Year: 2013

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American Airlines Dumps 35 lbs of Paper By Deploying iPads

“Our Electronic Flight Bag program has a significant positive environmental and cost-savings impact,” said David Campbell, American’s Vice President – Safety and Operations Performance. “In fact, removing the kitbag from all of our planes saves a minimum of 400,000 gallons and $1.2 million of fuel annually based on current fuel prices. Additionally, each of the more than 8,000 iPads we have deployed to date replaces more than 3,000 pages of paper previously carried by every active pilot and instructor. Altogether, 24 million pages of paper documents have been eliminated.”

via American Airlines Completes Electronic Flight Bag Implementation :: American Airlines Newsroom.

American is replacing nearly 35 lbs of loose leaf binders with a single iPad as it rolled out the Electronic Flight Bag (EFB). The press release notes the program is fully underway and the paper is gone. That means no more paper updates and loose leaf filing chores for flight crews.1» The FAA-approved EFB uses a specially designed app from a division of Boeing Digital Aviation to manage all of the information and is kept up-to-date electronically.

As we see more and more iPads being used in various professions, it should only be a matter of time until law schools start handing incoming law students an iPad loaded with all of the material they need for their law school education. Or maybe not.

 

And I thought that onerous task was only endured by librarians and their minionsPowered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5
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Taking CALIcon13 Live to the Web Using YouTube Live Events, TeleStream Wirecast for YouTube, and Commodity Hardware

We were able to live stream the entire CALI conference on YouTube this year. A lot of folks have asked me about how we did this and that’s what this article is going to cover. Before I get into the nitty gritty of how it all worked I want to make sure to thank the folks at IIT Chicago-Kent for making all of the tech stuff happen. Specifically from the Audio Visual & College Service Center Staff: Jarryd Scott Steimer, David Townsend, Alton Jackson, Sue Jadin, Gloria Juarez, Aaron Ruffin; from the Center for Law and Computers Staff: Sejal Vaishnav, Nisha Varughese, Bill Mette, Mohit Gaonkar, Rudi Buford, Efe Budak, Heather Banks, Greg Morris, Larry Adamiec; and Debbie Ginsberg and Emily Barney from the Law Library. Thanks everyone for making CALIcon13 a great tech success.

One upon a time webcasting a conference live on the Internet took a LOT of effort. Cameras, capture cards, encoders, PCs, a streaming server, and a fair amount of good luck to make sure it all worked. We did it for many years with the CALI Conference for Law School Computing. Eventually we gave up, as it became too difficult to manage especially as we took the conference on the road every year to a different law school. Even something as seemingly basic as pointing a camera at the front of room became difficult especially when you multiplied it across 5 rooms and 4 – 5 sessions per day. Lots of equipment and lots of things to go wrong. We just went back to recording for archives and dropped the live stream.

Earlier this year Google began making YouTube Live Events available to Google Apps for Education organizations. YouTube Live allows you to schedule and stream live video using YouTube’s infrastructure. Using YouTube Live requires having an encoder running on a local computer and a good, stable Internet connection to connect the encoder to YouTube. Once connected to YouTube, the event will not only stream live on YouTube but it will also record to YouTube. The archived recording of the event becomes available on YouTube at the same URL shortly after the live streaming of the event concludes. After testing the product I realized that we might be able to bring live streaming back to CALIcon.

The basic set up for this is pretty straight forward and is well handled by commodity hardware. We used a Canon video camera, Star-Tech USB capture, and Dell laptops. The actual specifics of the hardware isn’t really important since it is more about the features of the hardware. The camera should have composite video and audio outputs. High definition video isn’t really necessary here, it just uses extra bandwidth. The camera’s video and audio outputs were connected to the USB capture device. The capture device was connected via USB to the laptop. The laptop needn’t be a hot rod, just current. The encoding software we used is available for Mac or Windows computers.

With the hardware in place the USB capture device is seen as a USB camera by the encoding software. This allows the audio and video from the camera to be streamed to YouTube. For encoding of the video, we used the free version of TeleStream Wirecast for YouTube. Wirecast proved easy to use and the free version provides enough features to get your stream up and running, especially for most law school events that you might be streaming.

Once we sorted out the hardware and software we were going to use the next thing was making sure that all of the sessions were scheduled on YouTube. 55 sessions were scheduled on YouTube. This gave us event slots that we could connect the encoders to at the right time. We created a separate event for each CALIcon session. This created a YouTube link for each session. The URL was embedded in each session page on the CALIcon website so that the conference sessions could be watched live directly from the CALIcon website. The same URLs embed the archived session video in the session page on the site.

