Blogging beyond the web! Make your own media/podcasts! It's truely exciting stuff!
Recently I inquired about recieving a fm transmitter from "Broadcast Your Podcast" via Audioactivism.org so that I could possibly give a platform for friends and community to say something about their country, recent happenings, or their own music. I really am excited about the potential for use and the empowerment of creating your own broadcasts from your computer and bringing them to people driving by tuning in!
How it basically works is you get this FM transmitter that you attach to your computer and tune it to a specific frequency...(an unused one, I imagine, at the top or bottom of your of the spectrum like 89.1 or 106.7) then you just start playing your media! Whomever tunes their radio station to your preset frequency will be able to hear what you have to say.
After I have tinker with it and learn how to make them on my own, I hope to provide them for free to anyone who wants one and will use it. When I recieve mine (via the generosity of Lotte Meijer of Broadcast Your Podcast), I will be posting more on how I use it, the range, etc.
Saturday, April 29, 2006
My favorite professor dies :(
From UNC Pembroke Newswire:
A professor emeritus in the Department of Chemistry and Physics, Reissner died Saturday, April 15, 2006. Dr. Reissner, 64, lived in Wilmington, N.C., and in Lumberton for many years. He joined the UNCP faculty in 1976 and continued to teach in the phased retirement program until his death.
Dr. Reissner was born in Boston, Mass., on December 3, 1941, and was the son of the late M. Eric and Johanna Siegel Reissner. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California at San Diego.
I think we all owe a lot to the people that helped shape us who we are today. Saying that, I owe a lot to Dr. Reissner, who captured my imagination and turned it into something.
He was very math oriented, which I was not. Thought about the universe in very wierd ways, which I did not...until he taught me.
He taught me that math is fun in biophysics and that physics is fun in quantum mechanics, two subjects notorious for their difficulty and comprehension. But he championed my motivation and built my confidence!
If anyone knew whether or not Schrodinger's Cat was alive, Dr. Reissner certainly had a good idea.
Thank you Dr. Reissner for the knowledge and thank you for your friendship!
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Random screen shots of some cms's
Just a clean shot of my desktop
(background is a drop of water getting ready to penetrate through surface tension)
Mambo run site with clean template and pretty flower
Drupal Based Civic Space
Drupal Based Civic Space
Joomla/Mambo, Drupal - CMS heaven!
Well, I'm proud to say that I've come a long way from when I started to seriously convert from MS Windows to Linux. I have arrived to a point where I can effectively update/install/remove packages with yum and synaptic using the command line :D...while also compiling from source(this is where I brag some more) and I can install and do basic configurations for Apache, MySQL, and PHP using vi, gedit...whatever text program. So fun, so fun....and sooooo much light with my new LAMP.
I am really excited, and I should be, because there are so many mature open source content managment systems (CMS) available. Most recently I have been testing out Drupal and Joomla. I am pretty happy with both, but more excited about Drupal and it's fork, civicspace (well, not sure if a fork, but based off of drupal) because of its social-activismish preference.
Both Drupal and Joomla are pretty simple to install and use. (both take advantage of a web autoinstaller) Drupal is a little more complex, but I think because it's more robust of a CMS than Joomla.
Civicspace, derived from Drupal and causing a stir in grassroots campaigning via Howard Dean during the presidential race, comes bundled with some really powerful components like CiviCRM, CiviContribute and an Event & Calendar system which really rocks. This totally blew me away. To think (I am still absorbing how gracious I am to have linux for FREE) that CiviCRM and CiviContribute are free, not to mention the CMS itself....!!! It's hard for me to imagine how much it would be if I were to purchase proprietary software that did the same, literally thousands of dollars!
CiviCRM would equate to what many businesses call their sales database to which many solely rely for survival! I would love to become an expert in implementing this so that nonprofits could harness its power and ability!
I've been excited a lot more lately in large part to my fanatical reading and tinkering with open source softwares.
I have a test site up online HERE using mambo CMS. (I hope to make live a Civicspace or Drupal based site in the near future) Feel free to try it out!
Oh yeah, and while we are talking about my new test site for mambo, I wanted to mention that the site hosts for free with no ads, 1 MySQL database and lots of resonable space and traffic quotas. Check it out if you wanna create your own CMS and put it online all for free!!!
I am really excited, and I should be, because there are so many mature open source content managment systems (CMS) available. Most recently I have been testing out Drupal and Joomla. I am pretty happy with both, but more excited about Drupal and it's fork, civicspace (well, not sure if a fork, but based off of drupal) because of its social-activismish preference.
