Thursday, July 16, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Helped grad CL with a question about email. Investigated a solution for the "video poster" that Chris C and Rodney Y are installing in the elevator lobby. It's a large flat panel display that enables us to share announcements. This installation has a number of requirements: It must allow moderation, it must loop forever, it must allow us to control the amount of time between slides, it must fill the whole screen without showing scrollbars, it must display a title and description if available, it must cache the data so that Flickr's servers are not unduly burdened with running our slideshow all day long, it must provide at least a fade-in, fade-out transition between slides. I want to use a Flickr solution, but Flickr's slideshow at https://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne does not allow looping, doesn't let you control the timing, and I couldn't get it to fill the screen without showing scrollbars no matter what I tried. Lunch by myself at Marnee Thai: pad thai, thai iced coffee. After more hunting, the announcements display solution I found was Slickr, a Windows screen saver for Flickr data which I had actually used as early as June 24, 2006. It has since been moved to Google Code and although there is no further development the author released the code as open source. We won't need to modify it for our purposes. Submitters will need to have pro accounts in Flickr or else the images will be too small to look good on our large display. We'll use Flickr's built-in moderation, and items will need to manually removed from the group when they expire. Slickr was created before Flickr began accepting video, so unfortunately we won't be able to include video items in our solution. This seems like an ideal solution to me. Staff all over campus can theoretically create announcements once and then easily submit them to all the audiences they want to reach using Flickr groups that are fed to flat panel displays wherever we can put them. Anyone can follow the feed via RSS as well as from mobile devices, though maybe mobile screens are still too low-res for them to work well with this. Eric D and Susie L stopped by to do some DAL testing with me. Worked in Yahoo! Pipes, creating feeds that combine faculty, student, and staff blogs in different ways. Dinner at home with Patrick: cabernet marinara with spinach and baby tomatoes with angel hair pasta, french dinner rolls, Smart Balance Light. The repaired miniStack v2 arrived today, so I began setting that back up: plugged it in, partitioned and formatted it, ran a disk verify, and began an rsync to restore all our music files. Archived lots of documents, mostly receipts, but also a letter from my mom. The repaired heater also arrived today, so I set that up, too. Late meal: hot nonfat milk, english muffin with Smart Balance Light, lowfat cherry yogurt. Stretches. Weight training: various leg lifts and kickbacks. Worked on Danny's website: Cook! SF. Installed Firefox 3.5.1 for OS X. Stretches. Cardio cool-down: 14 minutes. Stretches.