And that is all there is to it. We also recorded the video on SD cards in the cameras for archival purposes. Of the 55 session streams that we launched, we had some timing issues with the first set of sessions that resulted in some short streams, and we had 1 stream that did not record properly on YouTube. All of these videos were replaced on YouTube with the video recorded on the SD cards. Within 4 days of the end of CALIcon13 all of the video for all of the sessions that were recorded was available to all on YouTube and on the CALIcon13 website.

I would recommend that you give this a try at your law school. No matter what sort of recording/streaming solution you are using, I think you’ll find the YouTube Live Events solution useful. If you have any thoughts or questions, please use the comments below or send me an email.

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Try Onion Pi To Turn Your Raspberry Pi Into a Wireless Tor Proxy

The do-it-yourselfers at Adafruit have provided step-by-step instructions for turning a Raspberry Pi into a Tor proxy and wireless access point. A good project for users looking to anonymize their Internet traffic, “Onion Pi” requires just a Raspberry Pi, a few standard peripherals, and some work in the command line.
You’ll need a Pi of course, an Ethernet cable, a Wi-Fi adapter with an antenna, an SD card loaded with the Raspbian operating system, and a power supply. You can buy all these from Adafruit in the companys Onion Pi Pack, but the components are pretty standard and could be obtained from many other sources. A portion of sales through Adafruit will go to the Tor Foundation.

via Onion Pi turns Raspberry Pi into Tor proxy and wireless access point | Ars Technica.

This is timely. Sounds like another good way to put a Raspberry Pi to use.

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Google Play for Education Accepting Submissions

Google’s submission process requires all applications marked as suitable for K-12 to first pass through a network of non-affiliated educators for evaluation before then being measured against the Play for Education store’s requirements for classroom use. If selected, developer’s applications will be made available to the many pilot programs currently underway across the country

via Engadget: Google Play for Education now accepting developer submissions.

Google Play for Education is getting under way. Seems like Google is doing all the right things to make sure that the apps that get into the special store really belong there.

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Script Converts Basic Google Drive Documents To Markdown, Easing Portability

We’ve shown you the wonders of Markdown as great for your to-do lists and notes. If you love Markdown too but you’re stuck with a bunch of Google docs that aren’t in the format (but need to be), this Google Apps Script converts them instantly.

The script, available at GitHub by Renato Mangini, is easy to use, works like a charm, and you can save it in Google Drive so you can use it over and over, anytime you need to convert a document to Markdown.

via Lifehacker.com: This Script Converts Google Documents to Markdown for Easy Exporting.

Now this is intriguing. Markdown is a fine basic text markup language that is great for simple standalone documents1» . I’m certainly one of those folks who often feels like I’m stuck with using Google Docs and then find myself needing to use that info elsewhere. Good luck.

I’ve followed the instructions in the article to add this script to Google Drive and it seems to work well on things like meeting notes and outlines.  For more complex documents like a functional specification for a Drupal 7 website under development, the results are a bit more mixed. It certainly converts the document to markdown and it retains most of the general formatting, but the detail formatting is lost. it does do a great job at extracting images.

Overall I’d say this a useful tool for liberating basic documents from Google Drive. For more complex documents, I’m waiting for the version that converts to AsciiDoc.

 

For longer more complex works like a book or journal article I recommend AsciiDoc.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5
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After 3+ Years Amazon RDS Cloud Database Service Achieves “General Availability”

The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) was designed to simplify one of the most complex of all common IT activities: managing and scaling a relational database while providing fast, predictable performance and high availability.
RDS in Action
In the 3.5 years since we launched Amazon RDS, a lot has happened. Amazon RDS is now being used in mission-critical deployments by tens of thousands of businesses of all sizes. We now process trillions of I/O requests each month for these customers. We’re seeing strong adoption in enterprises such as Samsung and Unilever, web-scale applications like Flipboard and Airbnb, and large-scale organizations like NASA JPL and Obama for America.

via Amazon Web Services Blog: Amazon RDS: 3.5 years, 3 Engines, 9 Regions, 50+ Features and Tens of Thousands of Customers.

As part of recent rebuild of Classcaster, I shifted the MySQL database for the system to Amazon RDS. I found the process of importing an existing database to be straight forward and was up and running in no time. Since it is just an instance of MySQL running in the Amazon cloud, I administer it as I do the other my other MySQL databases running on AWS EC2 instance using SQLyog on Mac and Windows and MySQL Workbench on Linux1» .

As far as performance goes, RDS seems a bit more responsive than the AWS EC2 hosted databases I run. It is important to note that it is possible to knock it over by overloading the connection pool2» . Logging and backups are handled well and access to these from the RDS dashboard is pretty good. Although I haven’t tried it yet, the features exist to scale the database as needed. I may take advantage of some of this if I decide to move our main databases to RDS.

