Collaborative Tools Project

Following a short presentation about online apps we're looking at at York, Michael Charno got in touch and said.. The following are apps that we use at the Archaeology Data Service: * Asana [ https://asana.com/ ]: Its a really simple task management app that enables task allocation, commenting, prioritising, creating deadlines, etc. Its free for use amongst 10 colleagues, so we've been fine with it so far. * New Relic [ http://newrelic.com/ ]: Systems analytics software for understanding where problems exist in servers/web applications/interfaces. Obviously more useful for people managing servers or web applications, so might not be widely useful. However if the university was going to get a license we'd happily join in! * Slack [ https://slack.com/ ]: We used the free version but quit after we found ourselves moving to the 10,000 message limit quickly and didn't want to purchase a license. We haven't replaced it, but would certainly start using it again if the un...

So after a lot of experimentation, I decided that WebGL was a good way to go ( see an earlier post  about automatically showing videos on a 3D models walls). I took the video example and simply hacked around, watching where objects move to when I changed values, and then added extra objects, in this case walls. And it worked! Which is pretty impressive ( I think ) for someone who knows nothing about 3D programming. Here is a live version showing music I loved from the 70s .

Yesterday was fun. Sara Perry is planning to use the amazing 3 sixty space in The Hub on Heslington East for a module on museum exhibition design. The 3 sixty is a room in which you can display images on all four walls and play audio. It's quite a big space as you can see. If Sara is 5'10" how big do you reckon that wall is? Anyone? So, before heading off there, with only a lunch break to spare I decided to get a better idea of what it could do. I downloaded the PowerPoint template file that you can use to create the content that you might display.  I decided, like a megalomanic to see if I could make a room that was filled with my head in a really, nightmareish and ominous way. So I used the built in camera on my laptop to video myself, slowed it down, added effects and some audio from Sunn O))) and put the videos I made into the Powerpoint. The video was like this... ( play them both at the same time )... as is meant to be displayed on opposite walls. ...

I've been thinking ( again ) about RSS readers, what they are, what they are for, where ( if anywhere ) they're going next and lastly, how I might maybe make my own ( on the cheap ) . What is an RSS reader anyway? Avoiding the technical specification of what RSS is... it is just a way of collecting explicit subscriptions to news from various sites. It is markedly NOT email. Along the way, RSS forgot, or were told to forget, they were also aggregators. Aggregators were cousins of RSS readers in that they collected lots of news together and re-published it, normally as a web page. In the olden days ( 2005ish ) there were lots of aggregators. There were tools to make your own aggregators and aggregators were important, in my opinion because they did the hard curatorial work or selecting related news sources and making them available, normally in a format you could subscribe to. As more and more people came online, producing news, consuming news, many aggregators - who wer...

My eye caught the City of York Council announcing that they publish all the "Freedom of Information" requests as PDFs ( here ). The sharp-eyed amongst you will spot that the requests are organised by weeks. Each week's requests are stored in a PDF for that week. Each PDF would need clicking through to that week, then clicking through to that page and then downloading separately (using the handy "Download Now" link ) and then reading. The search engine is pretty hopeless and can't just return FOI requests and so gives you hundreds of results for any query. Organising FOI requests by week is completely ridiculous, almost as ridiculous as ordering them by the number of words used or alphabetically. Now of course it probably makes sense from the point of view of compiling the requests - it sounds like a "once a week" job for somebody, but to then publish them once a week seems madness. One of my pet hates is information that is made available ...

I noticed something on Twitter about the University's Festival of Ideas and thought I'd take a look at the events listing . Not long ago, the Web Office used to put microformat information in web pages so that I could easily add events to my calendar... Either they've stopped doing that, or it's stopped working, so I thought how easy would it be to grab the events listed and add them to my (or a separate calendar). In order to do this, I'd need to... Scrape the HTML from the web page and find the event data Connect to Google Calendar and add the events found Because I like programming in python, the first thing I did was to go get the latest copy of  BeautifulSoup , which is a library that is unbelievably handy for scraping data out of HTML and also Google GData  which lets me talk to Google Calendar. I so I began... import urllib, urlparse, gdata, time, datetime from bs4 import BeautifulSoup import atom import gdata.calendar import gdata.calen...