Month: March 2013

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Videos from Open Database Camp

By Sheeri K. Cabral, Planet MySQL – March 25, 2013 at 11:18AM

Open Database Camp was just over a week ago, Mar 16-17th at Harvard University, co-located with Northeast LinuxFest. We had a great lineup of speakers, and we have processed all 11 videos in record time! We got new video cameras at the beginning of the year, so the video quality and resolution is stellar, you can see everything. Here are the videos:

2013 Open Database Camp
and Related Northeast LinuxFest Videos

Enjoy!

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Original Apollo 11 CBS News broadcast

By Jason Kottke, kottke.org – July 20, 2010 at 01:04PM

I had so much fun with this last year, I’m doing it again: watch the original CBS News coverage of the Apollo 11 Moon landing and first Moon walk, reported live by Walter Cronkite exactly 41 years after it happened.

Apollo 11 on TV

Just leave this page open in your browser and at the appointed times (schedule is below), the broadcast will begin (no manual page refresh necessary).

Schedule:
Moon landing broacast start: 4:10:30 pm EDT on July 20
Moon landing shown: 4:17:40 pm EDT
Moon landing broadcast end: 4:20:15 pm EDT
…
Moon walk broadcast start: 10:51:27 pm EDT
First step on Moon: 10:56:15 pm EDT
Nixon speaks to the Eagle crew: approx 11:51:30 pm EDT
Moon walk broadcast end: 12:00:30 am EDT on July 21

If you’ve never seen this coverage, I urge you to watch at least the landing segment (~10 min.) and the first 10-20 minutes of the Moon walk. I hope that with the old time TV display and poor YouTube quality, you get a small sense of how someone 40 years ago might have experienced it.

Please note that schedule times are approximate, based on your computer’s clock, and that the syncing of the videos might not be perfect. You need to have JS and Flash 8+ to view. This is just like real TV…if you miss the appointed time, there’s no rewind or anything…the video is playing “live”. I have not done extensive browser testing so it may not work perfectly in your browser. If you run into any problems, just reload the page. Thanks for tuning in.

Tags: Apollo   Apollo 11   Moon   space   TV   Walter Cronkite

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TechCrunch Review: The Blekko Search Engine Prepares To Launch

By Michael Arrington, TechCrunch – July 19, 2010 at 06:11PM

It takes a crazier than average entrepreneur to go after the search market. There’s an entrenched player, Google, with 65% market share. Google is so powerful the second player, Yahoo, just bailed out of the market. And third place Microsoft is throwing billions of dollars around just to get in the game.

We’ve seen Wikia, Cuil and other well backed startups try and fail at search. Now Blekko is preparing to launch. Will they find success where everyone else has failed?

They’ve been working on Blekko for 2.5 years now – we first covered them in January 2008. Cofounder and CEO Rich Skrenta had just left his previous company, Topix. Blekko has raised three rounds of financing since then, totaling $20 million, from some of the most respected angel and venture investors in Silicon Valley.

Blekko remain in private alpha, although I’ve had the chance to test the engine over the last few days. They will shortly begin letting a few beta testers onto the site, and a full launch will happen later this summer.

What Makes Blekko Different?

Blekko is a full web search engine, with regular crawls of billions of web pages. But they know that they can’t beat Google at size of index, relevancy and speed right out of the gate. So they’re differentiating themselves in another way – by giving users tools to do new types of searches that they can’t do elsewhere. And by providing an unprecedented level of access to the algorithms and data that Blekko uses to determine relevancy.

That doesn’t mean Blekko’s relevancy isn’t great. The company says they’re on par with Google and Bing for most queries. But the differentiating feature are the query refinement tools they call Slashtags. These tools, like /news or /date or /amazon or /blogs, or any combination, make it very simple to quickly filter results to what you are looking for.

Users can create their own slashtags based on a group of URLs. I’ve created one that lists all TechCrunch sites to do easy site search. Others have created slashtags for conservative or liberal blogs, top tech sites, etc. If they make those slashtags public, others can use them, too.

The company also lets users search via a variety of APIs. Add /amazon to search on Amazon. Or /twitter to search via the Twitter API. Or just type /whatever.com to search just that domain.

Blekko Is Instantly Likeable

Anyone who’s used to advanced search tools on Google will instantly like Blekko. It’s much quicker than using things like “site:” modifiers on Google, and some of the searches you can do on Blekko you just can’t do on Google at all.

Will less advanced users like Blekko, too? The founders think they will. And since Blekko works just like the search engines they’re used to as well, they think people will quickly get comfortable creating and using slashtags.

Transparency

Blekko is also showing just about all the behind the scenes data that they have to determine rank and relevancy. You can see inbound links, duplicated content and associated metadata for any domain in their index.

