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Friday, February 16, 2007 |
Over 27% of Firefox Patches Come from Volunteers. dolphinling writes "Everyone is aware that the Mozilla Corporation makes some money, and employs some people now. Google has full-time employees working on Firefox too, as do a number of other places. Yet despite that, in the six months up to Firefox 2 some 27% of the patches to Firefox were submitted by key volunteers, and those patches represent 24% of changes made to the source code. What's more, those numbers only counted contributers with 50 patches or more, so the actual numbers are probably quite a bit higher. It's good to see that even as Mozilla does so well in the business world, it can still keep its ties to the community so strong." They were running these number to find out who they need to start offering support to. So: contribute to Firefox, and you know you'll get a hand up. Nice work, folks.[Slashdot]
6:45:20 PM  Google It!.
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Apple TV to be a Centrally Controlled P2P Network?. Rolgar writes "PBS' Bob Cringely theorizes that since the Apple TV will be an always-on device with a 40GB hard drive, Apple may move to content distribution via a P2P network. The ISPs will incur higher bandwidth locally, possibly lose some subscribers to cable TV, but have fewer costs through the Tier II Internet backbone providers. Bob also expects that Google will be involved with their fiber network and advertising expertise, and my hope is that they'll bundle in YouTube content as well. The article suspects that they won't get around to announcing the full details of this plan until they hit a half million units or more, and that this Apple and Google pairing will become the equivalent of a cable TV provider with almost none of the infrastructure costs. Eventually, he hopes, we'll see a real HD revolution from Apple and Google for this service." If Apple rolled something like this out to the service, would you bite on it? What would it take you to move to this over Tivo or MythTV?[Slashdot]
6:40:19 PM Google It!.
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PMD Applied. Simon P. Chappell writes "It's a fundamentally agreed fact within our industry that code reviews are good. Really good. Sliced bread good. But have you actually tried organizing one? If you can get everyone together that needs to be there at the same time in the same meeting room, then you still have the challenge of trying to keep a roomful of geeks from getting trapped in minutiae and squabbling over details like formatting conventions. Well, what if I told you that you could get your code reviews done in less than five minutes and that there would be no arguing? Enter PMD, an open-source Java static analyzer. Think of it as a code review in a box. As if that weren't wonderful enough, there's even a book, PMD Applied, written by Tom Copeland, the author of PMD." Read on for the rest of Simon's review.[Slashdot]
6:38:11 PM Google It!.
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Bionic Eye Could Restore Vision. MattSparkes writes "A new bionic eye could restore vision to the profoundly blind. A prototype was tested on six patients and 'within a few weeks all could detect light, identify objects and even perceive motion again. For one patient, this was the first time he had seen anything in half a century.' The user wears a pair of glasses that contain a miniature camera and that wirelessly transmits video to a cellphone-sized computer in the wearer's pocket. This computer processes the image information and wirelessly transmits it to a tiny electronic receiver implanted in the wearer's head." [Slashdot]
6:34:39 PM Google It!.
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Montastic - Free Website Monitoring Service. http://www.montastic.com/
I am responsible for a few web servers in addition to this blog, but in all of these cases they are servers that I don[base ']t own or have root access to (nor any particular pull with the sys admins). For a while we kept having server outtages on one of them that would go unnoticed both by me and the sys admins until it was too late and users would get effected. So I started looking for a site monitoring service that didn[base ']t require a software install nor the cooperation of any sys admins, and a few months ago came across this one, Montastic . It is very straightforward - after creating an account based on your email address, you simply give it a website and address and [sigma] that[base ']s it. It will send you notifications either by email, RSS or [OE]widget[base '] if that server stops responding so you can start appropriate actions. Perfect for your average instructor or blogger who does not necessarily have control over their server environment and yet feels responsible for the quality of their users[base '] experience. In an ideal world this is a service any web host should be able to offer you by default, active notification of server outtages, but until then, this is worth a try. - SWL
Tags: blogs server [EdTechPost]
6:19:52 PM Google It!.
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Martin Weller on Tony Hirst[base ']s Stringle. http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2007/02/stringle_almost.html and http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/stringle2.php
Martin Weller and Tony Hirst have joined Marc Eisenstadt as bloggers from the UK[base ']s Open University whose posts I now eagerly await, so it[base ']s a distinct pleasure to find Martin posting about Tony[base ']s project, Stringle.
I can almost hear the chorus now about how [base "]a PLE is not an application[per thou] and yes, but whatever. Tony has assembled a really useful demonstration of how, using feeds, services like grazer and OPML manager and many of the free web 2.0 applications out there (this demonstration uses Google docs, PBWiki, ELGG and Gliffy to name a few), a fairly comprehensive environment can be aggregated together for learners. I don[base ']t think this precludes all of the great learning resources out on the open web at all, in fact it rather welcomes them, and tools and services like Dappit, OpenKapow and ScreenScrapper are now making it easy for anyone to create RSS feeds for web content where previously there were none. It[base ']s not hard for me to see how with something like OpenID implemented on many of these services all of a sudden you can have your safe password protected areas for student work and eat your open web 2.0 cake too. Take some time and play around with what Tony has assembled and see if it doesn[base ']t jog your imagination. Is it going to replace your CMS tomorrow. Probably not if you are wedded to how that[base ']s working for you. But darn if it doesn[base ']t beckon to a day when making use of a new Web 2,0 app in your course in a way that works for you, for students AND your administration isn[base ']t as easy as [sigma] rip, mix, feed. - SWL
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Tags: CMS VLE [EdTechPost]
6:18:18 PM Google It!.
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My search is over - Yahoo Pipe to constrain search to linked to pages. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/zhmqsw_52xG4gUz8e_gC8A/
Wouldn[base ']t you know it, a few seconds after I finish commenting on Tony Hirst[base ']s blog that my personal quest has been a way to dynamically constrain a search to only those pages linked on any webpage, I actually read the entire post and learn that he had already done this! A simultaneous [OE]Doh![base '] and [OE]Hooray![base ']
From a usability perspective what I[base ']ve always wanted to see was this as a bookmarklet that passes the link the URL from whatever link containing page you[base ']re on, so I[base ']ll look into that, but Tony has demonstrated how this is seemingly quite straightforward with Yahoo Pipes.
Why is this important to me? Think of all of the collections of links out there, people who have painstakingly vetted links on a particular subject, collected only those they felt were important. With one click you can search just those linked sites. It can definitely be argued that this always runs the risk of missing stuff outside of those constrianed sites, but there[base ']s times when limiting the context is useful and important. - SWL
Tags: constrained search, google, mashup pipes [EdTechPost] -- nice way to handle information overload and reputation at the same time --BL
6:16:52 PM Google It!.
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© Copyright 2007 Bruce Landon.
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