Archive for October, 2007Hear here! Thanks for the quick work, Cristobal. Last night long time Chapel Hill political activist, Joe Herzenberg died following a long illness. Sally was among the last to visit Joe and also visited with him during his last hospitalization. Many of Joe’s friends are posting their memories of Joe on the Orange Politics blog where the owner/moderator Ruby Sinreich has turned the pages black in Joe’s honor. Among the press stories recognizing Joe is this one from the Daily Tar Heel and this one from the News and Observer. And as it was broken online by the Carrboro Citizen. Corey sends this link to an oral history of Joe talking about the Cane Creek Reservoir and other political happenings in 1985. YouTube – Buy Mii a Wii – Black Nerd Music Video Very funny and very well done and oh oh so true the love and all. Thx t-rel Bob Young is known as the founder of Red Hat, Lulu.com and Lulu.tv, but he is also the founder of Gnack.com an open source solutions company that aims to support open source media players and servers like Gnash and Cygnal. According to Gnashdev.org:
It was a pleasure to see the current faculty explaining their research in 5 minute segments ;-> One that stood out was Dr. Robert Fornaro who tried to teach me sometime in about 1969 or 70. His dedication and appreciation of the undergraduate computer science experience is still as fresh as it was in those first classes. Of the speakers, Al Aho the A in awk (amongst other things) posed the challenging unanswered questions in Computer Science including on from Bill Gates. The Gatesian question goes like this Moore’s Law is seen mostly from the benefits in computer power achieved, but the Law also shows a doubling of power usage and of heat produced. Given that multiprocessors have kept the growth of processing power and the production of heat growing, how will programming fully take advantage of the increased power and how will hardware solutions deal with the increased heat. (highly paraphrased). Dr. Dorothy Strickland of do2learn.org too was interested in avatars and animation but to a different end. Her work is with special need education especially but by no means restricted to autistic children. The main attraction was Steve Wozniak, already a holder of an NCSU CS Honorary Degree and ready to tell tales of pre-Apple glory (which are also available in his new iWoz book which was itself available for purchase outside the hall). Woz was wound up and wonderful and full of tales of his various pranks, of blue boxes, of dropping out of college and later returning as “Rocky Raccoon Clark” to graduation from Berkeley, of his shocking Steve Colbert and of as many of his early engineering innovations and pranks. Bob Young – The connection between Ibiblio, Open Source, Lulu, and the number 42 More info and signup at Facebook and the ibiblio speakers page. Entrepreneurs can be found in all fields of human activity, not just business. The common characteristic of Entrepreneurs, and most humans for that matter, is they eventually get tired of just listening and throwing things at the television set, or the pompous Professor at the front of the room, or their software supplier, and instead decide one day to do something about it. This explains Paul Jones and Ibiblio, it explains Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds of the free-software-open-source-gnu-linux movement, and it explains Lulu. It also explains the number 42. Bob Young is the founder and CEO of Lulu.com, the premiere international marketplace for new digital content on the Internet, with more than 100,000 recently published titles and more than 2,500 new titles added each week, created by people in 80 different countries. Lulu.com, founded in 2002, is Young’s most recent endeavour. The success of this company has earned Young notable recognition; he was named one of the “Top 50 Agenda-Setters in the Technology Industry in 2006″ and was ranked as the fourth “Top Entrepreneur for 2006,” both by Silicon.com. In 1993 Young co-founded Red Hat, the open source software company that gives hardware and software vendors a standard platform on which to certify their technology. Red Hat has evolved into a Fortune 500 company and chief rival to Microsoft and Sun. His success at Red Hat won him industry accolades, including nomination as one of Business Week’s “Top Entrepreneurs” in 1999.
Oct
23
2007
Carl on Public Resources; Fred on Candidates in Niche Social NetworksPosted by Paul in GeneralOle friend and Internet radio man, Carl Malamud presents his ideas about making government resources truly public in a presentation at the UC-Berkeley I-School (as linked to from Lessig.org). And he describes his Public.Resource.org projects entertainingly and well. Fred Stutzman draws on his online campaign experiences with Clark and Kerry as he comments in a Boston Globe article “On specialized websites, candidates home in”
Oct
23
2007
What Egypt, Viet Nam, Mongolia and the American South have in commonPosted by Paul in GeneralAll of them have digital library challenges that are very very similar. How to represent calligraphed scripts that run in a variety of directions. How to handle fragile materials. How to describe the materials well enough to find them but sparse enough to be able to get the works processed within budget. How to federate work projects. How to choose metadata elements and how to deploy them effectively. How to represent the original object as an image and as searchable strings. How to use non-English characters in metadata effectively. This after discussions with folks independently working on projects in the Nam characters, in Arabic, in Mongolian, in Slavic languages and in the antebellum South. Part of the trick to getting to a solution is to see where the problem sets overlap and where the solutions need to be independent and local. Still thinking about all of this but at the same time putting the principals in touch with each other.