Interview with the founders and a screencast of more features coming up in our next post.

Information provided by CrunchBase

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Alien Swarm gets Source upgrade, free re-release

By bkuchera@arstechnica.com (Ben Kuchera), Ars Technica – July 19, 2010 at 01:10PM


Alien Swarm started life as an Unreal Tournament modification. Later, the team was hired at Valve to work on the Left 4 Dead series before moving onto Portal 2. Both Valve and the original team have put together a very nice present for fans: the game has been updated to take advantage of the Source engine, and will be made available today free of charge, including the SDK.

Alien Swarm is a top-down tactical shooter with up to four-player co-op, over 40 weapons, eight characters across four classes, and persistent items to unlock. This release also features full Steam Cloud support, 64 achievements, and a match-making system. In other words, this is an incredibly full-featured release for a very fun, if challenging, game. It’s also hard to argue with the price.

Alien Swarm.

“In addition to the game, Valve will also release the complete code base for Alien Swarm. This includes updates to the Source engine SDK and full Steamworks integration,” Valve states. “If you’ve ever thought about developing a mod on the Source engine with Steamworks, this release provides more insight and examples for using Steamworks in game production.” This free release comes with the complete code base of the game, so you can really dig deep to see what makes everything tick.

This is a great bonus for fans as well as a good excuse to get some friends together for a quick session tonight. See you online!

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5 Effective Ways To Workout At Home With Online Videos

By Mohan Ramkumar, MakeUseOf – July 19, 2010 at 12:31PM

ways to workout at homeEverybody wants to be fit and healthy. Working out in a gym and taking the help of a fitness coach can be a very relaxing experience. But going to a gym to work out is not everyone’s cup of tea. Gyms with personal trainers tend to be expensive and if you are anything like me, driving to a gym is such a chore.

The quasi lazy person’s alternative is workout videos. Online workout videos offer the best of both worlds – staying in the comfort of your own home and also getting professional fitness advice. After the advent of broadband, delivering professionally produced videos for free while upselling full length DVDs and fitness products has become one of the most common ways to workout at home.


There are a lot of sites and blogs out there that help us tone our body with free workout videos. We have covered quite a few of them in the past and have come up with five more for our beloved readers.

Diet.com

at home workouts

Diet.com has a dedicated videos section featuring hundreds of video workouts and exercises. All the videos are neatly categorized and are updated pretty regularly. Even though there are paid plans available, the videos are not chopped off in the middle and can be viewed by unregistered users free of charge.

Video with tips to reduce weight, reduce fat etc. are an added bonus. Diet’s workout video archive is quiet fun to watch with videos like celebrity workouts, workouts without the need for gym equipments and the like. The Diet Investigates section features videos that probes a lot of health related topics and is a must watch.

Workoutz.com

ways to workout at home

On top of the great workout and exercise videos, Workoutz.com also has a dedicated section for specialty training videos. Video workouts of Yoga positions, kettle ball, speed & agility, stretching etc. are covered in the speciality training section.

These workout videos are of varying length and are available in their complete form on the site. All the workout videos can be downloaded for free to your desktop or for watching in your iPod and offer one of the most convenient ways to workout at home. Video links can be emailed to friends and the same can be embedded in your blog or website.

Freeworkoutvideos.org

Freeworkoutvideos.org is a workout blog that features selectively aggregated workout videos from YouTube. A variety of workouts on abs, weight loss, Yoga, abdominal exercises etc. are available here. All the workout videos are in their entirety and the duration ranges from 2 to 15 minutes.

FitnessFly.com

at home workouts

FitnessFly.com has an exhaustive collection of workout videos in its YouTube channel. A little more than 200 videos are listed in three different playlists – FitnessFly collection, Gilad workouts and the studio series with Ellen Barrett. The production values of the videos are very impressive and the instructions by fitness coaches are easy to follow.

PhysicalFitnet.com

ways to workout at home

Apart from the fitness and workout videos, PhysicalFitnet.com has a section where the visitors can ask questions to experts on various health related topics. Workouts are broken into step by step smaller videos to enable us to master exercises one by one.

In addition to the voice overs, every workout video has a brief description and specific instructions published for users to read and follow.

Final Thoughts

All the sites have a brilliant collection of workout videos and the videos load pretty fast too. However, one huge let down is the lack of visual appeal and poor website navigation. The design of these fitness sites are pretty rudimentary with a stale Web 1.0 look. The video players only support basic playback options. The production values of the videos are great with professionals, background music, proper equipments but the video quality is above average, which I guess is intentional to keep bandwidth charges at bay.

Are videos one of the more effective ways to workout at home? Is there a great workout video site that we have missed? Do share your thoughts in the comments section.

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