M.A. Hochberg’s Technology for Teaching

Making technology easier for people

Wednesday
03/24/2010

7:47 pm

For Ada Lovelace Day: Three Women in Computing

There are photos of three women in the computer lab at Meadowlark/Buena Vista: Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, and Barbara Liskov.

Who are they? Why do I have their photos up?

Ada Lovelace
, who lived in the early 1800s, is often billed as the first computer programmer. She designed a program to calculate Bernoulli numbers for Charles Babbage’s “analytical machine.” The program, like the machine, was never built.

What really intrigues me about Ada, however, is that she looked beyond what the machine was designed to do. She thought that it could do much more than crunch numbers. She thought it “might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” That curiosity, that inquisitiveness, envisioning what else can be done is a trait I admire. These traits are shared by the two other women whose pictures sit by hers.

Grace Hopper, also known as Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper and “Amazing Grace,” was a computer scientist and US Naval Officer. Her long career includes credits for developing the first compiler for a programming language, making the term “debugging” (based a moth found in a computer relay) popular, and introducing the idea of machine-independent computer languages.

Barbara Liskov, winner of the 2009 Turing Award, first women to get a PhD in Computer Science, developer of the concept of data abstraction, her list of achievements goes on. Her current work is on distributed computing and the security of data. Her work on fault-tolerant systems has made technology easier for us all.

For all their frustrations, I love working with computers. I love to see what they can do and how we can use them in more ways than their designers intended. These three woman all saw beyond what was usual, found what could be possible, and envisioned beyond that too.

On Ada Lovelace Day, I salute them and all the women who see beyond the usual with computers.

Wednesday
06/03/2009

4:01 pm

Computers are picky and fussy and so we have to be also

Another end-of-the-year, get-ready-for-next-year challenge: making sure that everyone understands

  • that a “Calendar” is a program that manages events and activities
  • that a “Calendar template” is not a program but something that is a part of another program, something put on top of a blank document, like blankets on a bed.

A word processor or spreadsheet can have a “calendar template” but it is not a “Computer Calendar” even if it is on a computer. You can share the document and let others make changes but it is still not a “Computer Calendar.” You can’t have events that repeat each week without putting them in each day.

A calendar program, like iCal, Google Calendar, or the calendar within Outlook, can repeat events, skip dates, categorize events, assign them to individuals and much, much more.

We just had a panic because they couldn’t figure out why they couldn’t see someone’s calendar in 4J Google Calendar. It turned out that the “calendar” was a spreadsheet with a calendar template applied to it. Yes, it looked like a printed calendar. Yes, it was a calendar on a computer. No, it wasn’t a “computer calendar” anymore than a typewriter is a word processor.

Monday
02/23/2009

2:43 pm

Keychain Passwords and Safari

The Keychain program on Macs can be a lot of trouble, both serious and annoying. The serious part is that once you have logged onto your account, anyone can open anything. Not a good idea in an era of easily stolen laptops.

The annoying part is when you change your password, the Keychain doesn’t update everywhere, especially in Safari.

You can get the complete details on deleting your old keychain at

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA20852?viewlocale=en_US

I suggest stopping at step 6 as I don’t recommend creating a new keychain.

This does a fairly good job of resetting the keychain—except for Safari. After you have deleted the keychain and the file, open Safari and reset it.

Reset SafariClear all in Safari

This should stop Safari from continuing to prompt for a keychain password.

Friday
10/24/2008

5:56 pm

Hide the Admin account from users

I think the hardest lock to pick is the one you can’t find.  The same is true of the admin account on a Mac. No one can break into the admin account if they can’t find the admin account. Thanks to a couple of Mac features, there is a way to do.

Warning: This requires the use of Terminal and a sudo command. If you are not comfortable using these tools, don’t do it!

A typical log in window at school has a list of users. You click on a user, then type in the password. Once you enter the sudo command, all accounts that have admin privileges will disappear from the menu.

Here’s the tricky part: hiding the admin users. It is only one line but make absolutely sure that there are no typos in the line.

Login as admin and start Terminal.
Type in the command below, all on one line, and press enter.

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow HideAdminUsers yes

You will be prompted for your admin password.

It will not look like anything happened but you just removed the admin accounts from the login window.

Type in “exit”, quit Terminal. Log out and check your login window. The admin accounts should be gone.

To log in as admin, press the down arrow to select any user name, then press option/return. The name and password boxes appear.

