Soulver - Sure beats standard calculators →

Ben Brooks over at The Brooks Review making a great case for Soulver on the mac:

I’ve mentioned Soulver more than a few times on this site and I am going to go ahead and mention it again, because it is an amazing tool.

I have mentioned it before. I use it as calculator, scratch pad and place to keep random numbers at times. They also make a iPhone and iPad app that syncs with each other via iCloud. Doing some numbers on your iPad or iPhone at lunch and get back to yoru desk in the afternoon--the numbers are already there.

Simple and powerful, cannot beat that. Get it on their site or the Mac OS App store.

No more asking for social network passwords (under the law, instead of just common sense)

The lines are starting to be drawn around online privacy, not only in employement, but in higher education. From Timothy Lee at ArsTechnica:

[Governor] Brown also signed related legislation that prohibits universities from requiring their students to disclose social media passwords. The governor’s office cited a growing problem with universities snooping on the accounts of student athletes.

This does not appear to protect students (or employees) from acts that they do online from being held against them if it is open to the general internet/public. It might sound vain or egotistical to google yourself, but you can bet other people might. Would you rather have you know what they might find before they do?[1]

If you have a common name, that other John Smith, might get you wrongly slandered and you might want to know about it before a particular employer or admissions office does.

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1. Make sure to log out of your google account before you google your own name. Otherwise your results will be biased much more to you then a general google search might other be so. Also, google search results can be personalized based on your cookie history. Instructions to turn off both on google’s support site  ↩

Academic Writing Accessibility

Marco Arment spent a good quarter of his last podcast (Build and Analyize Ep. 95) talking about iOS accessibility and the difference between developers who care and those that do not care. Stephen van Egmond also wrote about the same in The Blind Shooting The Blind. I agree with both of them.[1] Egmond wrote,

Here, then, lies the answer to how to tell whether some developer you’ve just met (or are interviewing) is serious about their craft in five seconds flat: borrow their device, and triple-click the home button. If you don’t hear “VoiceOver on”, or get prompted about VoiceOver, consider that −3 points on the Steve Test.

This applies to much more then accessibility for the visually imparied, but to doing the work (and in this case esay work) needed to make the things that we do accessible to the largest number of people possible. Academic writing, tied up in formal, expensive journals, ladden with insider language often are not built for the largest number of people possible as well.

I know this not a new point nor an argumenet that has not been debated a few (many) times, but I think we should always keep it in mind as we write for our formal, expensive journals, ladden with insider language.

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1. Via Marco’s podcast and his follow up on his website lead me to the original article by Stephen van Egmond.  ↩

What happens when the school year starts and you get a puppy

I apologize for not posting in the past two weeks. First, the school year started and the past two weeks have been our add/drop period. Second, our family got a new puppy and our lives have been revolving around introducing this new family member to our lives. So, I leave you with a photo of Zoey (to distract you) and plan to be back writing here soon.

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Zoey (the puppy)​

Updated California Community College Chancellor Office Website and DataMart →

Just noticed that California Community College Chancellor Office Website got a redesign and the DataMart has been made a little more easy to use. Take a look.