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In March, Mr. Payne created downforeveryoneorjustme.com, as in, “Down for everyone, or just me?” It lets visitors type in a Web address and see whether a site is generally inaccessible or whether the problem is with their own connection.

As Web Traffic Grows, Crashes Take Bigger Toll - NYTimes.com

A most interesting tool.  So, if your having trouble getting to a site just jump there and enter the URL and it will tell you whether or not it is visible elsewhere.  I’m going to recommend this to our friends, since we occasionally get complaints about CALi being unaccessible.

The Sun Wiki Publisher enables you to create Wiki articles on MediaWiki servers without having to know the syntax of the MediaWiki markup language. Publish your new and existing documents transparently with the Writer to a wiki page.All important text attributes such as headings, hyperlinks, lists and simple tables are supported. Even images are supported as long as they have already been uploaded to the wiki site. An automatic upload of images is currently not supported.It is the perfect extension for all users who want to make existing documentations and specifications available on MediaWiki servers. Just load the document and call the Extension with ‘Send – MediaWiki Server’. A dialog will guide you to publish your document.Requires StarOffice 8 (Update 10 or higher) or OpenOffice.org (2.4 or higher)

Sun Wiki Publisher | OpenOffice.org repository for Extensions

Tags: openoffice, mediawiki

Produced by Primary Research Group, The International Survey of Institutional Digital Repositories (ISBN: 1-57440-090-8; $89.50) describes norms and benchmarks for budgets, software use, manpower needs and deployment, financing, usage, marketing and other facets of the managment of international digital repositories based on data from higher education libraries and other institutions involved in institutional digital repository development.

Law Librarian Blog: International Survey of Institutional Digital Repositories

Tags: repository, library, institutional

The following package of extensions will incorporate a social profile, user board, and basic profile information into MediaWiki, specifically Avatars, Friending, Foeing, User Board, Board Blast, and basic Profile Information.

Extension:SocialProfile - MediaWiki

Some cool extensions to MediaWiki.  I find it amusing that not only lets you make friends , but also foes.  That’s good because I needto keep my enemies off my wiki:)

Blogged with Flock

Tags: socialnetwork, mediawiki

The following fifty proprietary programs are listed in no particular order within broad categories along with their open source alternatives. In some cases you could probably write your own book on frustrations with the proprietary programs shown here. In other cases, you’ll discover that the open source alternative isn’t quite up to snuff yet. And, in other cases still, you’ll learn that some proprietary programs are real gems, but that the open source advocate can replace those gems with equally shiny objects from the open source repertoire.

The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy — and Their Open Source Alternatives | WHDb

This is a great list that includes a head to head comparison of 50 closed source, commercial apps and their open source, no cost alternatives.  Yes, some only run in Linux, but for the most part, any MSFT app you can think of has an open source alternative that runs nicely in Windows.  Perhaps a litle experiment loading all of these Windows apps is in order, just to see what happens.

Blogged with Flock

As announced at public.resource.org, CC and public.resource.org have announced the first release of material to support our free law project. After raising a large chunk of change from great and generous sorts like David Boies, John Gilmore, the Omidyar Network and the Elbaz Foundation, we’ve purchased a database of a substantial part of all federal cases. Carl’s team has now made all the data available in a beautiful, xml format for developers to take and use however they want. The however they want part is what’s assured by the CCØ mark on all cases — no rights, including attribution rights, are asserted over these data at all. Free law available for anyone to build search engines, or collections, or whatever else they want.

Big news in the free law department (Lessig Blog)

Pretty major stuff here.  Coverage includes the Supremes, 1 U.S. 1 solid through 524 U.S. 775 plus intermittent coverage through 2005; Circuits, 178 F.2d 1 through 999 F.2d 1584 and 1 F.3d 1 through 491 F.3d 1342.  All of the decisions are very nicely formated in XML and transform wonderfully to the web.  The regular XML will make the slicing and dicing we want to do work well.  I would suggest that you keep an eye on CALI’s eLangdell project for more fun as we do a ‘rip, mix’ learn’ make over on some of this caselaw.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: eLangdell, caselaw, open source, free law