Slashdot had an article last week on how weather data is now available in XML format. While this has all sorts of fun applications, they also noted some cool svg stuff going on as well - including expected svg support in firefox coming around march 2005.

While cruising slashdot the other evening, I came upon a fascinating article depicting the rise of illiteracy in corporate America. While focusing largely on employees inability to compose coherent emails, the story is a great example of a need to encourage writing across the curriculum in class as well as elsewhere in student’s lives.

Over the years, I’ve encountered a number of different MySQL GUI apps, and this one seems as good as any I’ve seen (MySQL Front is also nice, but unfortunately is no longer free… phpMyAdmin is also handy, but is still a web app), and is open source (free as in free).

I still don’t use it all that much, preferring to run any necessary SQL from teh mysql prompt, but it’s handy to have around when you don’t want to take the time to look up that mysqldump syntax, or don’t have access to a prompt. Great tool if you are not as familiar with SQL.

I stumbled onto some very cool looking php classes while digging through some wordpress code the other night.

ezSQL Database Class “makes it ridiculously easy to use mySQL, Oracle8, Inerbase/Firebase, PostgreSQL, SQLite (PHP), SQLite (C++), MS-SQL database(s) within your PHP/C++ script”. I’m especially interested as it may well be an improvement over some of the classes I normally employ for this purpose.

EZ Results Paging Class let’s you build those paged search results you see at the bottom of google and so many other sites. I had been looking for one of these to implement that was easy to use and yet robust. It will be interesting to see how well this plugs into my projects!

Purpose: Create electronic slide viewer that is portable, flexible, allows for annotation of slides, and side-by-side layout of images.

Implementation/Tools: Flash interface (largely written in ActionScript 2.0) for end user (instructor presenting/students viewing), PHP/MySQL backend to create/organize individual presentations.

Features: Users can “Zoom in” on individual images; instructor can save a “snapshot” of the presentation and generate a zip file of it for download; images can be sub-titled; descriptive notes can be displayed; platform independent (requires only a browser and recent version of flash).

Last spring, Bill Mierse came to us looking for a way to enhance his Art History lectures - something which would allow him to do more than the traditional slide projector could. While he had been thinking about digitizing them somehow, he wasn’t sure how to go about it.

With assistance from students in the TechCATs program, we scanned in over 400 slides and uploaded them into CONTENTdm (a digital database/repository product recently purchased by UVM Libraries).

At the same time, we worked with Bill to develop presentation software with which he could build annotated slide shows for use in class, using the images in CONTENTdm. With a few clicks, he can publish these slide shows onto the course web site for the students to review.

We will soon be working with another faculty member who teaches the same course, but with a number of different images. With this software they can pool all of their images into CONTENTdm, and yet build personalized, annotated presentations that can be archived and displayed online. In addition to Art 005 (Bill’s course), other faculty members have also begun using CONTENTdm for their courses, which include Art 006, Art 196, and Art 172.

Well, I’ve been trying to keep these pages relatively up to date. As you can see, I’ve got wordpress plugging into the UVM Web Template - in fact, there’s a whole section that contains a fair amount of documentation on the subject.

I’m also trying to restructure the site a bit. The Tool Box is (I think) turning into an area for code snippets and other stuff that I use a lot - much of which I’ve either written or modified. The Cool Tools corner is where you can find some of the funky toys and apps I’m playing with or that sound interesting.

Well, it’s free… but it also happens to be a neat tool for measuring things on your screen, such as windows, images, icons, etc. If you do any graphic design, it is worth checking out.

This handy System Preferences module “show system logs, unix commands output, or images (i.e. from the internet) on your desktop“. I’ve got it printing out my ip address(es), and giving me a date/time stamp (saving me real estate on my menu bar).

Finally, a real text editor for os x that doesn’t “suck“, and isn’t prohibitively expensive. Quite an active development team to boot, with lots of interaction from the user community.

Yup. Apparently he’s a got a daytime talk TV show, with a cooking segment in which guest cooks come on and prepare a dish. Someone pointed me to the recipes section of his website the other day, which has all the dishes prepared on the show. Some of them sound pretty tasty, like “Eggplant, Sausage, and Ziti Casserole” for example…