Hosts Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley settle into their summer routines with the latest edition of the Coffee Break. In ITS news, they provide an update on the conversion from Blackboard to Moodle. In Tech News, they provide a rundown of their summer reading and projects lists, talk about Google's new 'Street View' addition to its Maps tool, and take a look at the new beta version of CNN's web site. Finally, they announce the first batch Moodle Quickstart workshops for the summer. Read the show notes and get the podcast.

http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~soapbox/node/1457

In "Comparing Open-Source Content Management Systems" Tech Soup considers the strengths and weaknesses of three popular open source content management systems: Joomla, Drupal, and Plone.

Based on my experiences with these CMSs, I'd say their evaluations are spot on. I haven't personally used Joomla, but I've seen quite a few sites deploying it, and it seems to be pretty user friendly. Drupal is what we're using at Lafayette for the ITS site and Soapbox; we're using an antiquated version now, but I'll be upgrading to the latest and greatest version starting next week (on a development box of course). I experimented with Plone about two years ago, and while I liked its workflow tools, the templating system made customizing the look and feel of Plone sites a challenge.

http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~soapbox/node/1458

Looks like there's a new entry (ok, expanded entry) into version 2 of the Browser Wars: Apple's Safari browser is going cross-platform and will work on Windows as of Safari 3. So says MacWorld. Firefox is my primary browser of choice, mostly because Safari is so poorly supported. This move is apparently meant to snag Apple some more browser marketshare, and thus earn a little developer love for their browser. And hey, it's even out as a public beta now!

http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~soapbox/node/1460

This post at Lifehack about stand-up desks caught my eye. I've found myself working this way at home recently -- we have a jelly cupboard in our library that's about the perfect height for me, and since it's in the middle of our first-floor is the perfect place to check e-mail or work on a project and still keep an eye on the kids. I've also found it to be more comfortable than sitting because a) after a day of sitting I'm ready to stand for a while and b) chasing and lifting a 1-year-old is hell on the back. It's a barebones setup that's nothing like the desk that Lifehack found -- just a laptop, a mouse and a power cord -- but it's been working for me.

http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~soapbox/node/1462

If one of your goals this summer is to get organized, check out the blog Unclutter, which describes itself as a "blog about getting and staying organized. A place for everything, and everything in its place is our gospel."

It's not just office productivity; they talk about improving your shower by replacing bottles with a soap dispense, the quest for the perfect laptop/cellphone/gadget charging station, and wireless power transmission (to get rid of all those annoying tangles of wires).

http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~soapbox/node/1465

Since folks like Unclutterer.com, here's a few other organization/productivity/self-improvement sites that I read regularly:

• 43 Folders: A "Getting Things Done"-oriented site, but it's still useful for those who haven't drunk the GTD Kool Aid.


• LifeHack: Recent posts include "How To Use Deadlines", "Read the Classics to Improve Your Mind", and "How to Increase Virtual Memory in Windows XP"


• LifeHacker: More tech-oriented life hacks, including "Read/write to NTFS drives on your Mac", "Soundproof your apartment" and "Speed up OpenOffice"


• Mind Hacks: By the authors of the O'Reilly book of the same name (which is available through Lafayette's Safari Tech Books subscription)



Keywords: "lafayette blog"

http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~soapbox/node/1466

According to CNET, Google is set to release Google Desktop for Linux. The story says "it supports the Debian 4.0, Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu 6.10, Novell Suse 10.1 and Red Flag 5 versions of Linux, and uses either the KDE and GNOME graphical user interfaces" but will only work on computers with x86 processors. (So that's one more think that won't run on my G3 iMac running Ubuntu Linux 6).