Well, I bet you can guess where Apple stands on that question. They are clearly engaged in a serious push get their multi-touch mobile devices in the hands of as many students, teachers, and staff as possible.

At EDUCAUSE 08 Apple is quite present, which is not unusual, but what is interesting is that every scheduled Apple-run session implicitly (if not blatantly) tries to bootstrap the iPhone into whatever pedagogy is being described. (Am I using bootstrap properly? I dunno, but it sounds good, I think…)

And not only that, it’s as if Apple pulled a semi up to the back door of the conference center and flooded the market on vendor raffle prizes. It’s verging on prize fatigue here.

Oh, so you’re saying if I attend your demo I could win another iPod touch? Because the one I got this morning is a little smudged from sitting in my tote bag…

They’re using them as coasters at the refreshment tables.

Yesterday I attended a session on developing apps for the iPhone. Really it was more of an infomercial on how easy it is to use Dash & X Code with the iPhone hook-ins, but you can’t expect too much for 50 minutes. &, slavish iPhone toadie I am I thought “Why that sounds just perfect for Thayer School!”

& I started planning a suite of apps to access and view data on ThayerFS (there don’t seem to be any real options for editing yet), post on the wiki, pre-order the grille special from Byrne…

But is this fair? Is it reasonable to pile so much brain energy and development into the boat of one vendor, one device? Then I sat on the floor to play another game of Classic Labyrinth & forgot whatever it was I was thinking over…

• Cisco VPN
  I know this is an odd one to have first, but I use this a lot from home, so this might have been a deal-breaker. Although the 4.9.00 version does not work with Leopard, the latest version, 4.9.01 (0080), has worked well for me – no kernel panics or other trouble. And, my favorite little front-end for it, Shimo works like a champ in Leopard!
• Microsoft Office 2004
  I wish I could say we didn’t need this, but we do. I normally run the included “Office Setup Assistant” to customize my install. Unfortunately, once you get to step 3 (User Information), the installer freezes and must be force-quit. The workaround is to do the “drag-install” by dragging the Office folder to Applications. However, once you do this, if you try to run an Office app, you’ll be plopped right back at the same user customization screen that will be frozen. The way I found around this was to do all the available Office updates before trying to run anything. Here are the updates you’ll need:
  1. 11.3.5
  2. 11.3.6
  3. 11.3.7
  4. 11.3.8

  Once all the updates are done, customization and subsequent running of the apps works fine.

• XCode 3.0
  Apple has also released XCode 3.0, which includes DashCode for building all those snazzy widgets. Fink, at least, requires that you install XCode 3.0. I’m not even sure XCode 2.4 would install on Leopard, so you should probably get this if you’re going to be doing any compiling under Leopard
• MacPorts
  MacPorts installed fine under 10.5, but some of the ports seem not to work correctly. In trying to build wireshark, tiff failed to build with the following error message:
  ld: cycle in dylib re-exports with /usr/X11/lib/libGL.dylib
  I haven’t spent any time yet trying to sort this out, but hopefully it’s nothing too major.
• Fink
  Although there is no fink binary yet for 10.5, the source compiles and works fine. Follow the directions on fink’s homepage to download the tarball, and then just bootstrap it like this:
  $ tar zxf fink-0.27.7.tar.gz
$ cd fink-0.27.7
fink-0.27.7$ ./bootstrap
  So far, everything I’ve tried building with fink (fileutils and wireshark) has compiled fine.
• Mail.app
  Mail seemed to import all my mail and work fine, but I did have some funkiness (although to be fair, I had some funkiness in Tiger, too). In particular, lots of messages saved locally had no bodies, and both the Activity window and the new “Mail Activity” in the sidebar seemed to be broken. So, I just trashed my ~/Library/Mail folder and com.apple.mail.plist and started over. Since I did this, Mail is much better behaved, and I was able to manually import all my old local folders. I still haven’t gotten my digital signature working yet – it’s in my keychain, but Mail doesn’t see it.
• SafariBlock
  My favorite ad-blocker for Safari doesn’t seem to work in Leopard. I found reference to Apple’s developer release notes stating that InputManagers are deprecated in Leopard and may be removed in future releases. There’s a blog post here with a potential workaround, but I haven’t tried it myself. I may try Privoxy to see if it meets my needs, although it may be a bit overkill.

That’s it for now. I’ll post more comments as I run across any other interesting tidbits or gotchas…

All Windows PCs and Mac & Linux computers connected to the wired network are not affected.

Instructions for connecting to the new wireless networks can be found at our help pages.

If you run into trouble connecting, please e-mail computing@thayer.dartmouth.edu for help.

If you’re getting getting an error on your Mac whenever you try to use the built-in iSight camera complaining that “Your camera is in use by another application“..

and you’ve made dag-nabit sure there’s no other iSight hogging app running…

and you’ve rebooted…

and you’ve cmd-opt-P-R-ed…

and you’ve Software Updated…

and you’ve tried every hair-brained tip from every far-flung forum that comes up in Google…

Try taking a peek in System/Library/QuickTime and see if you’ve got a wee file by the name of Video905c.component looking all innocent and sheepish. Delete it.

Apparently there is an OS X driver used by generic brand digital keychain cameras that doesn’t play nice. At least that’s how it ended up on my MacBook Pro after an unsuccessful attempt to get a door-prize camera working under Not Windows.

File gone, iSight happy. Back to PhotoBooth distortion hilarity.