Chase Brook Software

I attended a part of the Symposium on the Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College. This was a day-long event that included a variety of presentations showcasing applications of technology in the liberal arts.

Some of the programs I learned about:

Project Bamboo: trying to figure out how to use technology and social media techniques to help with research projects.  I didn’t really understand what this was all about.

Dartmouth Dante project: a fairly straightforward compilation of commentaries on Dante’s Divine Comedy. The information is easily searchable, and contains material that is otherwise difficult to get to.

Variable D Salon: a weekly meeting of students and professors to discuss technology.

“Photo Fakery in the Digital Age”: a talk about digital manipulation, with some pertinent and amusing examples from current media. The speaker Hany Farid was very good, and is a professor at Dartmouth.

Archimedes in Bits”:  a talk about using imaging techniques to recover a lost text of Archimedes that was written on a manuscript that had been recycled with something else written on top. Website

And I didn’t go in this, although I noticed it parked on campus – but the Tiltfactor Playcube is quite interesting.

I finally retired my Access-based time tracking tool, and switched to a new on-line tool called SyncD.  It turns out that it is a New Hampshire product, written by two brothers.  It has most of the features I was looking for:

• 3 levels of detail: clients, projects, tasks
• online employee access
• the ability to enter starting and ending time – this is because I usually enter time at the end of the day, and this helps keep it organized.  Many other time tracking tools only allow you to enter a duration.  This is enough for reporting or billing, but less helpful when checking your time spent against emails in/out, phone logs, etc.
• easy, intuitive interface
• optimized, fast data entry

Things I don’t like (but I can live with):

• no iPhone interface
• unable to force time to 15-minute increments
• no approval process – i.e., once a time is approved and or billed, then it can’t be changed

In the process of researching products, I built the following comparison grid:

You can create a URL-friendly user name for your Facebook page, but what about the pages you administer? Because I always seem to forget how to do it, here are the steps:

1. Login to Facebook and go to www.facebook.com/username.
2. Click on the link that says “Set a username for your Pages”, as shown below:
   
3. You should see a list of pages that you administer. Select the one you want to name. As long as the page has 25 fans or more, you can try a name and check on its availability. Periods are used as separators in names, but it doesn’t matter if you enter them here or not. For example, the page names chase.brook.software, chase.brooksoftware, chasebrooksoftware are all equivalent – pick the format you prefer for your name. All three spellings will go to the same place.

I examined Wikispaces for a software documentation project – as part of the process of moving material from traditional Word documents to a collaborative web-based format.

After a frustrating exploration of self-hosting with MediaWiki (used by Wikipedia), I decided that I would let someone else install and host the wiki. Wikispaces is very attractive in that it offers a hosted wiki. They have a free plan which is pretty good for most simple wikis, although it must be public, and includes advertising.  But for $50/year, you can have a private wiki that is free of advertising.  For documentation, I needed a private wiki, because it was only going to be available for users of the application.

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To create an alias (or “shortcut” in PC lingo) on a Mac, press Option-Command, then drag the item to the desktop.

To create an alias for a website bookmark, open the browser to the site, then drag the address to the desktop. This works on PC’s as well.