Technology
Entries related to technology.
#IPv6 on the Nokia #N900 and #Facebook
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/29/2010 - 11:22After a bunch of political blog posts, I’m on a roll of technology blog posts. Perhaps it is just part of my way of decompressing. Anyway, today I am writing about IPv6. IPv6 is Version 6 of the Internet Protocol. Currently, most people use Version 4 of the Internet Protocol.
The way this works is each device on the Internet is assigned a special number. Often these number are represented as four numbers between 0 and 255 and there are special rules about what numbers can be used which way. Essentially this limits the number of devices that can connect to the Internet to around four billion. While four billion might sound like a lot, keep in mind that every year more and more cellphones get connected to the Internet and in 2007 over a billion cellphones were sold. Unless something is done, we will soon run out of internet addresses.
Woodbridge Board of Education Shows Leadership in Technology and World Languages
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 04/27/2010 - 08:46Shortly after Apple released its new iPad, Woodbridge Board of Education member Steven Fleischman attended the National School Boards Association annual conference in Chicago. The new iPad that he carried with him attracted attention from many other school board members in attendance.
At the April meeting of the Woodbridge Board of Education he hooked up his iPad to a projector to give a report about the annual conference, perhaps making the Woodbridge Board of Education the first board of education to use an iPad for a presentation to the board.
Dr. Fleischman’s presentation covered many important topics, including how technology can be better integrated into the curriculum, and the importance of school boards, administrations and teachers working together on a shared vision. He spoke about how all of this needed to focus on twenty-first century skills.
Yet many of these ideas are not new to members of the Woodbridge Board of Education. Before Dr. Fleischman spoke, two Woodbridge students used some of the schools technology, including a smartboard and iPhoto to present to the board information about what they were learning from the school’s world languages program. The board also approved Woodbridge’s participation in the Cooperative Educational Services’ Title II grant ‘to create a 21st century learning environment for World Language students’.
This grant will use technology including ‘interactive whiteboards, Flip video cameras, iPods, multi-user virtual learning environments, Google Earth, Skype, and others’ to provide a rich opportunity for students to learn Spanish and Chinese. The program will include Beecher Road School, the Six to Six Interdistrict Magnet School and Southern Connecticut State University. Besides the technology, an important focus will be placed on professional development.
The Woodbridge Board of Education, together with the teachers and administration of Beecher Road School continue to work together to find ways to use technology to make learning world languages and other twenty first century skills more exciting.
(Cross posted at the Woodbridge Citizen.)
Why Have A Website?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 04/17/2010 - 14:51It may seem like a strange question to come from someone who creates websites, but I believe the question, “Why have a website?” is perhaps the most important are least frequently asked question by people setting up websites. The answer to that question is crucial in understanding what software should be used to support a website, what the website should look like, how it should be promoted, whether or not a website is really needed, and a host of other decisions.
Using Graphviz, Drupal and Google Analytics to Display Keyword Relationships
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 04/13/2010 - 08:45Recently, I started experimenting with the Google Analytics API. Using it, you can extract data from Google Analytics for whatever processing you might want to do. My first attempt was to access Google Analytics to see who is viewing the most pages on my site when the come from an EntreCard inbox. Yesterday, I went a bit further and used php and graphviz in Drupal to create a graph of the relationship of keywords used to access a site.
Here is a graph of the relationship of the most frequently used keywords for Orient Lodge over the past few days:
For the geeky details, read on.
The Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 04/11/2010 - 14:17A recent report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, The Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future suggests:
Most surveyed believe that innovative forms of online cooperation could result in more efficient and responsive for-profit firms, non-profit organizations, and government agencies by the year 2020.
Mostly, the people surveyed were ‘technology experts and stakeholders’ who would be expected to believe that technology is going to make things better.
Recall Congress Now reports that
A New Jersey Appellate Court, in a March 16th unanimous ruling, paved the way for the first ever recall effort of a U.S. Senator. After originally being denied their constitutional right last September by the New Jersey Secretary of State for the circulation of petitions to recall Senator Menendez, The Committee to Recall Robert Menendez sued, taking their case to the New Jersey court…and won. The American Civil Rights Union (ACRU) was the only outside organization that filed an amicus brief with the Court supporting The Committee to Recall Senator Robert Menendez, the group formed by NJ Tea Parties United and the
Sussex County Tea Party.
Is this the sort of more efficient and response government we are looking for? I know that a lot of people would have liked to recall Sen. Lieberman here in Connecticut, but I worry that this moves us even further into a world of constant campaigning, paid for by the most wealthy and creating more gridlock in Washington.
To support the Project Vote has announced “the first mobile canvassing tool for Apple's iPad. This will increase voter registration and drastically reduce canvassing costs”. As a Nokia N900 user, I’d love to see this tool available on other platforms as well. The press release notes that “Currently only four states, Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, support online voter registration”. Slowly, we are seeing that more and more government services are going online, and hopefully, move governments will use technology to improve their voter registration process, and make it easier to register online as well as easier to verify the legitimacy of the registrations.
Meanwhile, here in Connecticut, the battle over the future of the Citizen’s Election Program continues. The current Governor, who was elected before the program went into effect, wants to take over a quarter of the remaining funds in the program as part of the deficit mitigation efforts. Many express concern that cut of funding will force the program into insolvency. Perhaps everyone in the Governor’s office and the Legislature should take a 25% pay cut before we make that large a cut to the Citizen’s Election Program, since it is people that were elected prior to the program that have gotten us into this mess.
This again, returns to the latest Pew survey, where people noted that institutions are a strong resistance to change. Barry Wellman, of University of Toronto noted “Institutions know how to protect themselves.”
Will government be more efficient and responsive as a result of innovative forms of online cooperation? It would be great if that turns out to be the case, but the efforts of institutions to protect themselves significantly cast doubt on this.
