phpSurveyor
“PHP Surveyor is a set of PHP scripts that interact with MySQL to develop surveys, publish surveys and collect responses to surveys. Once a survey has been created it can be published as an online survey (displayed as single questions, group by group or all in one page) or you can use a dataentry system for administration of paper-based versions of the survey. PHP Surveyor can produced ‘branching’ surveys (set conditions on whether individual questions will display), can vary the look and feel of your survey through a templating system, and can provide basic statistical analysis of your survey results.“
SkypeIn, Other Features Announced
Skype for Windows Windows Version 1.2 Delivers User-Requested Portability and Personalization Enhancements
“Skype, the Global Internet Telephony Company, today announced the public beta launch of SkypeIn and Skype Voicemail, two new premium services available in the latest download versions of Skype software for Linux, MAC OS X, Pocket PC and Windows platforms. SkypeIn provides an affordable, flexible alternative to costly mobile phone roaming charges with SkypeIn personal numbers. SkypeIn customers can receive inbound calls to their Skype client from ordinary fixed telephones or mobile phones while they travel worldwide, providing seamless interconnectivity without having to pay costly roaming charges. Skype Voicemail enables users to manage incoming voicemail messages, making their Skype usage more ubiquitous.“
Chaos: Linux Distro for Instant Clustering
Wired News: Linux Distribution Tames Chaos
“Chaos, a Linux distribution developed by Australian Ian Latter, harnesses the unused processing power of networked PCs, creating a distributed supercomputer that can crack passwords at lightning speed.The program remotely boots Linux on a PC without touching the hard drive, leaving the “slave” PC’s operating system and data secure and untouched. Thirty PCs connected as a cluster create enough processing power to complete complex mathematical equations or high-level security tasks like password cracking that no individual PC could handle alone.“
Acrophobia: A Networked PDF Soft Printer
“Acrophobia is a Linux-based network PDF printer. Acrophobia appears as a standard network printer. Any jobs printed to the Acrophobia ‘printer’ are converted to PDF and sent via e-mail back to the originating user.Acrophobia is a project of the Open Source Software Peer Group of the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA – formerly LawNet) , an association of legal technology professionals. This project was created in order to demonstrate the usefulness of open source technology within the law-firm environment.“
ILTA is like teknoids for law firm/department technology types. There are things to learn here…
Swishd Cluster System: Distributed Doc Indexing
freshmeat.net: Project details for Swishd Cluster System
“Swishd cluster system is an application that will allow swish- e to scale to multiple machines, thus allowing the number of indexes (or collections) to become almost limitless. By scaling out to multiple swishd nodes the index sizes can remain small as the number of documents increase. This it typically measured in millions of documents/files.“
Open-Xchange Server 5 Released
Open-Xchange Server 5 Blends Proprietary, Open-Source Perks
“Netline Internet Service, of Olpe, Germany, has released Open-Xchange Server 5, which lets IT administrators create and implement applications without having to changing their existing infrastructure components such as databases, directory services, message transfer agents, e-mail servers or Web servers.“
VMware 5.0 Released
VMware Updates Desktop Virtualization Software
The new Teams feature, for example, “allows you to set up multiple virtual machine ‘developer classes’ and connect them together so you have an entire multitiered configuration running on one physical machine,” said Srinivas Krishnamurti, senior product manager at Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware Inc.< /blockquote>
RSDP – Really Simple Database Protocol
O’Reilly Network: RSDP: A Really Simple Proposal
“Most of what we use databases for, we can accomplish with XML-RPC and SQL. So why not define a simple XML-RPC interface (Really Simple Database Protocol, or RSDP), that allows applications to communicate with SQL databases without the need for troublesome external packages and middleware? People are already doing this with in-house projects, so all that is needed is for a couple of vendors to build simple XML-RPC front ends to existing systems.“
Sounds like a good idea, but I can already accomplish something pretty close to this with PHP and XML-RPC, I don’t think I need another layer.
Edukalibre Collab Moodle
freshmeat.net: Project details for Edukalibre Collab Moodle
“Edukalibre Collab Moodle is a Web interface to the Edukalibre Repository Manager, a system to create collaborative educational material with additional functionality such as automatic conversion of documents, history of documents, etc. This interface allows users to perform the most common tasks over the system using a Web browser. Some examples are the ability to upload or update a document, review the history of a document, or view the converted formats, etc.“
Using Skype For Recorded Phone Interviews
DDN Articles – Using Skype as a Community Media Production Tool
The article doesn’t pursue this to the end I can see: podcasting. You can use Skype to record interviews and then post those to a blog, getting your own podcast going. I’m developing this sort of thing using open source tools.