Open Source Speaker Series: Practical MythTV
Google engEDU
57 min – Aug 16, 2007

Google Tech Talks
August 16, 2007

ABSTRACT

MythTV is a powerful open source personal video recorder. It records television off the air, plays downloaded media files, DVDs, and audio files. It also includes a web browser, RSS reader, weather applet, and much more. During this talk Michael will introduce MythTV, show off the frontend interface, MythWeb, talk about the current challenges with guide data in the United States, and discuss some of the upcoming features. Michael is a coauthor of "Practical MythTV", which was published in April 2007.

Michael Still is currently a Site Reliability Engineer at Google. Before that, he was a senior software engineer at TOWER Software in Australia. For many years he has been using his spare time to work on open source projects of various forms. This includes a book on ImageMagick in 2005, and a book on MythTV in 2007. Read the rest of this entry »

Pipes: A Tool For Remixing the Web
Google engEDU
45 min – Apr 2, 2007

Google Tech Talks
April 2, 2007

ABSTRACT

Pipes is a service platform for processing well-structured data such as RSS, Atom and RDF feeds in a Web-based visual programming environment. Developers can use Pipes to combine data sources and user input into mashups without having to write code. These mashups, analogous in some ways to Unix pipes, can power badges on personal publishing sites, provide core functionality for Web applications, or serve as reusable components within the Pipes platform itself.

Here’s what Tim O’Reilly says about pipes: "Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output."

Speakers: Pasha Sadri & Jonathan Trevor of Yahoo! Read the rest of this entry »

The Semantic Chemical Web: GoogleInChI and other Mashups
Google engEDU
55 min – Sep 13, 2006

Google Tech Talks
September 13, 2006

Peter Murray-Rust is Reader in Molecular Informatics at the University of Cambridge and Senior Research Fellow of Churchill College.

ABSTRACT
The millions of scientific papers published each year are an amazing source for scientific discovery but in most of them the experimental data is destroyed by the publication process. Publishers insist on converting semantic data into PDF which effectively destroys everything. We have been developing social and technical strategies to preserve and liberate this data and where this has happened have been able to create completely new mashups and other semantic resources.

Chemistry is the most tractable discipline for the semantic web – most chemistry can be turned into XML with little semantic loss, using Chemical Markup Language and complementary MLs such as XHTML, MathML and SVG.

We have to mobilise a bottom-up revolution through modern Internet ideas – blogs, communal source development, interoperability. We have done this in chemistry through the Blue Obelisk movement – an informal but coherent group of young-at-heart hackers. We are adopting lightweight web technologies ("REST", etc.) to chemistry – an example will be CMLRSS which we run in a Bioclipse environment. Read the rest of this entry »

There are People in our Computers!
Google engEDU
50 min – Aug 1, 2006

Google TechTalks
August 1, 2006

David Wolber (http://cs.usfca.edu/~wolber) is a professor at the University of San Francisco. His interests include collaborative research systems, e-politics, and service learning within computer science.

ABSTRACT
Peoplicious is a collaborative research tool. Unlike systems such as del.icio.us, people are first-class data objects, along with documents. Users can create people, provide structured information about people (image, homepage, blog feed, delicious name, etc.), and create lists of people (people-tagging). Users can also bookmark documents and associate documents with people (personmarks). Any user can enter information about any person.

Peoplicious is where del.icio.us meets RSS reader all within a modern day address book. There is a working prototype that can be accessed at: http://peoplicious.com/Technorati/lists. It is designed so that new sites can easily be created for particular domains (e.g., see http://peoplicious.com/USF/lists). The system currently has one power user. Read the rest of this entry »

Turning Email Upside Down: RSS/Email and IM2000
Google engEDU
44 min – Jul 19, 2006

Google TechTalks
July 19, 2006

Meng Weng Wong & Julian Haight

Meng Weng Wong is an email geek. He started pobox.com in 1995 and karmasphere.com in 2005. He is responsible for SPF, the email authentication standard which was embraced and extended by Microsoft to form Sender ID. He recently moved from Philadelphia to Silicon Valley to work on Karmasphere, the open reputation network for the Internet.

Julian Haight founded SpamCop.net, the impossible spam-reporting service. He is currently working on a book dealing with network security. Before SpamCop, he worked as a private consultant developing small interactive web-sites. He has always been concerned with privacy and security.

ABSTRACT
A decade ago, DJB proposed IM2000: what if mail storage were the sender’s responsibility? Since then, spam *= bignum, blogs were invented, and RSS is now sex on a stick. Let’s say an RSS blog is just like a one-to-many public mailing list, but over HTTP pull. Now imagine what one-to-one private asynchronous messaging might look like, over HTTP pull. A few months ago Meng Weng Wong (spf.pobox.com), Julian Haight (spamcop.net), and others got together to build an opensource prototype of the system. Meng will discuss the philosophy, architecture, and implementation of the prototype. Read the rest of this entry »