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could solve our media upload issues in Autopubllish
Cisco To Acquire Set-Top Leader Scientific-Atlanta
Cisco Systems Inc. agreed to buy Scientific-Atlanta Inc. for $6.9 billion, adding the second-largest U.S. maker of set-top boxes for cable television and tapping into the growing market for Internet TV.Cisco, based in San Jose, California, will pay $43 a share, the companies said today in a Business Wire statement. The offer is 3.7 percent higher than Lawrenceville, Georgia-based Scientific- Atlanta’s closing price yesterday.
This would seem to give Cisco a leg-up on the race to grab the sofa surfer market. S-A boxes currently provide hi-def, DVR, and a host of other features. DVD burners are coming. The boxes are networkable and Cisco has Linksys. It isn’t too much of a leap to imagine a S-A box talking to a Linksys router and beaming content all over the house as well as receiving downloads of music, movies, and photos. It beats adding a MSFT media PC to my home theater rig.
technorati tags: cisco, scientific-atlanta, linksys, hi-def, DVR, wireless
IM Bots for CALI?
Ideally, these bots could use RSS and anyone with a feed could create their own bots that their visitors could add and use. Would you use a MAKE bot? You could ask it “how do i solder” and it he’d return text and links to our pages on this online and in the magazine
MAKE: Blog: Make AOL Instant Message bots?
Here’s an intriguing idea: we create bots that run on popular IM platforms (Yahoo, AIM, MSN, Jabber,etc) that fetch links to lessons or search the US Code. I could see this as part of our study group idea, or for use in the classroom. Put all that IM speak to good use.
technorati tags: IM, IM bots, CALI Lessons
Google Base: Powered By RSS
What’s perhaps most interesting about the Google Base design is that it appears to have been designed from the ground up with RSS and XML at its center. One need look no further then the detailed XML Schema and extensive RSS 2.0 specification to realize that Google intends to build the world’s largest RSS “reader” which in turn will become the world’s largest XML database.
Burnham’s Beat: RSS and Google Base: Google Feeds Off The Web
Google extends RSS through the use of a namespace, adding attributes to the <item> level. While this will certainly consume feeds, it seems that the feed’s author will need to be fairly clear about what the feed is providing. I wonder how long it will be before we see extensions built for commerce apps that will generate these beefed up feeds? In many ways it should be fairly straight forward if you are operating some sort of online inventory or catalog to generate these googlified RSS feeds.
Of course there is still the problem of getting the feeds to Google. It is not clear if Google will ‘aggregate’ feeds or merely parse the feed and create records. For it to be really cool, it needs to regularly read the feed. The focus on the bulk upload pages seems to be on FTP, but RSS is certainly lurking in the background. If I can give Google Base a URL for a catalog feed and have it chekc the URL for new items, then this makes a lot of sense. I guess we shall see.
technorati tags: google, google base, rss, xml, feeds
Asterisk 1.2 Released
Asterisk 1.2 is now available for download. This is the second major release of Digium’s open source PBX and telephony platform since the 1.0 release in September 2004.
technorati tags: pbx, asterisk, telephony platform
More VOIP: YakForFree, PC2PC SIP and Video Conferencing
“In a crowded and competitive VoIP marketplace, yakForFree is distinguished by its free video capabilities and ease-of-use. By downloading the free Virtual VideoPhone, which takes less than a minute, users can make free calls over the Internet using a high-speed connection.”
Slashdot | Yak Launches Free Video and Voice Service
This has been in the making for most of the year with CounterPath (formerly XTen) providing the eyeBeam softphone that handles SIP and video. The feature set offered in the various Yak products suggests an Asterisk backend. There is at least one report of configuring Asterisk to use the Yak service. I’m going to try this out, so if anyone wants to test, drop me a note.
technorati tags: yak, yakforfree, sip, voip, xten, counterpath, cooltool
UntitledLinux Clustering Made Cheap and Easy
So you need a lot of computing power but don’t want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a commercial cluster? Or maybe you just have a lot of machines sitting idle that you would like to put to good use? You can build a powerful and scalable Linux cluster using only free software and off-the-shelf components. Here’s how.
Linux.com | Condor: Building a Linux cluster on a budget
Step by step guide for building a Linux cluster suing Fedora, DRBL, and Condor. Uses commodity parts, so this won’t cost a fortune.
The Ultimate Disposable PDA
The PocketMod is a small book with guides on each page. These guides or templates, combined with a unique folding style, enable a normal piece of paper to become the ultimate note card. It is hard to describe just how incredibly useful the PocketMod is. It’s best that you just dive in and create one.
PocketMod: The Free Disposable Personal Organizer
This is wild. And it works. I’m forever making lists of stuff, so this sort of thing is just what I need. There’s even an offline version for you to download. Via MAKE
Google Base Launched
As announced on the Google Blog, Google Base has finally launched. According to Google, Google Base enables content owners to easily make their information searchable online. Anyone, from large companies to website owners and individuals, can use it to submit their content in the form of data items. We’ll host the items and make them searchable for free.”
Slashdot | Google Base Launches
I’ve got an idea for throwing something in here to see what happens. I’ll update this later after I give it a try.
technorati tags: google, google base, web2.0
As Wex Spreads…
Our friends at L&C find out about Wex from the CALIopolis blog.
technorati tags: wex, lii, boleyblogs, caliopolis