Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Free Anti-Virus Roundup, Part 1 — Microsoft Security Essentials

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

This series of posts will point you to the best free anti-virus software on the web.

Anti-Virus software is a must have of modern computing. Regrettably, the commercial subscription service fees to provide this protection can really mount up in the long term.

Fortunately, if Windows is your platform of choice and your Windows variant has already been “activated” or supports installing the Genuine Microsoft Software validation tools (i.e. Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7), you will be able to download and install Microsoft Security Essentials for free.

Security Essentials will then provide you with up to date anti-virus and malware protection tightly integrated into the Windows update mechanism under an elegant user interface that rivals those of third party vendors.

Also see Part 2 & Part 3 of this series.

Site of the Day — Ajaxian

Monday, January 11th, 2010

If you develop websites or would like to see what technologies go into them, Ajaxian is the site for you.

Here you can find up to the minute reports of all the major javascript based libraries and related tools that you can use to take a site to the next level. You’ll also find discussions of hot web accessibility topics like yesterday’s revelation that many screenreader users have javascript enabled — a situation not contemplated by most site designers.

You can also sign up for newsletters, grab podcasts, and find out about the latest conferences and job offers.

The site also features rich indexing by topic in the left sidebar, making it is easy to go back in time and bring yourself up to speed in any area of interest.

Site of the Day — A List Apart

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

If you are a professional web designer, you are no doubt are already familiar with A List Apartthe site “For People Who Make Websites”.

While its homepage is rather sedate and has shown less activity of late than in years past, the site’s many high quality articles have remarkable breadth and depth.

Here you will find detailed expositions of most of the web design techniques that undergird today’s state-of-the-art. Alongside such technical content, you will also find discussions of accessibility, information architecture, and the business side of web design and engaging designers.

In short, there is something here for everyone.

Tool of the Day — Zotero

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

If you ever have to do any academic writing you know how much work can be involved in building and formatting a bibliography.

There are some great commercial products that dispatch this task with aplomb, but they tend to be too expensive for casual End Users who aren’t in academia.

Enter Zotero a free FireFox plugin that does the job.

Zotero makes it easy to extract references from web pages and build bibliographies from citations you insert in your favorite word processor. Zotero can even capture web pages and sync across multiple computers & operating systems.

Many of us at the IEUC still use commercial products that support higher end functionality in our workflow, but Zotero is a great compliment to these tools as well.

WordPress Version 2.9.1 Up and Running

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

We have just run the automatic update to WordPress 2.9.1 without incident.