For more tips and ideas about the log in window, check out
http://www.peachpit.com/guides/content.aspx?g=mac&seqNum=186

Wednesday
10/15/2008

3:37 pm

Why I became fanatical about labeling plugs and remote controls.

It was all because of a drawer I opened back in 2004.

Remotes need labels

Now I label remotes, power cords, data cords….

Monday
06/16/2008

5:41 pm

iPhoto ’08 and why I’m not on the bleeding edge of technology anymore

iPhoto ’08 came out last summer. I just upgraded and I am very glad that I waited. No, not because of bugs, but because of “features” that don’t let me access my original (or modified) photos with any other program. The dictum is “Do it with iPhoto or don’t do it at all. ”

(A software reviewer once referred to OS X as “the OS of choice by Darth Vader.”)

That might be fine for some users but not for me. Fortunately, now that the program has been out for ten months. Some very simple work arounds have posted.

Here’s the one that I am using:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070813153307986

For a good explanation of the way your iPhoto library works and some other tips, check out.

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/08/14/tuaw-tip-crack-open-the-monolithic-iphoto-08-library/

Monday
06/16/2008

1:59 pm

Ouch! Staples inside the iBook latch

Updating computers usually isn’t physically painful but today, I was stabbed by a staple that caught on the inside of an iBook’s magnetic catch. Most of the staple was inside the iBook casing, with only one metal leg showing, just enough to draw blood.

Both the  iBook and Powerbook have a metal latch sticking through the plastic of the case. While I have seen paper clips grabbed by the magnetic latches, this is the first time I have seen a staple that had worked its way to the inside of the latch.

Last century, we had to keep magnetics away from our computers. It looks like this century, we have to keep metal, especially small pieces of metal, away from the computer’s magnets.

Friday
05/16/2008

3:24 pm

Full Date on the Mac Menu Bar

One of my pet peeves was that there was no way to add the calendar date on the menu bar. I finally found a way to do that without adding another program to my computer. Note: This works on 10.4 or later only.
http://lifehacker.com/software/mac-tip/display-the-date-on-the-menubar-316029.php

The directions are fairly clear but here are a few more tips.

  • You can insert the date before or after the time.
  • You can add spaces or ascii characters around either the date or time. I added a couple spaces between the date and time and added square brackets around the date. This improves the readability. Mine looks like this:

Menu Bar Date and Time

  • It took a couple of tries to get it looking the way I liked it. Each time I made a change, however, I had to go back to the Date & Time in System Preferences and uncheck “Show Day of the Week”.

I think I will include this hack in the next golden images that I make. This should save a lot of “What’s today’s date?” questions from students.

Tuesday
01/08/2008

5:38 pm

Kid Pix Deluxe 4, Kid Pix 3x, and Intel Macs

Sometimes it gets so confusing that it is impossible to say where the problem lies, who owns the problem, and whether it is worth trying to fix it.

Kid Pix is a venerable, yet very useful and current program–but does it run smoothly on Intel Macs? And why do two different companies own the different versions of it? Even worse, why does the “smaller number” version run better and have the most current support?

Version 3x is owned by MacKiev: http://www.mackiev.com/kid_pix.html

Version 4 is owned by Riverdeep/Broderbund:

http://support.broderbund.com/faq_list.asp?id=1294820710


This article sums up the differences in the programs:

http://k12geeks.com/article.php?story=20070821063610961&query=kid%2Bpix
At this point, all I can say is that I would truly miss KidPix and am annoyed at the notion of having to buy an “older” version of the product to get it to run on a very new computer.

No one likes to lose their work and first graders take it especially hard.

Friday
11/30/2007

1:55 pm

Digital Cameras, easier but still not there for the average user

I set up 4 more digital cameras yesterday. These are Canon PowerShots A460. Better than the earlier models but they still are a bit confusing for the average user.

One particular annoyance was the size of the memory card that came with them—only 16 MB! Even when I shrink the default picture size, they will only hold 26 photos, which is not enough for most classes.

The next challenge will be getting the photos to a folder where the students can use them. Depending on the student’s age, teaching them how to retrieve a photo from one place on the server and save it on another can be confusing. Worse, iPhoto does let you change or choose the default storage location. That means the student’s photos are tied to a specific computer or they have to save them in iPhoto, & drag a copy to the file location. For most, it would be easier to drag it to the desktop, then to a folder.

The other, simpler option, is to let them do all their editing in MS Word. It has decent photo editing tools and the students can save the file where ever they want.

I wonder what kind of photo tools Pages has?