I spent most the past 2 days working on the webcasting setups for the conference.  We will stream some 45 hours of video live over the web during the next three days.  Putting it all together is a big job.  I have great help at Duke from Todd, Wayne, and the rest of staff.

We're doing things a bit different this year.  We start with digital video, recorded to miniDV tape, fed to a workstation via firewire.  Windows Media Encoder 9 grabs the video and sound from the firewire input and encodes it at 15 fps.  Files are written to the hard drive and Encoder listens on a TCP port for requests from our Helix server in Chicago.  The Helix server pulls the stream from the Encoder only if a client requests it.  It works well.

11:58:11 PM    comment []  

MSN search bot a glimpse of ambitions. As it prepares its own algorithmic search engine, MSN quietly launches software that will index Web sites, a move that raises questions about MSN's deal with Yahoo unit Inktomi. [CNET News.com]

Scripting News posted a link to an info page on the MSNbot

So MSFT goes for Google.  The MSNbot is crawling the web now, but the results are not yet being used in production.

11:47:59 PM    comment []  

SCO Berates Linus' Approach To Kernel Contributions

SCO Berates Linus' Approach To Kernel Contributions

Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 18, @08:27AM
from the how's-that-dinosaur-ride dept.
Matthias_305 writes "The New York Times has an article about a new court document in which SCO critizes Linus Torvalds touting the 'inability and/or unwillingness of the Linux process manager, Linus Torvalds, to identify the intellectual property origins of contributed source code.' They claim to have got evidence from a conversation on the kernel mailing list in which Torvalds advocates programmers shouldn't care about patents. According to the article he stands by his view which is at least 'candid'." On a related note, BobDowling points to a proposal at The Inquirer ("Shutting down SCO's FUD machine") regarding SCO's claims. "SCO won't let people see the contested source code without signing an outrageous NDA but the article gives a mechanism for publishing appropriate MD5 checksums which allow code trees to be compared without anyone else seeing the code. This is offered as a means to locate the source of SCO's contested code. ... This mechanism gives a concrete procedure that SCO can be challenged to follow as part of the community's "put up or shut up" response. There would be no threat to SCO's claimed IPR."

[Slashdot]

10:33:09 PM    comment []  

Law School Fantasy Draft. UVA Law has set up a new system for 2Ls and 3Ls to choose their classes, and it's eerily similar to a fantasy draft: In round one, third-year students will submit a prioritized list of courses ("Add Requests") to enroll... [Unlearned Hand]

This points out the problem with building systems for law schools.  Things like admissions, career services, and class registration seem straight forward from a pure information point of view, but the problem is the 'local, local rules'.  When you look close each school does funky things with weighting, lotteries, etc. that make it a case of mass customization in a tiny market (less than 200 schools).  If only there were standards.

10:27:11 PM    comment []  

For the reader on your shopping list who has everything... or at least almost everything. 

6:36:09 AM    comment []