Livescribe Releases Sound Stickers App

While I was at ISTE 2011 I had a chance to visit with Livescribe and find out all of the latest developments that are happening with the Livescribe technology. For the past couple of years many of us who have been using the Livescribe pens have come with some interesting ways to adapt the technology so that text can be read on ordinary paper. I have highlighted that in some of my older blog posts- but today using the Livescribe Sound Sticker app and the supplied Sound Stickers you can quickly place a sticker on any paper and tap the sticker to record whatever you like. Once you download the latest version of the Livescribe Desktop software and the Livescribe Sound Stickers Application you can peel off a Sound Sticker and place it any where you like on a page. Now simply click in the Record button-tap a sticker and start recording - tap one more time to confirm and you are good to go. To play the associated sound simply tap the pen on the sticker to hear your play back. If you would like to re-record-you can click in the Delete button and quickly delete the sound that is associated with the sticker. Using the Sound Stickers I'm sure you can think of all kinds of ways to make accommodations for students with reading disabilities. Place stickers on books, tests, or set up schedules complete with helpful reminders- the possibilities are endless. Let me know how you intend to use Sound Stickers with your Livescribe Smartpen by leaving a comment.

Culture Dox 012 - Arne Weinberg aka. Onmutu Mechanicks

Arne Weinberg is a cool dude!

Britain Piloting First Biofueled Train

Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group has embarked on yet another venture -- Virgin Trains, which seeks to replace traditional diesel trains with models run on biofuel.

Virgin Trains' pilot project will test a train running on 20% biological material (typically a type of vegetable oil) in Britain for six months. If the test is successful, Virgin Trains will use the 20% mix full-time, with an eye toward engines run purely on biofuel. Virgin Trains says that switching to biodiesel could cut emissions by 14%.

Source: MSNBC

What is the best method for baselining your control environment?

CobiT combined with ITIL and ISO27001/2? CobiT in combination with another standard?

What are your thoughts?

Cisco Tip: ip default-gateway

The ip default-gateway command is used when you need to configure a default router and IP routing is either disabled or not available (on the 2960, for example).

Aside from looking through the configuration (show run | inc default-gateway), how can you check to see that your default router has indeed been configured?

Use the show ip redirects command to see your just configured default router. Give it a try!

Self-Healing Plastic

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have developed a nanotechnology polymer that can "heal" itself by filling in cracks and tears automatically. Although self-healing plastic is not an entirely new concept, the UIUC material is different because it can repair itself multiple times without any intervention.

The material could have important uses where making repairs is difficult, where materials are under enormous stress and/or where material failure would be catastrophic -- such as in implanted medical devices, airplane and spacecraft components, and microprocessors. The UIUC researchers emphasize, however, that practical applications are years away, and that initial products will be highly expensive.

Source: MIT Technology Review

Sven Väth Live!!!

Gute Laune!!!

Energy 52 - Café Del Mar (The Ricardo Villalobos Remixes)

Click below if you're up for the most useless remixes so far in 2011. Really dunno what happened here. I guess the ketamine in Berlin is getting worse and worse.
However, I know Ricardo isn't best friends with the remixes. BUT wasn't he able to give the smallest amount of effort?

Check them out on SoundCloud.

Btw, this one is much more like it!

Top Reasons to Firefox even better than Chrome for web development

Some time ago, some of us, web developers, we changed the Firefox Google Chrome because of the important features such as speed.

With the release of Firefox 4, it solved some of the problems we had in past versions, leaving it better, at least when it comes to web development.

This article, divided into two parts, explains some of the reasons why the Firefox browser is still a better than Google Chrome for your web development work.

Evolution of the market share of browsers

About a year ago, I talked about something most of us already knew, that PHP developers are switching to Google Chrome as its web browser access.

As you can see in the table below, this trend continues to be true this year. These numbers were taken from statistics developers PHP Classes logged in to the site .

Browser	May 2009	May 2010	May 2011	Change
Mozilla Firefox	68.0%	63.5%	57.3%	-6.2%
Microsoft IE	18.5%	13.6%	8.9%	-4.7%
Google Chrome	6.0%	15.7%	28.1%	+12.4%

As you can see, Chrome almost doubled its share in a year, while Internet Explorer has lost a little more than half. Firefox also fell slightly.

The gain of Chrome is greater than the loss of the Firefox and Internet Explorer. This means that Chrome also gained share lost to other browsers.

