Year: 2010

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Sen. Ted Kennedy’s FBI Files Released Just in Time for Beach Reading Season

Edward “Ted” Moore Kennedy served as U.S. senator for the state of Massachusetts from November 7, 1962 until his death. He was a long-time leader in the Democratic Party and candidate for that party’s presidential nomination. During his senate tenure, Kennedy served in several senior leadership positions, including stints as the chair of the Judiciary Committee, the Labor and Human Resource Committee, and the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

Edward “Ted” M Kennedy – Federal Bureau of Investigation – Freedom of Information Privacy Act.

Most of the files cover “FBI investigation of threats of violence and other extortion claims against Senator Kennedy and other public officials”. The files are in PDF format, scans of type written pages mostly. Hopefully someone will take it and do something useful like make it searchable.

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WordPress 3.0 Released, Includes Merge of MU Features Into WordPress Core

WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the culmination of half a year of work by 218 contributors, is now available for download (or upgrade within your dashboard). Major new features in this release include a sexy new default theme called Twenty Ten. Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies. (Twenty Ten theme shows all of that off.) Developers and network admins will appreciate the long-awaited merge of MU and WordPress, creating the new multi-site functionality which makes it possible to run one blog or ten million from the same installation.

WordPress › Blog » WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious”.

So, now the big question is how it changes WordPressMU. As those of you who follow along at home know, I’ve been busy of late with moving CALI’s Classcaster podcasting and blogging network over to WordPressMU. I think I will ewait a bit for the reviews come in on how the upgrade from MU to WP3 goes before I jump off that cliff. I’ve included a lot of plugins in Classcaster, so how all of them react to WP3 is going to be an issue.

Most likely I’ll take a stab at upgrading this blog first, after CALIcon, and then think about Classcaster. Of course any additional change to Classcaster will need to be done by mid-July so it is all ready for the Fall 2010 semester.

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Using XML, PHP and Festival to Produce a “Radio” Play

You play the play with two files: an XML data file that contains the play itself and a producer script in PHP. The XML data contains the cast list, the title and credits, a list of files to use for effects, and each character’s lines (the dialogue). The producer renders the play to an audio device according to the instructions in the XML data, which makes it easy to create a different play or edit the current one and play it with the same producer.

IBM Developerworks::Produce 60-second radio theatre with XML, PHP and Festival.

This is pretty crazy. An XML version of a script is feed to the Festival TTS engine resulting in a an audio file of the play. Some interesting ideas come to mind like automated newscasts, not to mention the revival of the radio drama as a techno art form.

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Update on the National Inventory of Legal Materials

Now there are 195 volunteers across the country working on federal and state level inventory projects, as it is now a full-fledged activity of the American Association of Law Libraries.  This project marries very nicely with AALL’s continued leadership and advocacy on  topics ranging from permanent public access to authentication to official status of online legal materials.   Much of this work draws and builds upon the fine work of the AALL Electronic Legal Information Access and Citation Committee.

National Inventory of Legal Materials – Bits and Pieces « Legal Research Plus.

Article provides updates on what is going on with the NILM. There is a round table discussion of NILM scheduled for 6/25/10 at CALIcon.

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Dave Winer’s Scripting.com Rewrite Looking To Remake Blogging, Again

Scripting2 is a rewrite of my blogging software. Its roots go back to the NewsPage suite developed in 1995. With this rewrite it no longer has code from before May 2010. I’ve learned a lot about web programming, esp in the Frontier environment, in the last 15 years. It’s great to have an up-to-date codebase.

via Scripting News: My Scripting2 to-do.

Dave Winer is rewriting the code behind scripting.com, bringing it into the 21st century.  He is planning on bringing back some the great features like “Edit This Page” that set Frontier, Manilla, and Radio apart as early blogging platforms. Most certainly something to keep an eye on.

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links for 2010-06-10

  • Drupal module: Question Field
    Question Field module can be used to create evaluations, questionnaires, surveys, and anything else you might want for gathering information from users. The module works much like Webform, but uses CCK to create it's fields.

    Think of the content type as a template for a questionnaire (survey, evaluations, questionnaires, quiz,..) that defines the type of answers that can be collected (text, image, video), and the node as the questionnaire created from the template.

    (tags: drupal survey cck evaluation module)