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MS Office 2007 SP2 To Add Support for ODF and PDF Printing
April 22nd, 2009
According to Lifehacker: “Native support for OpenDocument files (ODF), the major format of OpenOffice.org, without a plug-in, and printing to PDF. SP2 should arrive on April 28.”
[Link]Nmap: Open Source Network Security Scanning
April 10th, 2009
“[A] utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime.”
I first ran across Nmap last week during the countdown to Conficker’s April 1st deadline. I quickly installed it and ran the scans. It helped me sleep a better. Now I aim to learn a little more about it. It seems like a tool that should be on any school network admin’s radar.
[Link]“Is It OK for a Library To Lend a Kindle?”
April 10th, 2009
Fascinating article at LibraryJournal.com. Amazon is sending mixed messages about whether their Terms of Service allow libraries to lend Kindles to patrons. The wording says you can’t, “sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party.” As if that’s clear.
This makes me wonder if there is a market for eBook readers designed specifically for lending in schools and libraries. It also makes me want news of the Fifty Dollar eBook Reader that we were promise dyears ago…
[Link]Daring Fireball: VirtualBox on Mac “Inferior in Every Way”
April 9th, 2009
John Gruber of Daring Fireball tries Sun’s VirtualBox and finds it lacking for desktop virtualization. I have used it on Windows, but not on Mac. It’s too bad that the too big dogs in Mac virtualization, Parallels and VMWare do not have free products available.
[Link]Sugar on a Stick: A View of the Future?
April 9th, 2009
Wow, the first three posts at OpenEdTech all deal with operating systems. Interesting, though not really by plan.
There’s been a lot of breathless excitement about Sugar On a Stick recently. Sugar, the operating education-focused, constructivist operating system developed as part of One Laptop Per Child is now testing the waters of other platforms and finding itself installed on netbooks, Classmates, and low-power hardware from a bootable usb drive image. This brings up many interesting possibilities for schools where individualized flash drives for each student would be a very cheap way to give every student their own computing envirionment. There is alreadedy at least one company that is seeking to profit from such a scheme.
More interesting for most American schools, I would expect, would be the next logical step of deploying Sugar to thin clients via an LTSP server. Not surprisingly, others are working on just that. It will be exciting if the real payoff of the OLPC experiment turns out to have been the operating system!
Image Source: [wiki.sugarlabs.org]
Improved Netbook Support in Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring RC2
April 8th, 2009
“As well as conventional systems, it boasts excellent support for a wide range of netbooks, including all currently available Asus Eee PC models, the Acer Aspire One, the MSI Wind, and others.” [via Lilliputing]
[Link]Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04 beta available
April 8th, 2009
New features include:
- Gnome 2.26
- Ext4 filesystem
- Support for Eucalyptus cloud computing
Look for 9.04 to launch on April 23rd, 2009.
[Link]