Overall, I’d recommend RDS as a good way to get a database up and running quickly and to provide a stable backed for your systems.

 

I do like the latest version of Workbench, especially its real time monitor features, so I’m likely to move to it on all platforms.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5
As I discovered while dealing with one of those way too frequent brute force attacks against WordPress.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5
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Yes, A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words In A Law School Class, And Here Are Some Possibilities for Thousands More

Prof. Rick Hills decided to tap his inner Tufte in his Yale Law classes this year with good results:

My basic goal was to make doctrinal relationships, legal and political history, and legal text more intelligible by representing it visually in different modes — color, shape, movement, or images generally. My prime directive was to adhere to Edward Tufte’s principles: For instance, avoid “chartjunk,” and never use bulleted text that you read from a screen. Within this capacious constraints, I tried a wide array of images and diagrams — decision trees and flow charts, Venn Diagrams, statutory text in multiple colors, photos galore, and some often hokey but hopefully memorable visual representations of causal and doctrinal relationships.
My verdict? In anonymous surveys with a decent response rate, my constitutional law section 70+ members seemed to like the slides. Many printed them out as guides during the final exam. My own sense: The pictures, if sufficiently simple and memorable, helped clarify ideas or narratives that had previously left some significant portion of the class baffled and frustrated. After the jump, I will provide some samples and invite you to share your comments on whether you think that these sorts of visual aids help and how they might be improved.

via PrawfsBlawg: Is a picture worth 1,000 words in a law school class? My experiment with visual aids.

More and more law professors are incorporating visuals into their lectures as a way to engage students and illustrate the points of law being discussed. While this trend has been picking up a lot of steam of late, the use of graphics, flow charts, video, and more in law school lecture halls has been going on for years. There are a number of interesting resources for visuals that any law prof could use in their lectures available on the Internet. Here are a few:

Like most things, I’m sure there are many, many more examples out there. Feel free to add stuff in the comments (one link per comment).

 

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What If You Could Store a Complete Document in a URL?

Hashify does not solve a problem, it poses a question: what becomes possible when one is able to store entire documents in URLs?

via Hashify.

Try contemplating this for a few minutes. A whole document. In a URL. Not a link to a document, the actual document. Encoded and stored in a URL. Thousands of characters reduced to a handful in a short URL.

Imagine a blog that is just a store of URLs. A messaging system that trades links instead of text. A commenting API that just delivers URLs.

In education there could be student portfolios that are literally a collection of links. Exam submissions that require only sending the teacher a URL.

The possibilities seem endless and exciting. You can give it a try at http://hashify.me/.

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Some Automattic Shareholders Cash Out to the Tune of $50 Million

…there has been a large secondary transaction in Automattic stock, about $50M worth. “Secondary” means that it’s existing stockholders, like the earliest investors or employees, selling stock to another investor versus money going into the company (“primary”)

via Automattic After-Market | Matt Mullenweg.

What this means is that a small number shareholders of Automattic made a decision to sell some of their shares to an outside investor, turning paper wealth into actual cash money.

Typically these sorts of transactions aren’t about the company, but more about the folks buying/selling the stock. A company like Automattic probably has a pretty long list of folks interested in acquiring some stock in the company. At the same time there are stockholders who for various reasons may want to convert some of their shares to cash.1» Of course this sounds like a straight forward market transaction, but since Automattic is privately held the rules are different and the stock isn’t simply traded like Google or Microsoft.

The bottom line is that Automattic continues doing cool things with WordPress and more and some folks have an extra happy holiday weekend.

 

A little cash just in time for summer can be a good thing.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5
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Extra Fun for the Weekend: jQuery 1.10.0 and 2.0.1 Released

It’s a wonderful day for a software release. Such a wonderful day, we’re doing two software releases! Today it’s jQuery 1.10.0 and jQuery 2.0.1 making their debut — five years to the day after jQuery 1.2.6 was released.

A simultaneous release isn’t always easy, but it can be very satisfying. The team is certainly satisfied with this duo of deliveries; those of you who have already upgraded to the 1.9/2.0 level should have an easy time with these versions. If you’re upgrading older code, the advice in the jQuery 1.9 upgrade guide still applies to these two releases as well. Also don’t forget that jQuery. 2.0 doesn’t support IE 6, 7, or 8 since we’re leaving that work to the 1.x branch. If you need some help updating or keeping older pre-1.9 jQuery code going, don’t forget about the jQuery Migrate plugin.

via jQuery 1.10.0 and 2.0.1 Released | Official jQuery Blog.

Kind of hard to believe that 1.2.6 is 5 years old. So many sites are still using it. I may incorporate 2.0 into some personal projects just so I can say I’m not supporting old IE, but that’s just me.