Reasons to Firefox even better than Chrome for web development

Given the fact that the participation of Google Chrome continues to grow enough, you may wonder why on this article. The fact that Chrome will continue to become increasingly popular for web browsing does not mean that web developers are also working with him in his projects. For me, this is not the case. Often when I'm doing development work, I feel I need to switch to Firefox, for reasons which I will list below.

I wish they had in mind that this article is not a rant against Google, which gave us web developers a lot to be grateful to him, but when we speak of Chrome, there is still much to be improved.

I decided to write this article now in the hope that maybe someone at Google to read, and do something to resolve these issues, most of the time, really bother most of us, since we do not keep changing all the time browsers .

1. View HTML

When the code of our sites have bugs, it usually generates an HTML code that is incorrect or invalid. So we need to analyze the HTML code to understand what's wrong. Firefox has an amazing feature that allows you to select a portion of the page and it shows the exact HTML that corresponds to that portion of the selected page. This feature does not exist in Chrome.

The best you have is the Inspect Element feature, which allows you to find the HTML code for the page element below the cursor of your mouse. Not the same thing. If I select a region of the page, I want to see the full HTML of that region, not a single element.

Another annoying thing is that Chrome tries to make the HTML pretty. This means that if you have a malformed HTML, you will not see where he is malformed because Chrome will show an embellished version of the HTML code after it has been repaired. I wish they had an option to disable.

2. Validation of HTML

Another great feature of Firefox is the ability to display any validation errors of HTML that you may have. In fact, this feature is provided by the extension HTML Validator .

I tested several extensions with the same goal in Chrome, but nothing that was really good. Some just used the W3C validation service through the page's URL, which is not good, because when you are developing a page that is not public service W3C can not access it, and any user logged into the site you is developing can not access it.

Other extensions have tried to copy the currently loaded page and pass it to the validation service, but none showed any invalid HTML code that the Firefox extension HTML Validator shows.

It also does not rely on an external validation service. That means you can validate pages even if you do not have internet access. So for all these reasons, an equivalent version of the HTML Validator extension is sorely needed for Chrome.

3. Disable JavaScript

Sometimes you need to test your site with JavaScript disabled. The only way to disable it in Chrome is going to preferences and disable. This is truly annoying. In Firefox, you can use the extension Web Developer by Chris Pederick to add a button to the browser to quickly disable and re-enable JavaScript when you want.

In Chrome, there is also the extension Web Developer the same developer, but it provides no means to disable JavaScript. The problem is due to the limitation of the API exposed to Chrome extensions. It does not allow a way to disable JavaScript from extensions.

There is a request for funding for the project Chromium to implement the necessary support to disable JavaScript. Implementing this feature was actually given a year ago, but it never happened. Oddly, users have been banned from posting future comments on the application of this feature.

4. Empty the browser cache

Sometimes you need to force the cleanup of the browser cache, so that new content can be recovered from the site server you are developing.

It is the same limitation to disable JavaScript. You can not do this through an extension. You need to go in the preferences of Chrome.

There is also a feature request to enable support for clearing the cache from an extension. It was made more than two years, but only a few months ago was released for implementation.

5. Changing the agent identifier of the browser

Sometimes you need to access your site pretending to be developing using another browser, so you can see if it fits to that browser the way you expect.

For example, if you are serving an RSS feed to be handled by Feedburner, all you need to redirect browsers to the URL of the Feedburner feed, unless the current agent is checking if your Feedburner feed has been updated. Therefore, it would be helpful if you could cause the browser to pretend to be the Feedburner, so you could check if he was working as it should.

In Firefox, you can use the extension User Agent Switcher also Chris Pederick. In Chrome, there is also an extension called User Agent Switcher . The problem is that it does not work. Good works, but not the way you want. The extension can only change the browser identification exposed to JavaScript. This means that HTTP requests sent to the server will not use the string identifying the agent that you need to be sent.

I suspect that an application for resource to be implemented in Chromium, but not found. Until this feature is implemented, we will always have to go back to Firefox, which works well with the User Agent Switcher extension.

Bird Population Falls Over Past 40 Years

A recent study by the National Audubon Society has found that bird populations -- even those of common, robust species such as grackles -- have fallen drastically over the past 40 years. The populations of whiporwills and bobwhites have fallen by well over 80 percent, a drop so great that these once-common birds are now seldom seen or heard in the eastern US. Deforestation is partly to blame, as well as global warming, which appears to be affecting arctic birds especially hard. Because cold-climate birds must migrate farther north each year to reach their shrinking habitat, they rarely migrate below the northernmost regions of the US.

