Tech

No, no — not Plato. Plato Learning, Inc. They’re the company that provides the online program that we’re using in my math class.

It’s not that the program is bad — in fact, it seems to be simple enough (I’ve only gone through the introductory “this is how it works” section so far), and their website lists a number of success stories and awards for the program. It’s simply that after going through the first section and poking around at the CDs, I can’t find any good reason why the software is Windows-specific.

Basically, the entire setup is HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PDF, and Flash, with a Windows shell that it runs inside. To start a session, you go to the PIM site, choose your school, and then you’re presented with the options to do a lesson or check your progress. When you choose to do a lesson, a small nscc.iss file is downloaded. That file is actually a minimal text file with five small variables:

[Site Info]
Site=NSCC
SID=SD1
externalserver=isswebdb.academic.com
Server=isswebdb.academic.com
PORT=1521

Windows has .iss files registered to the shell program, which then connects to their servers using the information passed on inside the .iss file. After a quick logon/password check, the shell program then proceeds to run the courses off of the provided course CDs.

As best I can tell, the shell program needs to do four things:

1. Read the data in the .iss file,
2. Connect to the Plato servers to perform a login/password check,
3. Connect to the Plato servers to transmit scores and progress status,
4. Act as a mini-browser to display the HTML, JavaScript, and Flash files stored locally (I’m guessing PDF files are passed off to Acrobat Reader, though I’m not entirely sure yet).

In other words, absolutely nothing that requires Windows. The only thing preventing them from being able to offer the home-based services to Mac users as well as Windows users is the lack of a Mac-based shell. While I’m no programmer, I really have to wonder about just how complex something like that really would be…I’m guessing not terribly. Certainly something a major educational software company should be able to handle hiring a Mac programmer to do.

Ah, well. Macs are still the minority, so things like this aren’t exactly a surprise. Annoying and frustrating, yes — but not a surprise.

Amusingly, figuring all this out gained me a small “star moment” in class today. While about half the computers in the classroom were handling the nscc.iss file correctly (downloading it and triggering the launch of the shell), the other half apparently didn’t have .iss registered as a known file type under Windows. For those students, clicking the ‘do a lesson’ link resulted in nothing but a standard Windows “I don’t know what this file is. Open it or save it?” dialog box. Saving it, of course, did nothing, and trying to open it just presented the “pick a program” dialog box. Neither the students nor Ms. DeSoto had any clue what was going wrong, or how to get around it.

While my computer had worked as it should, I was watching the guy next to me fumble his way through trying to get things to work correctly. When the “pick a program” dialog popped up he started scrolling through it, and I noticed a program called issstub.exe pass by. Figuring that there was a good chance that issstub might handle .iss files, I told him to give that one a try — and as soon as he chose that one, the shell program opened right up, connected, and was ready to go. I pointed this out to another couple students who were having the same problem wile Ms. DeSoto watched, and then she passed the process on to the rest of the class. Success!

As the hour ended, I was packing up my bag when she walked by and patted me on the shoulder. “Thanks so much for finding that — you saved my day!”

Hey. Day number two, and I’m already sucking up to the teachers. ;)

“I Was Born to Love You” by Queen from the album Made In Heaven (1995, 4:49).