Global Community Software and Saveing Schools

I have always wondered why there isn't more use of Open Source software in United States' schools.  Sure I have seen Firefox catch on, but all browsers are free of cost today.  So why did Firefox catch on in the first place.  I think its a given that Firefox caught on because as we all know, unless you have been living in a cave, Firefox is faster and more secure than what most versions of Internet Explorer are.  This proved OSS (Open Source Software) could be better than commercial alternatives. 

Now what about replacing monstrously expensive programs like Blackboard.  Blackboard runs a minimum of $10,000 per year but typically runs colleges $25,000 to $75,000 per year.  There are much cheaper OSS alternatives that have virtually the same features and can even be further enhanced because of their open nature.  Blackboard could be replaced with Moodle, or Sakai which have a free price on their tag and can be self-hosted.  Sakai I find particularly interesting, its made with leadership from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with its original grant coming from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New York City.  Sakai allows for online document distribution, a grade book, discussions, live chats, assignment uploads, and online testing, plus more.  Moodle is comparable but was not founded in the U.S.  Moodle is from Australia but has been in development for a little longer, 15 years.  There has been some progress in crushing the cost of LMS software for schools.  Some schools are migrating away from Blackboard to the alternatives.  Blackboard had over 90% market share in 2006 and since 2010 the alternative software have reached over 30% market share.  I urge schools and any organization that requires educational learning software such as hospitals to utilize and improve open LMS software, by helping improve your LMS you are not only improving it for your students but you are providing a free service to the rest of the global community.  I am talking about those kids in Africa, India, and other parts of the world. 

Other areas of software that may be useful for schools to save on and improve for the global community by using and improving open source software include:

1. Libreoffice in place of MSOffice for most students
2. Switch to an open ERP such as... OpenERP
3. For medical and mental services in nursing offices or particularly in Universities OpenVista, FreeMED, or OpenEMR
4. For School Homepage a CMS like Joomla, Wordpress, or Durpal
5. For the Library use an open ILS like Evergreen or Koha
6. For Math SageMath, wxMaxima, ect.
7. For Programming, Eclipse, Netbeans, QtCreator, ect.
8. For Art and design, Blender, GIMP, Inkscape, BlueGriffon, ect.
9. For additional free education software and to replace Windows for most students try Ubuntu or Edubuntu which has great computer lab management software.
10. Other school related open source software to fill in the nooks include: SchoolTool, Project Fedena, A1 Academia, Gibbon, OpenSIS, and you can Google for more. 

Schools should regularly look at BOSSIE to find the latest and greatest open source software to teach with. If we can migrate everything to OSS imagine how much we could save tax payers and tuition spenders.  All of this savings put together should save hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions over the years.  The Federal Government is starting to use more OSS why not the local. Bill Gates says how he wants to donate money back to the schools, well if our local governments wouldn't have wasted so much on commercial software we would have that money now to pay for better teachers, books, and technology.  Lets not continue to make this mistake.

Refer to http://schoolforge.net/ for case studies. 

DirectX? Ha! - OpenGL is Superior

If you are looking to grab a developer’s interest, all you really need to do is begin popping out statistics. Feature something that’s not 1.2 times above par, but three or four times better, and you will know you’ve got them. That’s the good news Nvidia teamed up with AMD and Intel to present at this last week’s Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. AMD’s Graham Sellers, Intel’s Tim Foley, and Nvidia's Cass Everitt and John McDonald appeared on the same panel to explain the high-level methods available in today’s OpenGL implementations that reduce driver overhead by as great as 10x or more.  With OpenGL, an open, vendor-neutral standard, developers can get significantly better performance, up to 1.3 times. Though with a little tuning, they will often get 7 to 15 times more performance.

That’s a figure that will always make any developer sit up and listen.  Better still, the techniques revealed apply to all major manufacturers and are suitable for using across multiple platforms. And they brought demos, showing what these particular improvements mean on real world systems.  That’s because of the fact that OpenGL can cut through the driver overhead who is definitely a frustrating reality for game project developers since the beginning of the PC game industry.  On desktop systems, driver overhead can decrease frame rate. On mobile devices, however, driver overhead is significantly more insidious, robbing both battery life and frame rate.  Learn more here.  With such possible superior performance looks like its time to kill DirectX projects and make them into highly tuned OpenGL applications for SteamOS and yes, even Windows.  Below is a video that you might get more out of if you develop with OpenGL.  I never developed directly with OpenGL but I know I will use engines and frameworks that do, especially after learning about this. 

reEarCandy Problems...