Both Drupal and Joomla are pretty simple to install and use. (both take advantage of a web autoinstaller) Drupal is a little more complex, but I think because it's more robust of a CMS than Joomla.
Civicspace, derived from Drupal and causing a stir in grassroots campaigning via Howard Dean during the presidential race, comes bundled with some really powerful components like CiviCRM, CiviContribute and an Event & Calendar system which really rocks. This totally blew me away. To think (I am still absorbing how gracious I am to have linux for FREE) that CiviCRM and CiviContribute are free, not to mention the CMS itself....!!! It's hard for me to imagine how much it would be if I were to purchase proprietary software that did the same, literally thousands of dollars!
CiviCRM would equate to what many businesses call their sales database to which many solely rely for survival! I would love to become an expert in implementing this so that nonprofits could harness its power and ability!
I've been excited a lot more lately in large part to my fanatical reading and tinkering with open source softwares.
I have a test site up online HERE using mambo CMS. (I hope to make live a Civicspace or Drupal based site in the near future) Feel free to try it out!
Oh yeah, and while we are talking about my new test site for mambo, I wanted to mention that the site hosts for free with no ads, 1 MySQL database and lots of resonable space and traffic quotas. Check it out if you wanna create your own CMS and put it online all for free!!!
Not a Development Coordinator, but an Environmental Educator!
So, well, I jumped the gun when I announced my employment with the Boys & Girls Club. Although it would have been fun to raise money, manage donors, etc...it just wasn't the right fit for me in the end, so I decided on another, more my area kind of job....
drumroll.....dun du dunnnnnn...
I will be an Environmental Educator with the Sound to Sea program at the Trinity Center in Salter Path, NC. Yaaayyy!!!
I am really excited and look forward to teaching children about our environment!!
I am also looking forward to:
- Living right on the beach!
- Free housing and meals at a retreat center
- Learning from my co-worker's world economic development experience
- Helping to create online games for environmental education
- Becoming a better steward to the environment
- Being close to my parents
- Being able to surf more and more
Opportunities abound for interaction, personal development, and having fun with children!
And as you can clearly see, this place is beautiful!
These pictures were pulled from the Trinity Center Website (I really had to show them to ya'll).
Oh yeah, and just because I will be teaching about the environment, doesn't mean I will not be enhancing my 'geek' status!! Stay tuned!
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Penguins are my friend! Part I
Probably about a month ago from this writing I was explaining how I was beginning in my path down Open Source, a revelation from my previous job.
Well, now I am in! Actually I took a head first dive.
(this post may be longer than usual)
Saying that, let me tell you all what I did, give you some specs, and tell you some hardships.
Here is my physical computer details:
Dell Dimension L667
Pentium III 664 MHz
120GB hard drive
RAM 512MB
(pretty standard computer, with necessary components 'ex. integrated ethernet, VGA monitor, etc.)
Operating Systems
Now this is where I get a little overkill, but I truely wanted to see which linux distribution to use based on its flexibility, beginner usability, and documentation-support.
My father bought me VMware Workstation 5 for my Windows XP (thanks dad), but I also created a dual boot using GRUB (Grand Unified Bootloader).
VMware made it a breeze to configure settings like how much RAM usage to allocate, hard disk space, audio, ethernet, all with a simple gui (graphical user interface). What is also nice is that since I do not have a cd burner, I didnt have to get someone to burn me cd's of the images for the different distributions because you can set the path to where the 'iso' is located on your host operating system (OS) I will like to mention that Ubuntu sends FREE, and yes I said FREE, cd's to anyone who asks, which I also have 4 sets. They ship in attractive packaging and contain the live CD (to run from your cd drive) and a 1 disk installation cd.
So, with the ease of VMware, I proceeded to install Fedora Core 4, Ubuntu Breezy Badger, Gentoo, and Mandrake based on some internet reviews and recommendations from friends, familiy, and IT professionals.
For each OS, I allocated 10GB of space and pretty much used the default config for each. One really tricky thing did not have anything to do with the installation, but actually getting the VMware tools installed on each system because I have an older video card so my screens (after the install) were 640X480 and not rendering properly. Compounding that it was hard to view the screens and my beginner status, it was very difficult realizing that I couldn't just double click on something and have it install it. In Fedora, I had to use the rpm and Debian based, I had to unpack and compile using the tarball file. After installation of the VMware tools, however, everything worked smoothly.
