Saint Stephen's Technology Blog

The official Tech Department blog for Saint Stephen's Episcopal School in Bradenton, FL.

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Hacker Challenge: Crack Blind Quantum Computing, We Dare You PCMAG.COM | JANUARY 20, 2012 Security professionals would balk at the notion of a computer code so perfectly unbreakable that you couldn't crack it entering, exiting, or even perf... Read more

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Adobe has finally realized that many potential users are unable to afford the high price of their software. They are now offering subscriptions to their most popular software, giving more people an extended taste of their product. Perhaps they are feeling some pressure from free software such as GIMPshop and apps which have shown potential consumers that you don't have to pay $600 to change a photo's background. Whatever the reason, it's a great move towards more affordable software solutions. -k

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Today it was announced that Google might have improperly used the open-source Linux kernel during the development of its wildly popular Android OS, and intellectual property experts say that this 'faux pas' has the potential to bring about the extinction of the Android "ecosystem".

At issue is an intellectual property concept known as "copyleft", which basically states that open-source software (this includes the Linux kernel), when altered by anyone, must be redistributed under the same terms stated in the original license agreement.  In short, it is believed that Google has not done this.

As it stands, it appears that Google took code from hundreds of different Linux kernels, cleaned it up using a process they developed at their labs, then adopted the open-source code as original content.

At risk, some say, is everything that is based/depends on the Android OS.  Unless Google replaces all of the "cleaned up" code they borrowed from Linux kernels far and wide, a lawsuit could bring the OS to its knees.

Do I think this is likely to happen?  My gut says no, based upon how this sort of thing usually plays out in the industry, but spending a little time thinking about what the market would look like if Android where no longer in it, makes for an interesting diversion.

Finally, lest you forget, this isn't the only legal entanglement Google is wrestling with on behalf of its Android OS.  Oracle recently sued them over copyright infringement issues, stemming from Android's use of code stolen from their Java platform.

Get this intellectual property and copyright stuff under control guys, or this could be a really short trip.

-Dave Snodgress

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I am hoping that this will solve the problem of equations editors in our LMS. Please, please, please....

Editing equations is one of my biggest problems in supporting math content in our blended learning program. Google docs has an equation editor, but it is not compatible with Forms...yet. I am really looking for something that will allow students and teachers in a math class interact, exchange work and , yes, even test using an equation editor. Is this it? Part of it? I'll let you know!

-Cindy

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This is amazing news!  Industry analysts say that as many as 500,000 iPad 2s were sold in the first weekend they became available.

Coupled with the growing demand for the iPad in schools, this seems to indicate that even with competition from the Motorola Xoom and the newly Androidized B&N Nook, Apple's iPad is maintaining its hegemony over the tablet market.

-Dave Snodgress

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A nice video comparison of the Motorola Xoom and the Apple iPad 2 from PC Mag.  To sum up, the Xoom has many great features, but the advantage went to the iPad 2, based upon a its well-stocked App Store and a smoother, more feature-rich browsing experience.

-Dave Snodgress

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I'm really nervous about this one.  A prequel (and/or possibly a sequel) to one of the best films of the 20th century, which is based upon one of the best sci-fi novels of the 20th century? 

I hope Alcon Entertainment, the company that has acquired the rights to Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick) respects the original film enough to execute this project properly.

As yet, a director and screenwriter have not been chosen, although Ridley Scott (Blade Runner's director) is rumored to be in discussions with Alcon Entertainment at this time.

If I could choose the way in which this whole project will play out, I'd like to see Darren Aronofsky  in the director's chair and sci-fi literary giant William Gibson as screenwriter.

The film would be shot in black and white, in the French New Wave style, a la Jean-Luc Godard's sci-fi/film noir masterpiece Alphaville.

The plot would deal with how replicants (the artificial humans in Blade Runner) began to become self-aware and could be explored from a variety of metaphysical and existential angles, as Philip K. Dick probably would have himself.  A common theme in many of his novels and short stories is the existential conundrum,  "What is real and what is not real?"

Done poorly, without proper care being taken, this new film could become another excessively CGI-laden, Hollywood money-grab, devoid of substance and meaning.

