Computer Literacy for Experts

The title sounds self-contradictory. An expert should be literate, so should not need Computer Literacy education, right? Perhaps you can help me come up with better terms.

In the sumer of 2008, I taught a course to a group of outstanding computer science students at ITESO, Guadalajara. The topics I covered included:

1. The tabbing and extensible browser Firefox. Extensions.
2. Google family of software, such as Gmail, Groups, Doc and Spreadsheet, PicasaWeb, Blogger, etc.
   
3. Server-side and Client-side web authoring.
4. Emacs.
5. Python programming.
6. Functional Programming.

These topics were selected to instantly empower the students. At the same time, they present fundamental concepts of:

1. extensible software such as Firefox and Emacs
2. client/server technology
3. publishing and collaboration
4. procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming

I called this special course Computer Literacy for Experts.

Make photos available at high resolution

Here is an amazing picture of 830 Anti-Ma rally. It is rather small at 400 x 243 and 48K. I wish a very high resolution version is available on the web, but I have not found one. With this entry, I am calling for photographers to make their high resolution pictures available by publishing albums using software such as PicasaWeb or PyAlbum.

Here are stamp-sized pictures from 809 Anti-Ma rally: http://albums.tomoro.net/Jerome/809/index4.html
At this thumbnail size, you cannot see much detail. Now, click on the third picture from the top row, and you get a low resolution picture at http://albums.tomoro.net/Jerome/809/html/IMG_1320.html. Do you recognize this celebrity at this resolution? Most don't. Finally, if you cilck on the lower half of this picture, you get the full resolution picture at http://albums.tomoro.net/Jerome/809/html/IMG_1320_f.html.
At this size: 3888x2592, 12.8MB, any Taiwanese will recognize her.

Don't email pictures, publish albums instead

To share more than one or two pictures, it is easier to publish an album than to use email. For publishing photo albums, I recommend Google's PicasaWeb, whose use requires no computer expertise and using which albums can be published in a matter of minutes by unsophisticated users. There are many highly usable album software that make it easy to automate album creation such as making it easy to annotate pictures, arrange them in different orders or hierarchies, etc. I have been using Python-based PyAlbum.

Since the amazing 830 Anti-Ma rally, I received tons of 830 pictures through emails. One batch was unreadable by most recipients because the pictures had been uuencoded and few knows what to do with them. I uudecoded the files and created a PicasaWeb album at http://picasaweb.google.com/lubyliao/830. For another 830 album created using PyAlbum, see http://albums.tomoro.net/Jerome/830.