Jim Rettig’s Travel Schedule for 2008/2009
My director, Jim Rettig, is currently the President-elect of the American Library Association. I had the idea of creating a mashup of his travel itinerary for the year to help the library community visualize where he’ll be appearing over the course of the next year. The result is below.
Here’s a link to the full version on Google Maps: http://snurl.com/29z6i
To accomplish this, I created a dedicated calendar in Google Calendar, fed the xml data from the calendar into a custom Yahoo! Pipe, and then exported the KML data back to Google Maps.
Props to the team at Lifehacker for picking up on a post of how to do this!
TechTips Blog
So a few weeks ago, I began distributing tech tips every Friday afternoon to our library staff via our internal mailing list. My goal in doing this is to share some of the more helpful web services and tools that I come across on a regular basis. Recently my director asked me to approach our VP for IS (we’re part of our campus IS group) to see if this would be something of value to the rest of IS. She gave approval and also thinks this is a good idea to try. She also suggested using a blog for archival purposes. Working with our Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, I now have another blog installed on their WordPress MU platform. I will continue to distribute tips via email, but will simultaneously post them to the blog for wider distribution and archiving. Your comments and feedback are welcomed! I may also aggregate them here for further coverage.
Need Online Storage for Library Users? Try drop.io!
A new online storage service, http://drop.io, launched recently and allows users to store up to 100mb of files. Yeah, it’s stingy storage, but great for office docs, a few images, an occasional audio file, etc. The benefits: no registration so you’re privacy is intact (as much as you want to believe that), multiple users can share the space, you can set a deletion date, users can add notes and make changes, etc.
I can really see this being beneficial to library users visit the library, create a project/document, but need a quick way to save it or send it to themselves. Yeah, there’s always Gmail, but I like the ease of use of this site and like the ability to collaborate.
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Google Apps Premier Edition
In their ever growing battle with Microsoft, Google has opened its suite of online office and communication applications in an effort to further penetrate the enterprise market, and coincidentally arrive just after the release of the latest incarnation of MS Office. From the press release, here are the features that will be available:
Features unique to Google Apps Premier Edition include:
* 10 GBs of storage per user – Offers about 100 times the storage of the average corporate mailbox, eliminating the need to frequently delete email.
* APIs for business integration – APIs for data migration, user provisioning, single sign-on, and mail gateways enable businesses to further customize the service for unique environments.
* 99.9 % uptime – Service Level Agreements for high availability of Gmail, with Google monitoring and crediting customers if service levels are not met.
* 24×7 support for critical issues – Includes extended business hours telephone support for administrators.
* Advertising optional – Advertising is turned off by default, but businesses can choose to include Google’s relevant target-based ads if desired.
* $50 per user account per year – Simple and affordable annual fee makes it practical to offer these applications to everyone in the organization.In addition to Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Start Page, all editions of Google Apps now include:
* Google Docs & Spreadsheets – With this addition, teams can easily collaborate on documents and spreadsheets without the need to email documents back and forth. Multiple employees can securely work on a document at the same time. All revisions are recorded for editing, and administrative controls allow organizations to define limits on document sharing. According to custom analysis of Nielsen//NetRatings MegaPanel released this week, 92 percent of users of online productivity tools last October used Google Docs & Spreadsheets, making it the number one product in its class.
* Gmail for mobile devices on BlackBerry – Gmail for mobile devices provides the same Gmail experience – such as search, conversation view and synchronization with desktop version – on BlackBerry handheld devices for users of Google Apps. Gmail for mobile devices joins a list of other mobile options for Google Apps and BlackBerry users that already includes a Google Talk client and a variety of calendar sync tools.
* Application-level control – Allows administrators to adapt services to business policies, such as sharing of calendars or documents outside of the company.
Forget about shot across the bow, this is a full blown assault on Microsoft!
ProcessTamer
In our modern, multi-tasking world we often try to do as much as possible with all of our resources. Our computers are no exception! I often find myself running numerous programs and continually hopping between each in order to perform certain functions. This invariably leads to my computer getting bogged down with too many requests for CPU cycles and the RAM being overloaded! Enter ProcessTamer, a very small, lightweight, program that runs in the background and monitors each process running on your computer. It also automatically balances the load in order to prevent your machine from freezing. I just started using it and so far so good. Should that change, I’ll update this post! Click below to give it a try!
ProcessTamer
Firefox 2 Officially Released
The Mozilla.com website has been updated with download links, a press release, and a post from Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker about the official release of Firefox 2. The new version is on the heels of IE7, just released my Microsoft. Ironically IE7 is a major update to include many of the features already present in Firefox. It appears that Firefox has again leapfrogged Microsoft with new features and capabilities. I’ve been using Firefox as my default browser for a long time now and have only needed to use IE when accessing a service based site that requiring IE (update: the IE Tab for Firefox now eliminates my use of IE entirely). If you haven’t tried Firefox, I encourage you to do so and explore the many extensions offered by community developers that makes Firefox the swiss army knife of browsers!
New AIM Pro Version Released
AOL has released a new, free version of it’s AIM (instant messenger) service. I’m giving it a try as it connects with my both my calendar and contact list within Outlook. So far it seems to be a cleaner, lighter-weight version of the Triton version. It also seems to run a little smoother and be less resource intensive on my system. It will also connect with your existing AIM account and contact list. Give it a try at: http://aimpro.premiumservices.aol.com
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About
Professional and personal ideas, thoughts, and comments from your favorite tech-brarian. Actually, that's probably not a valid term, but hey, I'm not sweating the small stuff!
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