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Category: Alumni and other friends (Page 24 of 38)

Shuttle liftoff – select the cameras

ibiblio alum Jim Ray may be over in the penumbra of the dark side but he is making the best of it. Check out the slick multimedia package that Jim worked on for MSNBC on the Discovery shuttle launch. You can select which 3 camera angles you’d like to use to view the shuttle launch at once from a set of up to 11 available cameras and that’s just the beginning. As you replay the launch, you can move between cameras. Take a look. This is a wonderful piece of work.

GILS is going….

After spending years and mucho $$$, feds have decided to recall the Global Information Locator Service (GILS) standard (according to Federal Computer Week). For those of us involved in searching via WAIS and other now decade old searching schemes (back in the day when they were new), this is not a surprise but a relief. Eliot Christian has had a very long ride on GILS (he declined to comment on the story linked above), but will now have to consider how work done for GILS might fit with W3C standards and with current searching standards used by Google and Yahoo! Could these old school GILS problems point to similar problems with the semantic web? And what does this mean for state standards based on GILS like NC GILS?

What say you old school searchers?

Hot Jazz Mall?

Our friend Sylvia Garrard is not only a painter but also a singer. She just made a demo CD of four jazz pieces with pianist Chris Reynolds. In honor of that, we met at the Southpoint mall restaurant where Chris was scheduled to play with a guitarist as a duo. Things were a little confused. Our friend Jane couldn’t make it at the last minute. Chris has split with the guitarist and so had also split the dates. This week turned out to be the guitarist’s week at Maggiano’s. We listened a while then walked out and heard some funky jazz down the street. Playing in the 100 degree heat were the Usual Suspects, a local to Durham band that featured the wonderful Beverly Botsford on percussion. The jazz was hot and so was the air and anything that had been in the sun even a few minutes. We ducked in for a bite and caught the closing numbers after sunsite when the temperature had dropped to only 93 degrees! Good funky jazz and the band was paying some serious dues.

Princess of the Piedmont; Duke of Devonshire

The Honorable Dr. Sally Greene, Esquire will be returning to her reporting roots when she interviews the Duke of Devonshire as he visits Tyler, Texas. The Duke is there to promote a showing of selections from his family’s collection of art and fine objects opening at the Tyler Museum of Art called “The Devonshire Inheritance: Five Centuries of Collecting at Chatsworth.”

Sally will be taking a break from helping out her mother who is recovering from an automobile accident at East Texas Medical Center Rehabilitation Center in Tyler.

Massive Webcast? Why bother?

Just got a call from WCHL (1360 AM) asking me about a supposedly unique webcast scheduled to come from the University of Pittsburgh in September. The pitch here is that the producers of the event say that the webcast lecture will be have the largest audience of any academic lecture in history. Sounds like high-hopes promotion and wishful thinking. The talk is the Cutler lecture on public health for 2005, “The Public Health Consequences of Disasters: Challenges for Public Health Action” by Eric Noji.

I’m dropping my Gameboy and tuning right in!

Seriously, why is this news? We’ve been doing webcasts for years and years. SunSITE did a live webcast of Bill Clinton’s visit to Chapel Hill for the 200th anniversary of the founding of UNC back in October 1993. Live webcasts without interaction are most interesting if they are of a historic event like today’s space shuttle launch or the Victoria’s Secret annual show. Just check out Technorati for recent listings of webcasts, not to mention Google; there are no shortage of webcasts of every variety.

Stored webcast that can be played at leisure (via timeshifting) make more sense when you don’t want or need to provide real-time interactivity. We do that with the ibiblio speakers series for talks by Larry Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Dan Gillmor and even the Triangle Bloggers Conference. Heck, we even make the talks available through BitTorrent using Osprey.

If the talk were to allow some kind of intense and interesting and innovative interactivity, then we’d have a story. “We’ll have a million people listening to an academic talk on bioterrorism” is an amusing claim. A stunt really. And without added value to the lecture or its contents.

BTW Pittsburgh says “This year we plan to offer a live webcast of the John C. Cutler memorial lecture. The lecture will also be made available on the Pitt Media Site archive after the event.”

Jones-mania – Lesser Light

Today’s News and Observer’s Sunday Journal’s Sunday Reader section features one of my sevens based poems, “Lesser Light.” The online version screws up the stanzas; it leaves out the concept of stanzas completely. Imagine that you are reading seven lines at a time as a stanza and you’ll get the intent (until I hack a version of the html on this server).

I love it that poetry shows up in a section called “Lifestyles.”

UPDATE: Incompletely hacked but poeticly correct version is here.

