I realized that after the Pachyderm development team has been talking about the Big Pachyderm 2.0 Demo today, that nobody outside of the project has seen this particular beast. You may have heard something, but a picture is worth a thousand words. Here’s a screenshot of the screen editor, which is basically a fancy schmancy web page form, with boxes to enter text, and widgets to select media and links. The particular screen type shown here is called “Variety of Media” - and it can handle images, video, and text (hence the Variety in its name).
I just got an email from my dad telling me about this cool new audio tool he found for making phone calls on the computer for free. Skype, he says, sounds pretty cool.
My dad is turning 70 this year, and really enjoys tinkering with his iMac. He’s got a (now aging) blueberry iMac, and it’s tricked out with extra RAM and MacOSX 10.3.
So, I just added him to my contacts list, and we played around a bit. I called him on Skype Out, and he was pretty impressed. I’m even more impressed that he’s able to find and use these things, and that he actually gets it. I hope I’m still doing new things when I’m 70… :-) (woah - just realized I’m just over half way there.. )
I’m heading to Vancouver a day early for Northern Voice. Planning on hanging around Vancouver a bit, maybe take in the BlogWalk, and relax with Brian (D.J. Wiki) Lamb. Should be fun.
I’ll either be blogging more often, or less. Not sure… Someone is likely to be blogging the conference, though… :-)
Crap. It’s official. So, I guess we’ll be turning back to our official national sport: lacrosse?
Come on guys… How much money is enough (for either side). It’s a freaking GAME, people. You’re getting/making millions of dollars to play a freaking GAME. Perspective might be a good thing…
If you’re going to be at WebWise 2005 in Washington DC, stop by and check out Larry Johnson demonstrating Pachyderm 2.0. The software isn’t quite done, but you’ll get a good idea of what Pachyderm 2 is, how to use it, and what it produces.
The next chance to see it outside of the Bat Caves will be at Museums and the Web 2005, in Vancouver (April 13-16 2005).
PS. I realize I’m taunting the Demo Gods. Hopefully they are forgiving… We’ve been paying our dues big time on this sucker…
Actually, I upgraded my WP installation when I saw that 1.5 was final (yesterday?) Looks like I borked something while updating, because it was impossible for people using IE on Windows to see my weblog without getting a scary security download warning. Oops. Sorry about that, folks!
(I think) I’ve fixed it now, with a fresh install. (delete all non-config files, upload fresh copy of WP, run upgrade.php)
It’s a really great group of people, from an amazingly varied group of institutions, working on some pretty cool stuff. The Summer Conference is always informative and energizing, and members are on the inside track on initiatives like Pachyderm and the like.
Membership isn’t free, but it won’t break the bank, either. And no, I don’t get commissions… Hmmm… I should check into that! :-)
Excellent. I’ve already subscribed to it in iCal, so it will sync onto my iPod calendar next time I drop it into the cradle. Handy way to keep track of the conference schedule…
Brian’s MovableType install blew up pretty badly last month, when the BerkeleyDB database that was serving as the back end basically crumbled under increasing spam crapflood attempts.
Thanks to the heroic efforts of Brian’s team (especially Ken Pratt and Michelle Chua), they were able to resurrect the misbehaving database and migrate it safely to MySQL. Now, it should perform much better, and be easier to backup and repair if needed. I’m hoping Ken can be persuaded to document the process he concocted to help save future victims of the same problem.
I just found an old friend in the Blogosphere. I worked with davidicus in a previous life, at a dot-com eLearning/LMS/content company that shall remain nameless. He’s now moved to LA, and is working for a Big Game Software Company. Coolness abounds.
Oh, and he’s been blogging for almost a year, and I only found it just now!
He’s a very interesting guy. Fun, challenging, intelligent and rare. The first time I went to San Francisco was with him, on a pilgrimage to the Mother Ship to peddle our wares. What a cool trip that was, staying at Grant Plaza (on the edge of Chinatown - it was a bit, well, dumpier when we were there. it’s been pretty radically renovated recently).
It will also let you link to just specific sections of audio (like, for instance, just the section about be babbling about folksonomies) using a built-in audio bookmarking tool. Very cool.
Looks like a pretty major limitation that it has to load the entire file rather than streaming it on demand, but that’s a limitation of webservers, not of QuotePlay.