Category: CoolTools

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Halo_Radio: Web-enabled MP3 Streamer

freshmeat.net: Project details for halo_radio
“halo_radio is a package for running a streaming MP3 radio station. A usable Web interface, a backend Icecast source daemon, a utility script for populating a MySQL database with your songs, and other clients are included. The Web interface features informational functions, user management features, and search and request functionality. The source daemon can encode multiple bitrates and features an automatic playlist feature that will randomly select songs based on historical user data.“

I need something like this to adopt a webcasting module for ClassCaster.

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Bring an Aterisk PBX Home!

Kerry Garrison – Building your own PBX
“What would it mean to you to have your own full-featured PBX system at your home or small office? What would it mean to you if you could build an entire PBX system (minus the phones) on hardware you probably have laying around, AND that it can probably also save you money on your phone bill? Sounds too hard to believe doesn’t it, but using old hardware and some open source software, you really can build a commercial quality phone system that would normally cost thousands of dollars.“

Very rah-rah and very true, but this article skirts some of the serious config and setup issues that go with building an Asterisk PBX. Using Asterisk in your house requires a bit more to it than the article states.

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Google Desktop Search Exits Beta

InfoWorld: Google updates desktop search tool: March 07, 2005: By : APPLICATIONS : DATA_MANAGEMENT
“Google is set to launch on Monday an updated version of its desktop search tool whose enhancements include the ability to search the full text of Adobe Systems PDF files and the metadata of multimedia files, a Google executive said…

Other improvements in the Google desktop tool, which is free, are support for the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail application and for America Online’s Netscape browser and e-mail application. Previously, the product supported only Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser and Outlook and Outlook Express e-mail applications.“

The addition of Mozilla and Netscape mail and web cache are great. It also picks up metadata from images, music and video and the content of PDFs. You can grab your copy here.

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freshmeat.net: Project details for PurpleView

freshmeat.net: Project details for PurpleView
“PurpleView is a paper review system that was designed to help distributed project development. It serves as a collection of materials relevant to a field of interest, and its review capability allows users to distinguish good and relevant items from bad and irrelevant items. Submission of papers in different Categories and Platforms aids their systematization. The sorting and searching features facilitate powerful and expedient data examination. It incorporates discussion forums for each item, notifications and message boards, and features security logins and automated database backups that assure the system’s accountability and availability.“

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Podcast Commentary to Accompany Battlestar Gallactica

SCIFI.COM | Battlestar Galactica
“Copy-and-paste the following URL into your Podcast application:
http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/podcast.xml
When you synch your MP3 device, you’ll automatically receive any new commentary that’s been posted. Start playing each episode’s file when the words “The Cylons Were Created By Man” appear on your TV screen. Beeps will indicate when to pause for commercial breaks.“

This is beyond cool. Of course I’ll need something to mix it with the audio of the show. Podcasting is going to bbe big in ways no one has yet imagined.

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Mindmeld for Knowledge Management

Mindmeld at Sourceforge
“Mindmeld is an enterprise-capable knowledge-sharing system. It is an effective tool for any web community that needs to capture and share information, and is unique in that the knowledgebase grows smarter every time it’s used. It only knows what you teach it, but it’s very easy to teach.

Mindmeld’s core search technology, the self-organizing neural mapper, allows Mindmeld to incorporate terms used in each search into a contextual map of the answer itself, continually improving Mindmeld’s ability to derive contextual information from a given search. The system learns how people typically search for a given answer by identifying which search terms are most valuable in any specific context.“

The description makes it sound like a wiki with really good search capabilites. I’ll need to take a closer look.

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ONLamp.com: Rolling with Ruby on Rails

ONLamp.com: Rolling with Ruby on Rails
“Maybe you’ve heard about Ruby on Rails, the super productive new way to develop web applications, and you’d like to give it a try, but you don’t know anything about Ruby or Rails. This article steps through the development of a web application using Rails. It won’t teach you how to program in Ruby, but if you already know another object-oriented programming language, you should have no problem following along (and at the end you can find links on learning Ruby).“

Thanks to TRB, a new Ruby fan, for pointing this out.