Gizmo Project vs Skype

Brian Russell of audioactivism.org turned me on to the Gizmo Project which is a free VoIP competitor to Skype. Gizmo has several big advantages over Skype. The most important is that Gizmo is SIP compliant and will interoperate with other SIP compliant VoIP systems. Gizmo also has free voice mail which is mailed to you as a .wav file. It has a cute mapping feature, a friendly block message, call recording which is great for podcasters and more.
I’ve been very very impressed with the Gizmo quality and reliability so far.

ibiblio = memex authority says aussie rag

The Aussie “multiple medium” magazine, Gizmag, in print form is “distributed in environments where affluent males congregate.” This may be the reason that I’ve never seen it. That and that I think they are limited to Australia in the print edition.

Nonetheless I was delighted to discover that in their article on the 60th anniversary of the publication of Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” essay, they included two links to ibiblio sources. ibiblio link and the link to Ted Nelson in the article [they should have used this link for Nelson] go to a JOMC master’s project by Scott Griffin from 2000 on Internet Pioneers. Unfortunately, they misspell Dr. Bush’s name regularly.

Anniversary of Vannavar [sic ] Bush’s famous essay describing the MEMEX machine

[…]
Bush was a visionary and his work in creating the environment which nurtured
the development of what became the internet is well documented in several
excellent articles in Wired magazine and ibiblio.
[…]

Marchionini-isms

Poet of a sort or at least a creator of bon motes. My collegue Gary Marchionini has a gift or a curse for creating oddly specific words for the field of Information and Library Science. He has not been as widely recognized for this gift/curse as he deserves. In order to rectify that, I present this short list.

ibiblio = national model?

I’ve always thought of ibiblio as international going back to our original sunsite proposal in 1992. But when you get in good company on a list of things appreciated, it’s not polite to whine.

As Barbara Solow leaves NC, she writes one last Independent article about
what she will miss
. ibiblio is included under the heading of National
Models:

[…]
National Models: What is it about the Triangle that has us so chock full of nationally recognized institutions and model programs on a host of social-change issues? Maybe it’s that the region is still small enough so that grassroots organizing feels doable. Or maybe it’s because our economy has kept us on the cutting edge–tobacco manufacturing to RTP to the City of Medicine. But I think it goes deeper, to the progressive element that’s in the water around here. Among some of the leaders in this arena: The Self-Help Credit Union, Ladyslipper Music, The Institute for Southern Studies, Full Frame documentary film festival, Public Allies, Smart Start, ibiblio, The Triangle Community Foundation, Lincoln and Piedmont Community Health centers, The Coalition for Family Peace–and for that matter, the University of North Carolina and its 16 campuses.
[…]

Google Moon joins Google Earth

Today in celebration of the 36 anniversary of the first moonlanding, Google not only spiffed up the logo on their search page, but they released a Google Maps version for the moon. Landing sites and more are noted. Now if they will only add bike paths and public transportation mapping too. (yes on the moon and on the earth too).
They do keep the Google off-earth site meme going.
Hint: zoom in to on the Google Moon Map for a cute surprise.

Not moon-related, but Google Maps related: The folks at housingmaps.com have taken the Google Maps API and added the Craig’s List housing datastream and ended up with a great service if you are looking to buy/rent/lease a place to live (Triangle included as Raleigh).

Also [spoiler here], today’s New York Times Crossword theme is the first moon landing. And yes I finished it over coffee!

Blog Teach-in – Saturday July 30 noon – 2

MisterSugar alerts us to A significant community event:

  • What: Chapel Hill BlogTogether Teach-in
  • When: Saturday, July 23, 2005, 12 noon to 2 p.m.
  • Where: UNC-CH Health Sciences Library Biogen Idec Classroom.
    Park in the UNC Hospitals parking deck, or find free street parking in the area. The Health Sciences Library is on Columbia St. near the intersection with Manning. Directions.
  • For anyone who wants one-on-one help becoming a blogger
  • For new bloggers who want one-on-one help improving their blog or making the most of their blogware

Download this poster [pdf] for more information.
RSVP to anton@blogtogether.org or 919.225.0969.

Truth and Reconciliation – G’boro style

Ed Cone is intensely blogging (is that a term) with photos, the hearings of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Well worth reading and seeing and the best coverage I have found (as several of his commentors note).
The Commission is digging into the 1979 killings of Communist Workers’ Party marchers by members of the KKK and of the Amercian Nazi Party. The killers have never been convicted. The complex relationships between the Communists, KKK, G’boro police and hints of FBI involvment are being discussed by all sides (and reported by Ed).

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