shreveport’s Career Services reprint of an article about the impact of social network sites on getting hired. It mentions that even people who think they are being careful by restricting access to their on-line content might find it accessed by a potential employer, citing a specific case in which a state agency obtained access to restricted Facebook pages due to provision of the Patriot Act. It also reiterates the necessary … Continue reading Dangers of Web 2.0

I ran through my planned trial week with Opera, and I’ve decided to go back to Firefox. I definitely think that Opera has fewer memory leaks, which is a plus, and I really like the session manager. However, it never felt right – there were differences switching from IE to Firefox, but Firefox was never irritating. Opera never seemed intuitive about when it opened things in the same window as compared to in a new tab, as compared to some strange sub-window to a tab. I had trouble getting it to put and keep my bookmarks in the order I … Continue reading Back to Firefox

I have a basic familiarity with Photoshop, and use it for the little photo editing that I do, but I know there are lots of capabilities to the software that I am not utilizing, so this description of using Photoshop filters to sharpen focus on a photo element was really useful, though I haven’t found a photo with which to try it yet. I like how the article uses terminology like “depth of field”, but doesn’t assume that I know exactly what that is or how to use it in my photography. It’s really a lesson in how to take … Continue reading Photoshop Tricks

After hearing some positive feedback, I’ve decided to try out the Opera browser for the next week. I’ve been using Firefox, and I loooooove tabbed browsing, but it leaks memory like a sieve, at least for me. Opera, at first glance, seems to have many of the same nice features, plus it has a built-in setting that you can close your browser and have it reopen to the same set of tabs – it is possible there is a plug-in for Firefox that does this, but I haven’t seen it yet. Opera is acting a little sluggish for me, but … Continue reading Alternate Browser

This Slate dissection of the new Apple ad campaign says pretty much what I was starting to think about the ads. They’re funny and I enjoy them, but over the past few times I have seen them, I’ve started to feel sorry for the PC guy. I want him to point out, in the ad about having fun, that he’s going to play the latest shiny new computer games that aren’t yet out on the Mac. Or that at least when the cable modem guy shows up to turn on his internet, he’ll know how to get the IP address … Continue reading Play nice, Apple