SWFTOOLS – Utilities for Having Fun With SWFs

Thanks to John for pointing this out. A number of interesting things here, including generating a SWF from a WAV file. Nothing that directly converts PPT though:)

SWFTOOLS
SWF Tools is a collection of SWF manipulation and creation utilities written by Rainer Böhme and Matthias Kramm. It is released under the GPL.

NYT Article on the Collapse of the Educational Software Market

Once a Booming Market, Educational Software for the PC Takes a Nose Dive – New York Times
In 2000, sales of educational software for home computers reached $498 million, and it was conventional wisdom among investors and educators that learning programs for PC’s would be a booming growth market.

Yet in less than five years, that entire market has come undone. By 2004, sales of educational software – a category that includes programs teaching math, reading and other subjects as well as reference works like encyclopedias – had plummeted to $152 million, according to the NPD Group, a market research concern.

Law Lists Is No More

I remember Law Lists, put out by Lyonette Louis-Jacques, now at the U of Chicago Law School Library. Sad to see it go, but then I also remember when there was a list of all the known websites in the world…

BoleyBlogs!

RSS 3.0 Lite?

First Atom, now this. Quite the exciting week in feed land. Maybe I’ll write up a spec over the weekend, something like RSS 2/3.1. I wonder how to get Eweek to report it as if it were news? Anyway, I wonder what Dave will have to say?

Lightweight Version of RSS Released
Shouldering past the community fear and loathing over Microsoft’s supposed plans to co-opt and rename its first implementation of the Web publishing technology, RSS editor Jonathan Avidan released a third, fully XML version of RSS for review and comment on Thursday.

The RSS (Really Simply Syndication) 3 specification aims to fix perceived problems of inadequate documentation and “lack of concern towards modern necessities” in RSS 2.0.

MySQL’s MaxDB: If You Need A ‘Real’ DB

freshmeat.net: Project details for MaxDB by MySQL
MaxDB is a re-branded and enhanced version of SAP DB, SAP AG’s open source database. It is a heavy-duty, SAP-certified open source database that offers high availability, scalability and a comprehensive feature set. MaxDB complements the MySQL database server, targeted for large mySAP ERP environments and other applications that require maximum enterprise-level database functionality. It is available for a wide range of platforms, including Linux on several different architectures and Windows.

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