Oct
22
2007
For Sale: JJB’s PowerBook that has had brushes with semi-important peoplePosted by Paul in GeneralYou can bid on JJB’s PowerBook G4 – 1.67GHz – 2G RAM – 100G HD – AppleCare!! – (eBay item 230183388706 end time Oct-29-07 17:07:06 PDT). It has an ibiblio sticker on it AND it has been in the same room as semi-important people! (see description). JJB screencasts about the best ways to install Lyceum. This makes it really easy and really clear. Last week whilst I was in Kansas, Donald Sizemore, one of our ibiblio sysadmins, and Simon Spero, one of our Internet heroes, were out in SFO for the Open Content Alliance meeting. This morning the New York Times covers the meeting and OCA I am not making this up. BBC reports that “The deputy mayor of the Indian capital Delhi died on Sunday after being attacked by a horde of wild monkeys.”
Oct
20
2007
Durham Zombies lurch, Raleigh Zombies walk, Portuguese Exorcists associatePosted by Paul in GeneralCleaning up my mail after travel is always an experience. This time three messages in a row seem to have some sort of relationship — not necessarily one with me though. First, we are all alerted of and invited to the Durham Zombie Lurch with this note:
Then thereminist Steve Burnett chimes in with a note about the Raleigh Zombie Walk:
Finally, I find somewhat appropriate or at least topical spam from Fr. M. Humberto Gama of the Portuguese Association of Exorcists:
After at least 20 years in Chapel Hill, Phil Campbell has left the Flying Burrito and the Burrito as we know and loved it has left the building. See Sally’s post here. We loved the Burrito in so many ways; Phil made it into one of Chapel Hill’s great public spaces. And where else would be be served by someone who would become an important young adult novelist and someone would be become the distinctive voice of the Squirrel Nut Zippers. Not my report but a report on me as it appeared in the Kansas State Collegian this morning. One of my slides is lovingly projected on my forehead. First there was my horoscope on Facebook with this warning: Working with computers will cause you some problems. This is not because of the technology but more because of the people you’re involved with. Opt for an old-fashioned way of doing something during this cycle rather than relying on inventions and modern gadgets, or worse still, people who promise a lot but deliver nothing. Nice message to wake up to before giving a talk. Then the storms. We have quit having rain in North Carolina. Of course I didn’t bring rain gear. Heck, I can’t even remember when I last needed rain gear or where I left my rain gear. I have no mental picture of rain gear. Another sign I was sure. Then the set up of the room was too easy and too quick. I had kept my slides low tech and simple to be sure but it was all too easy. Now that’s a disturbing sign! I met the former governor of Kansas who was also the Archivist of the United States. That was I think a good sign or was it a sign of how badly I was about to embarrass myself and my host? As it turns out, the talk went well. I started and ended on time — always a good sign ;-> — and we had great questions and discussion afterwards. On to meetings around campus for the next two days. Long layover at MCI, or is that KCI?, where I’m enjoying the free wifi. Thanks KS and MO! I visited the airport Arthur Bryant’s BBQ originally looking for eggs, but who would pass on the famous KC BBQ? Well, it’s beef. Not so dry but not like chopped pork. The sauce is brown catsup with a few flavors to help the bland beef pass for more than overcooked slightly smoked stuff. Forgetable slaw, called cole slaw here, as a side. “Young Librarians, Talkin’ ‘Bout Their Generation”, a link that may given the ways of the Chronicle of Higher Education go away shortly, features interviews with 8 young librarians including Librarian.net’s Jessamyn West (her blog is hosted on ibiblio.org) who talks about the relationship between libraries and publishers. Jessamyn is handed a loaded gun when the Chronicle asks “Should the relationship between libraries and publishers change? If so, how?” and later (in audio) “What are libraries doing right? Doing wrong?” Jessamyn toasts Free Culture and disses libraries resistance to embrace rapid change. Thanks to Jeff Pomerantz for the link to the Chronicle. Jessamyn’s talk at Access 2007 gets reviewed on the Kansas State Libraries blog. In return, she links to bogs and feeds there at K-State. I’ll be at Kansas State tomorrow through Friday (as I mentioned in an earlier post) and I’m looking forward to talking to the library folks there especially now that Jessamyn has pointed out their blogs to me and I’ve been able to read a bit about what they are up to. The Independent has a story about the rise of the game of Go in the Triangle over the past few decades. As part of the story, a list of a few places where Go is played is included. Somewhat vaguely, we learn that “There are also weekly games played on the campuses of UNC and NCSU.” When you go to to the Triangle Go Club website, you once learned that weekly games were held on Sundays at UNC. I wrote the webmaster and asked “Where?” Err. No one knows. Now the website says Regular games were previously held at various locations at UNC and NCSU. If you know of any Chapel Hill Go gaming, please let Bob Bacon of the Triangle Go Club and me know of them. |











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