Ideas….

Amazon Web Services is offering data sets for Freebase, DBpedia, and US Bureau of Transportation Statistics.  They have other datasets as well.

The datasets are available via Elastic Block Storage:

Amazon EC2 customers can access this data by creating their own personal Amazon EBS volumes, using the public data set snapshots as a starting point. They can then access, modify and perform computation on these volumes directly using their Amazon EC2 instances and just pay for the compute and storage resources that they use.

All of this can be done through the AWS Web Console > Elastic Block Store > Volumes.  When you click “Create Volume” a new window will up and there is a dropdown box that allows you to choose from available datasets or you can use the snapshot id numbers that are shown on the public datasets page (because not all datasets are listed in the dropdown box).

What’s even better is that you too can share your data with the world by filling out a form (also found on the public datasets page) and talking to Amazon.

a view of EBS from the AWS Web Console

At Code4Lib I saw Becky Yoose give a lightning talk on AutoIt, a cool tool that is supposedly faster than Macro Express (but much more complicated in terms of writing the programs).

So while that was great, what was even better for me was that she used Jing, a free screencasting tool from TechSmith.  It allows you to create screencasts (in .swf format).  You can save the screencasts to your computer (and make an endless supply) or upload them to http://www.screencast.com.  You get 2GB of space with a free screencast.com account but if you upgrade to the pro account you get 25GB.

I’m hoping to rework the library website and would love to have tutorials that use screencasting.  And since it’s so simple to use I think our librarians might actually like to utilize the tool.  I also think that some of the faculty technology liaisons will get some use out of it while working with faculty members.

Now I’m wondering if there is a Moodle block or plugin that plays .swf files…..

I did a lightning talk at Code4Lib on Amazon Web Services.  Eventually a video of my presentation will be posted online, but in the meantime, I’m uploading my screencast here.

Essentially I launch an AMI, associate it to an IP address and then connect to it using terminal.  Pretty simple really but super powerful if you have no money and need a server quickly.

The screencast below is a bit small so here’s a link to it in case you need to see it bigger http://www.screencast.com/t/kIBVibIsL5T