-Dave Snodgress

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"Even if all students mastered core academic subjects, they still would be woefully under prepared to succeed in post secondary institutions and workplaces, which increasingly value people who can use their knowledge to communicate, collaborate, analyze, create, innovate, and solve problems." This is powerful stuff. No tip toeing around, no sugar coating, this report shoots straight into the heart of the need for technology in the classroom. Even I have never been this blunt! Sure there are obstacles, of course there are budget issues, naturally it won't be easy, but the walls of our classrooms should not insulate us from the world. The winds of real life need to blow through our schools, and technology is a big part of real life. And becoming bigger every day.

The business of schools is the future. We teach young people with an eye toward what they will need to be independent, literate, contributing adults. If we don't have an idea of what those needs are, how will we meet them? Technology is a tool, and it is more than a tool. It is not enough to have a basic understanding of a lever, one must be able to change and adapt the lever and all of its evolutions to solve problems that haven't even been invented yet. It's a huge undertaking. 

No wonder we feel more comfortable with doing what we have always done.

-Cindy

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As 3G and 4G smartphones become more common, rogue smartphone apps that behave in much the same way as a virus or trojan on a PC are also becoming more common.

Enter the latest nasty little Android OS trojan.  This one is a hacked variant of a legitimate application known as Steamy Windows.  In its original form, Steamy Windows did nothing but simulate a foggy touch screen window, which you could simply "wipe" off with your finger.  Cute.  Pointless.  Harmless.

The hacked variant of Steamy Windows is far from harmless and actually uses your phone to send text messages to people in your phone's contact list, while blocking access to your phone's text messaging accounting feature, a service designed to tell you how many text messages you've sent and how many you have left before you begin to be charged a per message fee.

In order to protect itself from discovery, it also blocks incoming text messages to make sure that the contacts you're spamming aren't able to notify you that they are receiving text spam from your phone.  Clever.

What makes this hacked app stand out from those that have preceded it is the level of sophistication required to create it.

Watch for more apps like this to flood the market in the near future.  Hackers and virus writers go where the people are.  They seek out target rich environments, in order to ensure that their efforts create the most damage possible. 

After all, what's the point of spending your time to create a payload that's only going ruffle a few feathers, when you can blow up the entire chicken coop.

Be smart about what you download.  If you didn't get an app from the iPhone or Android App store, don't trust it.  For that matter don't download it, period.  Furthermore, if you're installing an app on your phone and it starts asking you to give it permission to access all sorts of things on your phone, stop installing it.  That is usually (but not always) a bad sign.

Be careful out there.

-Dave Snodgress

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Cliches have always been a stumbling block for designers of web and print mediums. Somehow your best ideas can feel canned or cheesy and perhaps this is not always true. The same emotions that give cliches staying power can be emulated in your work if you take the time to apply those feelings in a more creative way. Check out Smashing Mag's take on cliche design & idea generation. -k

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A very sad article about the end of our manned space program, as we know it.  It is my hope that the program will be reborn in the near future.

-Dave Snodgress

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Google Docs to the rescue! Thanks to Richard Byrne and his fabulous blog for alerting me to the announcement that Google Docs now supports all Microsoft Office file types as well as Apple's Pages files. What this means is that the last small hurdle to our becoming a truly platform integrated campus has been overcome.This is something we feel is vitally important to address the needs of our faculty and to prepare our students for the real world in terms of technology.

On another note, there has been some discussion in our office about our growing dependence on Google. We love Google. We recognize that this should, perhaps, make us uneasy, but it doesn't. The fact is, they make good products. We want to use them. They fill the need for us that no other company seems able to fill. I actually have an Economics degree and in my mind, if a company is actually giving consumers what they want, they deserve to be successful. Sometimes a sports team consistently wins the championship because they have a strong program. Should we fear them? Should other teams become discouraged and drop out? Of course not. It just makes everyone else try harder. Isn't that what we want?

-Cindy

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I'm always interested in reading about how different professions are putting the iPad to good use and this article from TechCrunch profiles one of the best uses for the tablet I've seen so far.

As medical records move online, doctors are increasingly bringing laptops into the examination room to take notes, write prescriptions and more. But laptops can be cumbersome, and the iPad has emerged as a popular device for medical professionals. In fact, one out of every five doctors in a private practice owns an iPad. Enter DrChrono  a Y Combinator-backed startup that produces an iPad app and SaaS for doctors.

