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Category: Alumni and other friends (Page 8 of 38)

McGuinn on GuitarPlayerTV

McGuinn
ibiblio contributor and world’s greatest 12 and 7 string guitar player Roger McGuinn is subject of a multipart video interview on GuitarPlayerTV. Roger explains his various roots, describes/shows how he records, he plays 6 string, 7 string, 12 string, 12 string Ric, and banjo, and you get a peek at his transistor radio collection too. A bunch of asides that give insight to the music business are also included. Great stuff. Begin here.
Thanks to Mike Conway for the alert.

The First Century of the First State University

Documenting the Amercian South lead Natasha Smith writes to say that the 10-year old DocSouth launched its 10th collection – “The First Century of the First State University”:


Documenting the American South
is pleased to announce the launch of our newest collection, “The First Century of the First State University” (http://docsouth.unc.edu/unc/) on June 19, 2006. This collection presents a wealth of sources documenting the creation and growth of the University of North Carolina during the period from 1776 to 1875. These primary sources include letters, books, maps, receipts, bills, subscription lists, trustee and faculty meeting minutes, architectural drawings, and catalogs. The collection is grouped into the following topics: the creation and governance of the university, the campus, the university buildings, the curriculum, the faculty, student life, town and gown, the university in the life of the state of North Carolina, and the university during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Read more at http://docsouth.unc.edu/highlights/

[hosted at ibiblio.org]

Net Neutrality proposal from IP Geeks

Is there a place for fresh thinking and new recommendations in the infamous “network neutrality” debate?

Seth Johnson, David P Reed, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Pamela Samuelson, David Weinberger, Andy Oram and others [including me] have issued a new proposal on designed to “Preserve the Internet Standards for Net Neutrality.”

The authors point out that “IP-layer neutrality is not a property of the Internet. It _is_the Internet.” Then go on to say that “Providers certainly should be allowed to develop services within their own networks, treating data any way they want. But that’s not the Internet.”

Explanations are provided for CongressCriters, lawyers and lawmakers and human folks.

Tom Linden takes the State of Things

J-School collegue Dr. Tom Linden will be host of WUNC’s State of Things at the end of this week — Wednesday, Thursday and Friday June 21, 22 and 23. Tom says:

On Wednesday the topic will be the state of HIV/AIDS in North Carolina. Guests will include UNC infectious disease specialist Dr. Peter Leone; Justin Smith, project coordinator for STYLE (an HIV support group); and Evelyn Foust, director, STD /AIDS Prevention Program at the North Carolina Dept. of Public Health.

Thursday, we’ll talk with J. Peder Zane, book review editor for the News & Observer, about a survey he conducted with prominent North Carolina authors in which he asked them to name the most distinguished work of fiction in the past 25 years. His poll followed a similar one posed by the New York Times Book Review section. The contrasts in the two polls are striking.

Friday, we’ll focus on gardening with interviews with local experts. That segment will be followed by a discussion with John Biewen, audio programs director for the Center for Documentary Studies, and some of his students, about their ongoing work.

We’ll end with live music from Cities (Yep Roc Records), a local Chapel Hill band that just released its first album.

Dr Fun throws in the towell

Bye Dr Fun
Peeps, spam, microbes, chickens and more will be missed. Dr Fun’s creator and perpetrator, Dave Farley wrote last night to say that he had completed 10 years of the single panel comic and that he was done. I’ve loved Dr Fun of the 13 years it took Dave to get the 10 years done. I’ve always been delightfully surprised and amazed. There are stories behind the panels of course and having known Dave for over a decade I can understand his frustrations as well as his triumphs. All of Dr Fun will be still available on ibiblio.org forever or longer.
Dave is really a creative and weird (in the best sense) guy. I’ve never met him even though we’ve worked together since 1993. I’m looking forward to seeing what he’s up to next.

Note: Dr Fun is now on Slashdot.

BarCampRDU full up! Organizers needed

We have 150 folks signed up for BarCampRDU (way to go Fred!) — OpenNMS’s Tarus Balog is number 150 (oops one person dropped so Tarus is 149 — YOU can be lucky 150! Go sign up NOW!).

Fred has sent out a call for Organizers (5) and Volunteers (10) on the BarCampRDUBlog. If you are already signed up for BarCamp, read the Call and join the Organizers and/or Volunteers or even consider being a speaker by adding that to the Wiki.

BarCampRDU

Lyceum – Smallwood Press Release

The news is going out on the Smallwood gift to ibiblio and the Lyceum project. I actually said/wrote some of what I’m quoted as saying. Thanks to Kelly and Wanda and especially to the Smallwood folks and to the Lyceum developers — here at ibiblio that’s JJB, Fred and Jameson.