"These are not rare or exotic birds we're talking about -- these are the birds that visit our feeders and congregate at nearby lakes and seashores and yet they are disappearing day by day," said Carol Browner, Audubon board chairperson and former Environmental Protection Agency administrator in the Clinton administration. "Their decline tells us we have serious work to do, from protecting local habitats to addressing the huge threats from global warming."

Source: Boston Globe

OWASP Top 10 - #1 - Cross Site Scripting (XSS)

In another post, I said I would talk about the OWASP Top 10, which is a list of the 10 most dangerous current Web application security flaws. This list, interestingly, is built into both the PCI DSS standard as well as Shared Assessments.

#1 on the OWASP Top 10 is Cross Site Scripting (XSS), which, per OWASP is:

whenever an application takes user supplied data and sends it to a web
browser without first validating or encoding that content. XSS allows
attackers to execute script in the victim's browser which can hijack
user sessions, deface web sites, possibly introduce worms, etc.


For more information on XSS, check out this nice FAQ.

In the next post we will cover #2 on the Top 10.

DID YOU KNOW? Shared Assessments' Application Vulnerability Assessment actually contains 11 attributes. Can you name #11?

Using the Livescrbe Pen to Develop eLearning Assets

Over the past couple of years I have done a number of workshops and presentations on using various tools to create eLearning assets in the ubiquitous Adobe PDF format. It is pretty incredible thinking about just how many ways you can use PDF's in your workshops and courses that you know can be successfully viewed with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader.

In my workshop: Delivering e-Learning Assets in PDF Format- I showed my participants how I am using Adobe Acrobat Pro Extended, Adobe Captivate 4, Camtasia Studio, and Adobe Presenter to create rich and engaging eLearning assets. Using a combination of these tools it is possible to create some interesting materials that can be shared with the Adobe Acrobat Reader. One of the real take away's from the presentation is that it is now possible to embed video in your PDF's which your users can view with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader 10.

One of the new tools on the horizon is the Livescribe Pulse and Echo Smartpens that makes the process of creating rich interactive PDF's a cinch. Just last week Livescribe added the the Livescribe Connect capability to output their penscasts in an interactive Adobe Acrobat format. Livescribe calls this format a Pencast PDF and it is really easy to create. So now it is easy for teachers to create  instructional videos complete with audio on just about any topic you desire. If you have taken a look at the Khan Academy you will be able to create very similar videos with the same look and feel.  The great thing is - it is so easy to accomplish with the Livescribe Smartpens. Open a page in a notebook - click the Record button and when you are finished recording plug the USB cable into your computer to upload your work to the Livescribe Desktop Software. Once your pencast has been uploaded on your computer simply drag the page under the Connector panel to the Computer option. This will automatically save the file in the Adobe Acrobat PDF format that can now be viewed by anyone who has the free Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Here is an example of what you can do with your Livescribe Pen to create an interactive instructional video. Click here to view or on the image below to view the Pencast PDF.

How to make a widget from your Google+ profile

Like other social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), Google + allows you to create a widget from your profile, as a sort of badge of their information. The novelty is that now began to appear some plugins directed to him. 

The plugin Script Google + Profile + widget, for example, allows you to add on your website or your blog Wordpress + Google widget. In it, you will see your photo, a box to add it to the network, and also the possibility to activate the links for available networks in your profile.

In Step by step we will see below how to add and add the widget to your website or blog in Wordpress:

Step 1. Sign in to your account and download the Wordpress plugin on this link;

Step 2. Extract the files into the Plugins folder (located inside the folder of wp-content root of your site or blog);

Step 3. On the control panel of your website or blog, enable the plugin Script Profile + Google Widget;

Step 4. Widgets menu, drag the plugin to the sidebar panel. Fill in your details:

Googe + ID: is the number that appears on the link in your profile Google +;
Width: the width (in pixels) that the widget must have;
Domain: the domain of your site or blog;

Color: the background color of the widget (in hexadecimal);
Social links: here you can choose to expose them or not.

Step 5. Click "Save" and your widget is ready!

The plugin is currently available for those who have their own domains (wordpress.org). For blogs hosted on wordpress.com (blog.wordpress.com), there is not expected to be available.

