Scott Baker
Welcome to Scott Baker’s blog at Southwestern Community College. This blog contains information about classes I am teaching and some other various information. If you need to know what classes I am teaching, my door schedule, or other cool stuff, you are in the right place.

On Tuesday, November 25th, we took a group of SCC IT and WEB Technology students on a field trip to ORNL. ORNL is located just north of Knoxville, TN. We got to see many great things and to meet and hear from many smart people. We even got free t-shirts and 2GB jump drives. Cool! There are many highlights to the trip, including Jaguar, the world’s most powerful computer for science. I have links below to each of the main areas we saw and to photographs posted on the SCC TASC4CE web site.

• Photo Gallery
• Jaguar
• National Center for Computational Sciences
• Spallation Neutron Science
• High Temperatures Materials Laboratory (HTML)
• Research Alliance in Math & Science

I came across this site while watching a different Photoshop video podcast.  He has some cool tutorials and a podcast you can subscribe to as well.  Check it out at russellbrown.com, and try to ignore his hair. 

After a week of testing, the Roku Netflix streaming video player is pretty cool.  After adding several shows and movies to my Netflix Watch instantly queue, and once I activated my Roku on startup, it showed them right away.  I have DSL at home, and the videos take 30-60 seconds to download and stream.  The quality is pretty good, but not HD yet.  The remote that comes with the Roku is easy to use.  The video quality is no worse than watching it on regular TV broadcast.  I’ll update once HD is offered.

If you are attending the blogging training class at SCC on 11/12/2008, go to my Blogging page to download the exercise files and handouts.

If you would like a copy of the PowerPoint, send me an e-mail.

I received an e-mail from Netflix this morning that the Watch Instantly is now officially released for the Mac (or Firefox) without having to do the beta.  I downloaded the Microsoft Silverlight plug-in for Firefox, installed it, restarted Firefox, and it works great.  I tested a few TV episodes and it seems to work fine.  Thanks Netflix!

I also ordered the $99 Roku Internet-Streaming video player.  It allows you to use your TV to watch the Watch Instantly collection on Netflix.  They say HD content should be available in additional to the current library by the end of 2008.  I’ll post about it once I get it up and running.

Announced on an Oct 27, 2008 press release from Engadget, Netflix finally makes their online Watch Instantly offerings available to Mac users via the current beta.  Netflix is an awesome service, since you don’t have to leave home to order DVDs and you can setup a queue.  Postage is free and there are no late fees.  Sweet!  As a Mac-only user at home, I have been frustrated by Netflix’s inability to support non-Internet Explorer users for their online Watch Instatnly library.  They use DRM via Internet Explorer to protect the streaming media.  In my opinion, DRM only punishes those that do not pirate software and media.  Those that want to pirate are always able to get around protection algorithms, so it only adds additional red tape to most legitimate users.  Enough on the DRM rant.  I was having to run Windows XP on my iMac via a virtual machine (see Sun VirtualBox post below) in order to be able to use Internet Explorer.  A workaround, but it was useful.  I’ll post on how well the Silverlight option works for both Firefox 3 and Safari.

Eye-Fi 2GB Card

Check out the latest offering from Eye-Fi that lets you wirelessly upload your photos directly from your digital camera to the web via their 2GB wi-fi SD card.  All you have to do is be within proximity of one of their 10,000 hot spots or you can also enable it to connect to any open Wi-Fi access point for uploading.  The largest card size is 2GB, which is pretty good unless you are taking very high resolution photos (10 megapixel or larger).  They will likely get a larger version out soon.  It offers geotagging and hotspot support.  It is amazing that this technology can fit into an SD card.  Here is how it works:

Photoshop is a great application for doing so many things.  I think that no one person knows everything Photoshop can do, but some come close.  These are some sites that have some outstanding (and FREE) screencasts and walkthroughs on how to do about everything.  I have Photoshop CS3.  CS4 just came out, but I am not when when we will get it here at SCC.

• PixelPerfect (screencasts can be downloaded and in HD as well)
• Planet Photoshop (Blog format; Tutorials link is at top)
• PegaWeb (advanced tutorials)

I rode my last cycling event for the year as mentioned a few days ago, the Tour de Franklin.  Other than some lower back pain, I felt great.  I finished in 2nd place of all the riders that did the century, doing it in 5 hours and 53 minutes.  It was just over 103 miles and had about 8,800′ of elevation gain.  If you want to see all the data from my Garmin Edge 305 cycling computer, you can see the ride profile.  The guy that finished first races for the UNC-Chapel Hill cycling team, so that made me feel pretty good.  He rode it about 6-7 minutes faster than me.  Super nice guy though.  I plan to take it easy for a few weeks before toning it down for the winter training plan.

Check out Sun Microsystem’s FREE VirtualBox application.  There is now both a Windows and Mac version.  You can install alternate operating systems to play with or test, or install the same OS if you are using Windows.  I love this stuff!  I’ll keep this one linked under Tech Sites.