The dual boot was easier than I thought! When you install MS Windows, it takes up the whole hard drive, so you have to shrink it. After reading some, and installing Mandrake Linux, I discovered that Mandrake has a nice gui utility that lets you graphically shrink the windows partition. So I did that, then installed Fedora Core 4, removing all other linux partitions. This worked well and fast.
After testing out each OS, I dropped Mandrake and Gentoo for now, and concentrated on Fedora Core 4 and Ubuntu Breezy Badger because after using them all, they seemed the easiest to use and have the largest base of support forums and tutorials. My father is also Red Hat certified, so my choice of Fedora might be a little biased since I have on-demand support whenever.
Books
Seeing this as a long-term investment, I also bought some books for reference as well as guides to aid me. I will note though that you can also find everything in these books somewhere online for free; it just takes some looking and printing if you want to read while you are away from a computer.
I am also a big fan of O'reilly books because they seem really easy to understand and provide lots of content.
I bought (keeping in mind my desire to use a lamp architecture):
Running Linux 5th ed.
Linux in a Nutshell 5th ed.
MYSQL in a Nutshell
Information Dashboard Design
Apache: The Definitive Guide
Web Service Essentials
Learning PHP5
A long list, I know, but they have already helped me so much.
Well, now I am in! Actually I took a head first dive.
(this post may be longer than usual)
Saying that, let me tell you all what I did, give you some specs, and tell you some hardships.
Here is my physical computer details:
Dell Dimension L667
Pentium III 664 MHz
120GB hard drive
RAM 512MB
(pretty standard computer, with necessary components 'ex. integrated ethernet, VGA monitor, etc.)
Operating Systems
Now this is where I get a little overkill, but I truely wanted to see which linux distribution to use based on its flexibility, beginner usability, and documentation-support.
My father bought me VMware Workstation 5 for my Windows XP (thanks dad), but I also created a dual boot using GRUB (Grand Unified Bootloader).
VMware made it a breeze to configure settings like how much RAM usage to allocate, hard disk space, audio, ethernet, all with a simple gui (graphical user interface). What is also nice is that since I do not have a cd burner, I didnt have to get someone to burn me cd's of the images for the different distributions because you can set the path to where the 'iso' is located on your host operating system (OS) I will like to mention that Ubuntu sends FREE, and yes I said FREE, cd's to anyone who asks, which I also have 4 sets. They ship in attractive packaging and contain the live CD (to run from your cd drive) and a 1 disk installation cd.
So, with the ease of VMware, I proceeded to install Fedora Core 4, Ubuntu Breezy Badger, Gentoo, and Mandrake based on some internet reviews and recommendations from friends, familiy, and IT professionals.
For each OS, I allocated 10GB of space and pretty much used the default config for each. One really tricky thing did not have anything to do with the installation, but actually getting the VMware tools installed on each system because I have an older video card so my screens (after the install) were 640X480 and not rendering properly. Compounding that it was hard to view the screens and my beginner status, it was very difficult realizing that I couldn't just double click on something and have it install it. In Fedora, I had to use the rpm and Debian based, I had to unpack and compile using the tarball file. After installation of the VMware tools, however, everything worked smoothly.
The dual boot was easier than I thought! When you install MS Windows, it takes up the whole hard drive, so you have to shrink it. After reading some, and installing Mandrake Linux, I discovered that Mandrake has a nice gui utility that lets you graphically shrink the windows partition. So I did that, then installed Fedora Core 4, removing all other linux partitions. This worked well and fast.
After testing out each OS, I dropped Mandrake and Gentoo for now, and concentrated on Fedora Core 4 and Ubuntu Breezy Badger because after using them all, they seemed the easiest to use and have the largest base of support forums and tutorials. My father is also Red Hat certified, so my choice of Fedora might be a little biased since I have on-demand support whenever.
Books
Seeing this as a long-term investment, I also bought some books for reference as well as guides to aid me. I will note though that you can also find everything in these books somewhere online for free; it just takes some looking and printing if you want to read while you are away from a computer.
I am also a big fan of O'reilly books because they seem really easy to understand and provide lots of content.
I bought (keeping in mind my desire to use a lamp architecture):
Running Linux 5th ed.
Linux in a Nutshell 5th ed.
MYSQL in a Nutshell
Information Dashboard Design
Apache: The Definitive Guide
Web Service Essentials
Learning PHP5
A long list, I know, but they have already helped me so much.
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