Founded
22 November 2002
The IEUC was established to engage in ongoing research and educational initiatives pursuing secure, simple, supple, and sophisticated systems to unlock our full human potential. It was established under New York State's not-for-profit corporation law and has been recognized by the IRS as a tax exempt public charity.
email: info@ieuc.org
News and Views from The Institute for End User Computing!
As you may have noticed, we are entering a brief hiatus in blogging while we deal with a couple of time-sensitive maters that require our full attention, foremost of which is a book chapter that our Executive Director is writing.
Once deadlines are past, we will resume daily postings!
For users of Unix and Linux, the most comprehensive free anti-virus solution is the venerable ClamAV.
This open source project licensed under the GPL will thoroughly scrub your system of known threats to any platform. Its database of malware signatures is frequently updated and the system has a number of graphical front ends.
A new native port for Windows is still in the works, but there is already an older unsupported ClamAV for Windows and a ClamWin as well as a ClamXav 2.0 Public Beta that runs under the latest release of OS X for Mac Users.
While the various ClamAV GUI’s tend to produce too much low level feedback on what the tool is doing, the system gets the job done which is what really matters most in this space.
If you are a home user and your platform of choice is the Mac, you can find a rather elegant and free OS X anti-virus solution in PC Tools iAntiVirus.
Note however that iAntiVirus won’t catch any non-mac threats, so if someone sends you a file with a windows virus you are still at risk of passing it on to friends. Nevertheless, it will catch known Mac viruses and trojans and since there are fewer of these on the Mac side, the scan will generally run at a good clip.
The company also has a subscription version of the tool with technical support for business users.
Alternatively, all Mac users can look at ClamXav (see tomorrow’s post).
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.
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.
If you are really new to computing and enjoy Eastern Philosophy, then “Zen Computer” by Philip Toshio Sudo is a must read for you.
This lightweight paper back is a great Ski Lodge or Beach book that will gently introduce you to many computing concepts related to computer hardware, software, programming, and networking while relating them ideas drawn from Zen.
Each entry begins with a pithy quote and leads you on from there with a mix of exposition and the occasional koan to relieve the stress of your day.
Find it at your favorite bookseller from Simon & Schuster (ISBN: 0-684-85410-4).
If you are a professional web designer, you are no doubt are already familiar with A List Apart — the 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.
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.
We have just run the automatic update to WordPress 2.9.1 without incident.
Did you ever wonder how software gets created? Who are the people behind the programs you love to use? How do they think and what do they think about?
If you do, “Coders At Work: Reflections On The Craft Of Programming” is the book for you!
Written by Peter Seibel, the book contains revealing interviews with such famous programmers as Douglas Crockford, Simon Peyton Jones, Guy Steele, and Donald Knuth among others.
Find it at your favorite bookseller from Apress (ISBN: 978-1-4302-1948-4).
2009 saw the announcement of a number of new devices and 2010 should be a banner year for Nook and potentially an Apple Tablet if the legion of rumors dating back to the untimely demise of the Newton Message Pad 2100 are finally to be believed. Much is owed to Microsoft’s Tablet PC support, the Kindle & Sony Readers, and the multi-touch innovations of the iPhone & iPod Touch in making this space viable.
The big question for End Users is what kind of a reader / tablet to embrace. Platforms like the Sony Reader actively encourage users to bring their own content whereas Apple’s offerings are clearly aimed at dissuading the user from doing so by trying to tie all sales to their online market, effectively placing an Apple Transaction Tax on every purchase.
Whether we will see such practices successfully challenged in the courts on antitrust grounds remains to be seen as does the outcome of potential litigation to prevent the practice of jailbreaking Apple devices to permit End Users to load their own 3rd party apps.
Jailbreaking will become an even bigger issue in 2010 if large numbers of Nook users take advantage of its Android foundation to subvert the Nook’s free wireless internet connectivity which is intended to provide a dedicated conduit to the Barnes & Nobel e-book market for general web browsing.
While a dedicated reader is very appealing, particularly for those of us normally accustomed to printing out countless academic papers and such equally critical is note-taking and reference management functionality which is unlikely to be well supported in a purely recreational device.
The Newton Messagepad still sets a very high bar for user interface functionality that has yet to be surpassed.
In any case, End Users should demand the freedom to install or buy digital content and apps from multiple sources. Given the ability to safely “sandbox” applications and restrict their resource usage if needed (as clearly demonstrated by Google’s brilliant Chrome browser), the claims of vendors like Apple that they need to control what you can run on your device to insure that it behaves sanely in a networked environment are of exceedingly dubious merit.
If End Users refuse to tolerate such practices and vote with their wallets for open ended platforms, 2010 could mark a real turning point for the better.
A lot has been going on behind the scenes here at the IEUC and we look forward to many exciting developments in 2010.
The next couple of weeks will be taken up with a writing project while we wait for any trailing 2009 donations to reach us so we can fully assess our financial position from the year past. Then as soon as the IRS release the 2009 990-EZ Form & Instructions we will be processing that paperwork and transferring the information in it to our next Annual Report. We are also actively looking to expand our Board of Directors, so if you’d like to be considered, do get in touch.
As time permits between all of these administrative tasks we will roll out our next major website update as soon as possible so we can begin to expand the site again. We need volunteer to help in this work too!
Research-wise, we are primarily focused on parsing quasi natural language for End User Programming and we are also looking at some Public Policy Issues related to Virtual Worlds.
We have a few other plans in the works, but don’t want to prematurely make any announcements at this time.
Overall, 2010 is shaping up to be a great year!
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