Lyceum—innovative software for blogging

By KELLY MURPHY and WANDA MONROE
UNC School of Information and Library Science

Chapel Hill – Great news for those who create or wish to create two or many thousands of blogs (Web logs) with just one installation! Staff and students of ibiblio, located in the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, are developing innovative blogging software that allows individual communication exchange as well as large and varied group communication.
A powerful Web publishing system, Lyceum builds on WordPress software and allows for ease of use while maintaining high performance and security.
Lyceum, the multi-blog WordPress derivative, may accommodate installations with two or 200,000 blogs. It is ideal for corporate intranets or universities that need secure, manageable, and high performance blogging services for thousands of users. It expands on the familiar features, interface and tools of WordPress for users and administrators.
“As the Internet has grown and evolved, it has become a place of collaboration, a forum for discussion and a medium used to exchange information at the click of a button,” said Paul Jones, director of ibiblio. “This growth is exemplified by the open source software, blogs and other communication tools being used every day on the Web. What better way to expand on enhancing these opportunities to share ideas and thoughts than to offer software to make it easy to create and install blogs?”
The emerging generation of Web tools is often described as Web 2.0. According to the O’Reilly Network, which spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazine, and conferences, the concept of Web 2.0 emerged during a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Web 2.0 is an emerging generation of Web tools and one of its components is “social software.” Among this new software are blogs, wikis, trackback, podcasting and videoblogs.
A gift of $25,000 was awarded to SILS to create a fellowship in open source. The fellowship will be used to continue the development of the Lyceum blogging system, which is open source. The funding provided by the Frances C. and William P. Smallwood Foundation, a grant-making foundation that promotes technology and education, will assist in refining the program and making it available to users around the world.
“The visionary gift from the Smallwood Foundation will allow us to take the next steps in innovation with Lyceum, that is to move the project from an early test state to software that can be widely used by a vibrant contributing community,” said Jones.
The $25,000 gift counts toward the university’s Carolina First Campaign goal of $2 billion. Carolina First is a comprehensive, multi-year, private fund-raising campaign to support Carolina’s vision of becoming the nation’s leading public university.
Home to one of the largest “collections of collections” on the Internet, ibiblio.org is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies. ibiblio.org is a collaboration of the Center for the Public Domain and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To access the collections of ibiblio, visit the Web site at: www.ibiblio.org
To test the Lyceum software, visit the “Lyceum Demo Installation” site at: http://demo.lyceum.ibiblio.org

In Ames, Iowa – Odyssey of the Mind and CAVE 6

Arrived to semi-hostile wireless access. The Cafe Diem has great access and it’s free and the coffee and veggie fare is great. The campus ISU is not ready to give access to just anyone. Odyssey of the Mind must ask they tell me. The library wasn’t much help either although I only chased that access via the Ask-a-librarian service.

But all is not lost. Thanks to David McConville, I’m hooking up with Steve Herrnstadt and heading for a trip in the C6 tomorrow!

3 Films: Alternative Freedom, Elephants Dream and An Inconvenient Truth

David McConville alerts us to two movies.

“Alternative Freedom” takes the Free Culture movement and documents it under a Creative Commons license (at least for their web site) and includes interviews with Larry Lessig, Richard Stallman, Danger Mouse and others.

“Elephant Dreams” web site has been SlashDotted, but then Slashdot describes the movie and it’s creation as the first “Open Movie” this way:

The 3D animated short ‘Elephants Dream’ will today be released as a free and public download. This is the final stage of a successfully completed Open Movie project which has been community-financed, using only Open Source tools, and opening up the movie itself as well as the entire studio database for everyone to re-use and learn from.

UPDATE: Wikinews has an interview with Ton Roosendaal

Davis Guggenheim, whose films “Teach” and “First Year” got our attention earlier on, is hitting it big with the Al Gore driven flick, “An Inconvenient Truth,” about global climate crisis and Gore’s passion to set things straight in the world. The site has a great theatre finder and the film is in wide release.

No Mo’ SoB?

Beeg Man
Ken returns from Disney World with possibly sad news: Many of the shops at the world famous South of the Border near Dillon, SC looked to be closed. Indeed, reports at various websites since the death of the founding SoB Alan Schafer in 2001 claim that the faux Mexican Mecca has gone to seed.

Frankly SoB was always teetering between magic and mistake. Schafer was constantly trying new shops and killing his losers. A sudden drop in the market price of mariachi dressed dried alligators could cause the entire redesign of a salesfloor to accommodate the wonderful bargins. A guy I once knew worked at one shop as a manager. He was saddled with barrels of odd sized leather purses that wouldn’t move no matter how much he dropped the price. Schafer stepped in personally and tripled the posted price, added a special sale sign in his imagined Mexican-English and put them by the door. Not only did the sales more than double, but so did the shoplifting. My informant insisted that Schafer wrote off the loses to his light fingered visitors at the new high price which gave him an additional large tax savings!

Of course, I don’t know how much of all of that is true, but the shear audacity of Schafer was for me the magic of the place. Not the tacky “heir conditioned” honeymoon suite which catered to folks eloping and to various military guests. Not the large collection of thin beach towels and corny t-shirts. Not the famously slow service in the restaurants or even the uneven, and occassionally very good, cooking. Not even the fabled Sombrero tower — itself a mix of Mexico and Paris in Eastern South Carolina. No, it was the totality of the place. Unfinished and constantly madly reimagined. And would you expect a place which features a Dirty Old Man Shop to attract anyone who isn’t at least seedy in part of their imagined life?

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