Exciting Week Coming Up! iPad Summer Institute

After a great deal of planning it is hard to believe that the iPad Summer Institute is happening this week-on Tuesday and Wednesday.During the conference Christine and I will share our insights on how we have been using the iPad as a both a learning and communication tool for students with speecial needs. We have a lot of ground to cover and trust that our attendees are as excited as us about all of the possibilities and the potential the iPad can offer. Once you start using the iPad you begin to realize that the options are endless and the ease of use and user interface is ideal for the students we work with. During the day we will talk about various apps, management issues,peripherals, and how to best use the iPad in the classroom.

Both iPad Institute Sessions are closed out but we will be offering another session on Thursday which is being hosted at the Middlesex ETTC in East Brunswick, NJ and there are still some seats left.

Easy Steps to Improve Your PC's Performance

This article is from AOL and does recommend some AOL products; however, the majority of the content is informative - and easily overlooked!

Easy Steps to Improve Your PC's Performance

The iPhone Revolution?

The iPhone, released to the public last Friday, is one of the most hyped devices in memory. But is all the excitement justified?

John McCormick of Baseline suggests that the iPhone could blow the market for handheld rich Internet applications wide open, even though the iPhone was designed for the consumer rather than the enterprise market. Om Malik concurs, noting the significance of the built-in Safari browser that brings the full Web experience to mobile phones for the first time. Smart Mobs opines that mobile phones (not just the iPhone) represent a mass medium unto themselves that are revolutionizing the fundamental ways in which we communicate.

UPDATE: Read a contrarian view...

The End of "Cheap Food"?

From the end of World War II until now, most nations have enjoyed plentiful and relatively inexpensive food supplies. But now, according to the well-known futurist think tank Global Business Network, that era may be ending.

GBN cites the near doubling of corn prices on the world market in the past year as evidence that this trend has already begun. Factors that are driving up prices include increased demand by the growing world population, as well as the growth of Asian economies. The latter is significant because, as economies prosper, meat consumption increases... and with it, the need for livestock feed. Increasing consumption of bio-fuels will stress grain supplies even further. Throw global warming into the mix (crop yields can fall by up to 5% for every 0.9 degree F rise in temperature) , and the stage is set for possibly much higher food prices worldwide, shortages, and ultimately, mass starvation in the poorest countries.

Writes GBN's Gwynne Dyer, PhD, "In the early stages of this process, higher food prices will help millions of farmers who have been scraping along on very poor returns for their effort because political power lies in the cities, but later it gets uglier. The price of food relative to average income is heading for levels that have not been seen since the early 19th century, and it will not come down again in our lifetimes." [Emphasis added]

Source: Arlington Institute

5 sliders content for jQuery

Sliders are powerful tools to highlight content on a website. This article gives you five options jQuery plugins to implement this functionality.

Nivo Slider - Site | Demo

The strong Nivo Slider is a clean HTML for the initial structure of the slider. Only a div element with pictures and links is necessary. The main focus of this slider are images, but the HTML caption feature just enabling the display of any content.

Among the options offered are the speed and direction of the transition and callbakcs to perform actions after the start and loading of the slides. The plugin still has no more and no less than 16 choices of transition from one slide to another. Its compressed version has 15kb.

Coda Slider  - Site | Demo

This plugin has emerged based on the application site Slider Coda . Each element of the slide should be a div element with class "panel".

Coda Slider leaves something to be desired flexibility, offering few options but to display different types of content is most appropriate plugin.

Orbit  - Demo

Originally developed to be a slider images, Orbit also incorporating HTML content just as long as the content div element contains a background set.

Its compressed version is very light, and another differential 3.2kb cool Orbit is the application of a loader marking the transition time between slides.

Anything Slider  - Site | Demo

As the name suggests, the AnythingSlider accepts all and any type of content. In the words of the author, "the plugin is an attempt to gather all of the features found in other plugins of this type."

It is the most adptável plugin and integrates better with the rest of your application oferencendo own hashtags for each slide and the possibility of creating a direct link to a slide.

Moodular  - Demo

The neat thing is Moodular, as well as the name suggests, is modular, core, control and effects. So if you need a simple slider is not necessary to load the control module, for example.

The effects of Moodular module includes the popular "reflection" (the one from Apple) and the control has built in support for touchscreen applications, and keyboard navigation.