gCount

gCount is a menu bar item that displays the number of unread messages in the inbox of a recently popular email service. It is provided free of charge, and the source will be released eventually. It requires Mac OS X 10.3 or later.

On Monday morning I gave a short talk in Connecticut before I went to work in Portland. Normally that would be a tough commute, but we were using iChat AV.

Don Leu, an education professor at the University of Connecticut, asked me to talk about weblogs and their use in schools to a group of teachers and administrators at a statewide technology conference.

I first met Don about 7 years ago when he approached me about a book he was writing about Internet use in elementary classrooms. The book, Teaching with the Internet K-12: New Literacies for New Times, is now in its 4th printing.

Don is one of those folks who you wished had a weblog… Gotta work on that…

Essentially, if you’ve got blogging turned on your Tiger server, every user you create will get a folder inside their home folder for their blog posts, and any text file they put in there (whether manually, through a web interface or via the Atom API), will appear as a post on their blog.

[Tuttle SVC]

Tom very neatly explains the significance of Apple including blogging in Mac OS X Tiger server. This is exactly what I want to do at Lewis. Create accounts for a bunch of 5th graders on the server, and in the process have blogs enabled for them. I like the fact that it is based on Blosxom. That is the blogging software that Tom uses. I use it locally on my Powerbook for note taking at meetings. It is a great little application.

At Lewis this summer we are moving all our iMacs to OS X Panther. Our school district IT department is installing an X Serve. We will have logins for our 4th and 5th grade students. Am looking forward to next summer and upgrading to Tiger.

RealNetworks has announced an agreement with Novell and Red Hat to distribute RealPlayer 10 for Linux. This could prove to be good news for both RealNetworks and Linux on the desktop [Ars Technica]

newsmap

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.
[Via The Tao of Mac]

The visual representation of the Google News page. Larger text indicates more news articles, lighter color represents most recent updates. Requires Flash.

Accessing your Gmail inbox with Python | Holovaty.com

Am thinking Tom will be interested in this…

NECC has three keynotes going this morning. Intel come up with an innovative approach to ensure a full house for CEO Craig Barrett… Give away stuff… As predicted, the keynote by Craig Barrett was full…