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.
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.”“
Knoppix 3.8 and UnionFS. Wow. Just Wow.
“Klaus has released the latest version of Knoppix, 3.8, to the crowd at CeBIT 2005. This version includes the normal round of updates including the 2.6.11 kernel by default, KDE 3.3.2, and Firefox and Thunderbird instead of Mozilla. The exciting news, however, is the addition of UnionFS. UnionFS stacks your Knoppix ramdisk on top of the read-only filesystem on the CD, the effect being that you can apt-get install, and otherwise modify all of the files on the system as though they were all writeable. Here I’ll go over why I think this is going to change Knoppix in a major way.“
Of course it doesn’t appear that Knoppix 3.8 is actually available for download yet. I hope it is released soon since it sounds a good idea to build CALIoppix 2 on top of this.
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.
CODEC – CODEC Vegas Cancelled – Meet in NY or Chicago in June
“The March 21 CODEC Strategy Workshop in Las Vegas is CANCELLED. I only got one person who could make it. I suspeect that a combination of spring break west coast air fares are to blame.The CODEC Strategy Workshop in New York at NYLS is still on and I have heard from at least 20 people who will be attending!“
freshmeat.net: Project details for imap2rss.php
“imap2rss.php is a program that exports the contents of an IMAP folder as an RSS feed. It reads the folder in real-time and has support for multi-part MIME messages and permalinks.“
OK, so we take the email destined to webmaster and make it a feed. From there we all look at feed and respond to the messages as appropriate.
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.
Library Stuff
“We’ve seen professors have students participate in classroom blogs or have them start their own as part of a semester long project. Feedback from the students is important. Take a look this paper titled, Blogging In An Online Course: A Report on Student Satisfaction Among First-time Bloggers [PDF], which does exactly that:“
Products & Services > Digital Media Solutions for the Blackboard Learning System™
“The Blackboard Integration Suite from Real and Accordent Technologies enables non-technical users to publish video and audio directly into the Blackboard Learning System. In addition to simplifying the publishing process, the solution fully supports the Helix Server infrastructure and RealVideo 10 and RealAudio 10.“
This is not really a surprise. BB has needed to add this sort of functionality for a while.
Zope Dispatches
“Over the last 1.5 years, Jon Udell has been espousing a set of ideas and following a pattern of trends that culminates in a very interesting screencast with the folks from Mark Logic. View the screencast and go to the 5min27sec mark (yeh, I should know the URL to go directly there, but I don’t).“
There are a number of interesting things going on here that I need to look into.