Kaleidagraph 4.1.2 for OS X Lion (10.7) now available

ITS has just made Kaleidagraph 4.1.2 for Lion available from the ITS software page for all College faculty, staff and students to use. This latest update offers the following enhancements: Added support for the Intel Macintosh. The installer will install the correct version based on the processor in your computer. Bitmap file export such as BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF now uses QuickTime to generate the export files. As a result, several new options are available for some of the formats such as byte ordering, LZW compression, and variable JPEG export quality. High Resolution TIFF images are exported with … Continue reading Kaleidagraph 4.1.2 for OS X Lion (10.7) now available

Student use of Mobile Devices, Social Networking, and More

Tomorrow’s Professor recently posted Timeslicing in the Classroom, an excerpt from The New Digital Shoreline: How Web 2.0 and Millennials Are Revolutionizing Higher Education, by Roger McHaney, that explores how students are bringing technology to the classroom. The excerpt addresses the following topics: Video Recording Audio Recording Wikis Blogs Twitter Social Networking Cell & Smart Phones Instant Messaging & Texting Live Streaming Tablets Additional Resources: Timeslicing in the Classroom Tomorrow’s Professer Listen to Dr. Roger McHaney discuss the The New Digital Shoreline Continue reading Student use of Mobile Devices, Social Networking, and More

Shifting Funds from Student Voice Mail Services to Internet Bandwidth for Students

PLEASE NOTE:  STUDENT RESIDENCE HALL PHONES ARE NOT AFFECTED BY THIS CHANGE After studying the voice mail usage logs and consulting with available students, we have decided to redirect the funds previously spent on student voice mail services and purchase additional Internet bandwidth instead. Eliminating student voice mail will save $9,000 per year in maintenance fees, and this will fund a 50% increase in bandwidth available to students.  This fall, we will move from 200MB to 300MB in Internet bandwidth for students. Student use of the voice mail service connected to the residence hall phones has declined to very near … Continue reading Shifting Funds from Student Voice Mail Services to Internet Bandwidth for Students

R Statistical Software Training

R is a free statistics program widely used at Swarthmore (and the rest of the world, too).  If you would like to learn more about how to use R, ITS will be hosting a series of web training sessions from the National Institute from Computational Sciences.  The sessions take place every Wednesday at 3PM from June 22 to July 6, 2011.  The topics are: June 22 – Introduction to R June 29 – R graphing with ggplot2 July 6 – Parallel computing with R Contact Andrew Ruether (aruethe2, x8254) if you would like to attend any of the sessions. Continue reading R Statistical Software Training

Summer Software Developers: Don’t forget version control

If you are planning on doing software development this summer, consider using some form of version control software.  This will let you backup your work, allow you to roll back to a previous version, and make it easy for multiple users to work on the same code.  If you are still appending suffixes on to different versions of your program (e.g. myapp, myapp_1, myapp_2, myapp_old, etc.) version control will be a big help. There are a number of free or paid options available online, but ITS offers a free software development system including version control.  If you are interested, get … Continue reading Summer Software Developers: Don’t forget version control

Print Release Station Saves Trees, CO2, Real $$

The Print Release Stations, which we’ve tested a bit in McCabe, and have been testing in the Beardsley Media Center continuously since Spring Break, have led to real savings in resources not used…  that is, jobs that people send to the printer, but choose not to actually print (or just forget to pick up). In the past one month (April 5, 2011 to May 5, 2011) we have saved a total of 8,159 pages, of which, 5,847 were color pages and 2,312 were grayscale.  They would have been printed on 5,807 sheets of paper (some people choose duplex).  To put … Continue reading Print Release Station Saves Trees, CO2, Real $$