January 2008 Archives

I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5, more commonly know as Leopard back in November shortly after it was released. The upgrade was not all that painful. There were a few applications that stopped working. There were a few features moved around. This experience is consistent with every OS upgrade that I have ever done.

For some great help with Leopard and your applications, the PSU Mac System Admins wiki has a great list. Have a look. Maybe even add a tip if you have one.

Since I ran the actual upgrade, there were a few things that stopped working. Since clean installs are usually recommended, most of my problems were self-inflicted. Your mileage may vary. My own list of program glitches included the following:

• Parallels 3 which released an update for Leopard shortly after I installed.
• Norton AV 10.x Corporate's LiveUpdate was crashing. The FAQs linked to from the Mac Sysadmins page fixed that problem.
• Cisco VPN Client failed to connect. Reinstalling the version 4.9 fixed the problem.
• Wireshark porting has changed due to the changes in the Apple implemetation of X11.

Overall that wasn't much of a list of problems. No big reasons not to upgrade as long as your main apps can go with you.

We spend a lot of time talking about Web 2.0, and what it means. The consensus seems to be that Web 2.0 is all about social interaction. I follow a few library related blogs. If you would like to know what they are, drop a comment. I have been looking for an excuse to turn on Blogroll. I don't follow them because I am a librarian or interested in library science specifically. I follow them because I don't know if you know this or not, but librarians are geeks in a big way. I think that I am qualified to make that assessment since I own both Darth Tater and Spud Trooper. (Also, I got a Sonic Screwdriver for Christmas.) What I mean is that some of the coolest applications of technology happen at the library.

Meebo is one of those applications that I found courtesy of librarians. I first glimpsed the widget on John Meier's blog here at Penn State. Then I stumbled across it while following a rathole of links from another blog at Dominican University. The concept is pretty straight-forward. Meebo is a browser-based IM application. There is no software to install, and the web client allows you to sign into AIM, MSN, Yahoo, et. al. The most interesting concept here was the idea of the Meebo html widget. I have added this widget to my blog's sidebar. (Hint: Look to the right of this text. :-)) The widget allows anyone to chat with me from my site without having an account.

For personal use, I don't know if my site traffic is high enough to make a difference, but this application could provide realtime and contextual access to support staff. Dominican University Libraries have added the widget to their failed book search pages. If the search returns zero results, would you like to IM a librarian to help you refine the search? That is efficient and customer friendly. What about IT support or project teams using the tool for more immediate communication? If you try it out, share your thoughts.

P.S. Happy New Year!