The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog
freshmeat.net: Project details for Walkietalkie
“Walkietalkie is a lightweight application for voice-over-IP (UDP) communications between PCs and Macs. It is low bandwidth and low latency, and ideal for voice chat during netgames. It doesn’t require any servers or other infrastructure.“
Uses a single UDP to link 2 PCs for audio. There is a server available for conferencing. Mac and Win32.
de.lirio.us – Social Bookmarking, Tagging, Blogging & Notes. Mmmmm, Notes.
“de.lirio.us – My latest project. All the buzzwords, in one package!
Blogging, tagging, folksonomies, social bookmarking, and a bit more. And the whole thing is open source.
What’s really sweet about this is that you can include a long
detailed note with each post in addition to a one line description. That becomes your blog post.. if you want or just leave it for folks to read.Please try it out, tell your buds, kick some tires. In the spirit of open source, it ain’t perfect, but good enough to do a release & let people poke at it.
More here too.The source code is open source & in perl if you feel like hacking it up some.“
Perhaps the coolest tool of late, an open source del.icio.us
Knoppix Remastered for Phishing Prevention
“Cybersource, an electronic payment services company, has announced a new product called “Coastguard” to help make accessing online banking sites more secure. Coastguard is basically a remastered Knoppix CD that has DNS servers and other settings are automatically configured to use secured bank servers. This is a departure from token-based systems that other companies use.
I like the fact that this company was able to recognize how useful Knoppix is, particularly for this kind of security. Of course, at a $250,000[AUD] price tag, it’s not exactly cheap. For the cost you do get complete access to the remastered CD with the ability to further tweak it, although I think you could probably pay a lot less for someone who knows Knoppix to create a remastered version just for you.“
The deal is the bank buys the master and the hardware for burning copies of the CD. The disc can be customized by the bank. The CDs are distributed to customers who then boot the disc and connect directly to the bank. It certainly would be secure, but imposes a huge support burden I think. Knoppix is cool, but in the hands of civilians it can be a little difficult to use. Now if they have really stripped it down and made it plug-n-play, that would be good. I suspect that we won’t here about this, at the 200K+ price point again.
Click here for the ClassCaster audio.
Click here for the ClassCaster audio.
freshmeat.net: Project details for KnowledgeTree
“KnowledgeTree is a feature-rich document management system featuring knowledge management, document version control, hierarchical document management, support for common file formats (MS Word, MS Excel, PDF, TXT, HTML), extensible meta data, creation of custom document types, application managed document links that guarantees consistent data and eliminates emailing documents, easy publication of documents, subscription agents, archiving according to expiry date, expiry time period, or utilisation for enhanced speed, and much more.“
May be of interest to teknoids looking for a less expensive solution to knowledge management.
Bob Barker Gift Endows Animal Rights Law Course (Northwestern University News)
“Bob Barker, host of the Emmy award winning “The Price Is Right” and a longtime proponent of animal welfare, has donated $1 million to the Northwestern University School of Law to endow a course in animal rights law.
The Bob Barker Endowment Fund for the Study of Animal Rights Law will provide students an opportunity to earn course credit. Course topics could include: how humans interact with and use animals; current animal protection laws; species protection; and international wildlife law.
Barker has previously made $1 million gifts to the University of California at Los Angeles, Duke University, Stanford University and Columbia University. It all began with a similar endowment established in his name at Harvard Law School by FemantleMedia, which produces “The Price Is Right.”“
WP2PDF
“WP2PDF is a collection of scripts that convert one or more entries created with the blogging-software WordPress to PDF, a very popular universal document format. It is highly configurable and can easily be integrated in an existing Blog running WordPress.“
InfoWorld: Yahoo’s free mail service to offer 1GB of storage: March 23, 2005: By : APPLICATIONS : SECURITY
“Yahoo will increase the inbox capacity of its free Web mail service for the third time in the past nine months, now raising storage to 1GB, exceeding Microsoft’s Hotmail and matching Google’s Gmail.Yahoo Mail users all over the world will begin to see the larger inboxes between late April and early May, said Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo’s vice president of communications products.“
Vex – A Visual Editor for XML
“Vex is an editor for XML documents. The “visual” part comes from the fact that Vex hides the raw XML tags from the user, providing instead a wordprocessor-like interface. Because of this, Vex is best suited for “document-style” XML documents such as XHTML and DocBook rather than “data-style” XML documents.“