The free iPad app allows doctors to schedule patient appointments, write prescriptions and send them to pharmacies, enable reminders, take clinical notes, access lab results, and input electronic health records.

The electronic medical records element is key because the Obama administration is currently offering strong incentives for doctors to start moving their health records online. DrChrono will help doctors start, finish and manage this process.

The fact is that there has never been a better time for DrChrono to launch its business to the medical community. iPads are still the hot new gadget, and doctors have major incentives to move to electronic medical records.

-Dave Snodgress

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Optimizing for the Mobile Market

Around the world there are approximately 5 billion subscribers to various mobile technologies. This includes a much greater variety of economic and social classes and thus gives us a wider audience to aim for. The downside – you have about 2 seconds to catch their attention. Also, due to smaller screen size, top ratings on search engines are critical.

Research your keywords Mobile users are not searching with the traditional, longer strings of keywords. They are using one or two word phrases, abbreviations and they are looking to fulfill an immediate need. To see how your keywords hold up for mobile SEO try the Google Keyword Tool. Go to advanced options, and you’ll see a section titled "Show ideas and Statistics for," where you can select from: Desktop and laptop devices, All mobile devices, Mobile WAP devices, Mobile devices with full internet browsers (e.g., iPhone or Android). Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance.com has a great post on this including screenshots and more details at http://www.wilsonweb.com/paid-search/churchill-mobile-keywords.htm. metaTXT Metatxt.org defines metaTXT as “a way of exposing and making discoverable content, for example multimedia, within a site. It provides multiple mobile web site entry points for browsers. In short, metaTXT helps the search engine return the most relevant site for the consumer device.” Why is this so very cool? Currently the PC version of a Web site is the default that a visitor is taken to. The site then redirects (hopefully), to the appropriate version for the devise it’s being viewed on. For both the programmer and consumer this is time consuming and sometimes inaccurate. However metaTXT will indicate which url a devise should follow to bring end users to the web site that is most relevant to them. You can also include location, basic meta info (keywords, description and title), site map, and rss feeds. For code samples and more details read http://www.mobileseonews.com/metatxt-mobile-seo.html

-k

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A few years back, one of our biggest competitors in the Tampa Bay area decided that it would be a really great idea to rip out almost of all of their CAT 5 network cabling and make every PC on their campus wireless.

This was, as you can imagine, a move that would fall into the 'EPIC FAIL' category.  In fact, it was such a failure they ended up having their CAT 5 cabling reinstalled and subsequently fired the network administrator who caused the trouble.

Up until now (theoretically, at least) wireless networking equipment simply didn't provide the speed and throughput that traditional CAT 5 cable-based networks do.

This article from PC World sheds light on some groundbreaking network technology that is being developed at Stanford University.  If it can be perfected, perhaps then we will be much closer to a world that is truly wireless.

-Dave Snodgress

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OneDayonEarth.org has just launched their online database of thousands of videos filmed all over the world on one day, October 10th, 2010. The project was launched over 2 years ago to create a  documentary capturing a day in the life of earth. Individuals and organizations captured on film any aspect of daily life during this one day, and uploaded them to onedayonearth.org. The site includes an interactive map that marks where each video was captured – click on any country to view the videos from that area. There are scenes from everywhere, including over 100 developing countries where The United Nations assisted local people by filming the clips and sending them to the website by mail. The final documentary is expected to be released in movie theaters and online at the end of the year. -k

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The tablet war is heating up and you need to know what is what.  With the impending release of the Motorola Xoom on February 24th, the Blackberry Playbook in April, and the HP TouchPad in June, there will soon be many tablets to choose from.

Up until now only Apple's iPad and Samsung's Galaxy Tab have been the big contenders in this class and at the present time Apple is still the undisputed leader, the Galaxy Tab's effort having fallen short of the mark in many ways.

For the money the iPad still seems to be the way to go.  Android (Galaxy Tab, Xoom) and WebOS (HP TouchPad) are great operating systems for tablet devices, but Apple's iOS still offers greater functionality to the average user.

If you are trying to decide if a tablet is right for you, this article from TechCrunch.com will be a big help.

-Dave Snodgress