iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

This is part of one of the workshops I’ve been giving at Brock this month (as it pertains to WebCT and security/privacy). I thought it had valud outside Brock’s walls. The videos on YouTUBE so that it’s hamsters can do the heavy work.

HawkWings.net has a good write-up on MacInTouch reader Bill Benson’s rule for fighting image based spam. Basically, most of this image spam contains a heading Content-Type which contains multipart/related. You have to add the header to your rules in Mail.app, but that’s the only tough part. I would recommend you set the filter to change the background colour until you know everything is working.
www.hawkwings.net/2006/08/01/mailapp-rule-fix-for-image-spam/

Update: You may want to add something like “From” does not contain info@evite.com.

Recently NeoOffice released NeoOffice 2.0 in a final beta format. NeoOffice is a rebuild of OpenOffice.org for Mac OSX.

OpenOffice.org is an office suite that is being developed by the open source community, lead by Sun, that originally provided an office productivity suite to the free software based systems like Linux, Solaris and BSD. The initial offerings were not that great, and stability and compatibility were an issue. Today’s releases of open office for Linux are perfectly viable replacements for MS Office’s basics, and the actual “Writer” tool is about as good as MS Word.

The latest versions or OpenOffice.org (also known as OOo or OO.o) are available for Linux, BSD and Windows, but the Mac version has previously required extra steps to run on OSX, NeoOffice offered an alternative, but it was very unstable and slow until this 2.0 release.

The OpenOffice suite has always had the option to open and save files in the MS Office Format, as well as it’s own format and the Open Document/Open Text standard.

NeoOffice’s PDF support is better than any other OSX options. The print export option that comes with OSX and the Adobe creator that plugs directly into MS Word are notoriously bad when it comes to identify and preserving hyper links. The standard “Save as PDF” option in the print menu simply doesn’t preserve hyper links. Adobe should be able to preserve hyper links but often does not. OpenOffice/NeoOffice’s export to PDF option does preserve hyper links and I’ve already mentioned that it opens MS Office (Word) files!

This November is NeoOffice month for me because I plan on using nothing but OpenOffice/NeoOffice for the entire month. There is a small exception, if I have to demonstrate MS Office software at work I will, but I think it can be avoided.
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On Monday I found out that BlackBoard (Bb) had been issued a patent on eLearning. Bb recently bought WebCt inc. which makes the learning management system that consumes most of my days at work. I was dismissive of it until I learnt about the subsequent lawsuits against Desire2Learn (D2L) the day afterwards.

As far as I’m concerned it’s a problem with the US software patent system more than anything else. The reason I initially dismissed it was I assumed it was akin to Amazon’s “single click purchase” patent and the collection Microsoft and Apple hold against each other in a kind of cold war — then Bb sued D2L (see Slashdot).

Now I’m a little more concerned and hope that the patent gets invalidated, take a look at these gems (from US Patent office):

9. The system of claim 2 wherein the course files comprise an asynchronous communication file.

10. The system of claim 2 wherein the course files comprise a synchronous communication file.

19. The system of claim 18 wherein the grade is made available to the student user.

I’m pretty sure that there’s a lot of prior art on these points, some might even pre-date Matthew Pittinsky’s (Bb chairman of the board and co-founder) birth! I’m not sure if Bb can win on a few points of a patent that is otherwise invalid.

I left the international WebCT Conference in Chicago with a relativly good feeling about Bb and what their future plans were, even if I’ve never been a big fan of CEO Michael Chasen — that feeling is rapidly going away and according to the academic technology related list serves, I’m not the only one who feels this way.

To use a Chasen-ism, BlackBoard is becoming a thought leader in business bullying.
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If you bought a copy of iPhoto ’06 or bought a new mac in ’06 here’s how you can subscribe to someone’s flickr photos:

• First head over to the flickr home page of the person or group you would like to subscribe to and find the feed at the bottom of the page.
  
• Follow that link or right (ctrl) click it and copy the URL.
• Next open iPhoto and find “Subscribe to Photocast” in the File menu.
  
• Past the URL (Command+V) into the space provided and press subscribe.
  
• You should now be subscribed and able to view and work with these photos.  iPhoto should check for new photos when you launch it or when you press the little refresh circle.