Just so you know I am having problems building reEarCandy on my computer right now.  I would appreciate some feedback if anyone can get this to build.  For some reason I can't type the program name into the program recording source.  I am also curious to see if this will build on Windows.  A couple of people have said they may be able to help me get it working on Windows.  Please contact me if you can fix these things or can give me some insight.  I am opening up comments on this post so you can give me feedback.  Thanks.  

Esenthel Next-Gen Game Engine

 Esenthel calls itself a Nex-Gen game engine.   It now supports Linux along with Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and web with no plugins.  If you want the full version that includes Linux support and Game Object Class Source Code it will run you $199.  There is a free to try version.  They also have made demo games for a variety of game types.  Esenthel's features include:

• Very Easy to Use
• Advanced Graphics and Physics
• High Performance
• Unlimited Sized Worlds
• Collaborative Development
• Auto Publishing
• 100+ Tutorials and 90+ Documentation Pages Included
• Esenthel Store to sell your own Items
• Frequent Updates
• Rock Solid - Zero Bug Tolerance
• Free to Try!

Reconstruct Your Face From DNA

Have you ever been asked, as a witness, what does this suspect look like?  Your description may be quite limited in detail.  We have all seen the artist made drawings of criminals that authorities are looking for.  These drawings even change from time to time.  Well now Scientists are working to see if they can reconstruct faces from DNA.  They have had some success, according to PLOS Genetics in a publication from yesterday.  Right now crude 3D models of the person can be made from samples of their DNA.  Researchers are looking only at genes that seem to construct facial structure.  The process is far from perfect at its current state and the scientists admit that the limitations of what they can find from the DNA may prove to be non useful in the end.  But it is too early to tell.  If scientists can find a way to reconstruct the whole face this could be very useful to forensics.  However things like weight and age will still need to be determined visually. 

Blender Now Better For Game Dev

I will keep this short.  Blender 2.70 is out and since Valve had a 6 month contract with The Blender Foundation, I think this has something to do with the, better game development support, included in this version.  Other features include: user interface improvements, modelling enhancements, motion tracking tuning, a threaded dependency graph, freestyle NPR rendering, new features for the Cycles renderer, and more.  See more at the Blender Wiki.  Blender is better for game development now, but its also great for 3D animation, physics simulation, video effects, editing and more.  If you want to see what blender can do look at this...

What Game Engine To Use

I have been playing around with game development on and off for a while.  I always have the minimum requirement for the engine to run on Linux.  I have this requirement because I run Ubuntu on my best desktop computer in the house which has a Radeon 7770 for video and has a 6 core AMD Phenom II.  This setup plays all Steam games fairly well at 1600x900.  There is even greater reason to pick an engine with Linux support because the new Steam Machine game consoles basically have game support through Linux support.  Graphics are also important to me because I love things that look beautiful.  If you are a pro game developer that wants the greatest graphics for your AAA game you are going to have to:

    A)  Pay for an engine that supports the best graphics possible.
    B)  Build your own in-house game engine with what you want.
    C)  Take an Open-Source game engine and add the latest graphics support.  (Tesseract)

If you go with option A your best options are Unity, Unreal Engine 4, or Cryengine. 
These all can run your developed game on Linux and they have pay versions that support the latest in OpenGL graphics technologies.  Unity runs $1500 per seat for a pro license.  Unreal Engine has always had a reputation for being cheaper for small projects by charging a smaller monthly fee.  And now for the first time ever Cryengine is pulling an Epic by charging a super small monthly fee of $9.90 a month which is beating Epic Games price for Unreal Engine 4!  The new EasS (Engine as a service) pricing is staring May of this year.  So Cryengine is looking like the best option for now, see the video below.  Lets not forget about Valves Source 2 Engine which will be coming out soon it might out-do even Cryengine since the Source Engine right now is free and its possible to make free contributions to its source code. 

I Made News in China

Hey everyone I was looking at where my blog stands on Google since I am trying to get the word out about reEarCandy.  I came across an article about me on a website from what looks like China.  Here is the link if you don't believe me. 

http://www.tuicool.com/articles/aiArUza

This actually happened because of my submission of the news to Slashdot but they got the details from this blog of mine.  I hope this encourages you to download my software available on this blog under the reEarCandy for Ubuntu page.  Remember to please donate.  Also I need a developer to help me get this running and packaged for Windows.  I also want to make a deb package so anyone who wants to do that for me too I welcome you.  Thanks. 

What Causes Black-outs When Drunk

Happy St. Patric's Day everyone!  Drinking became popular on St. Patric's Day because churches lifted Lenten restrictions on eating and drinking this day years ago.  Be responsible and don't drink too much because you don't want to become black-out drunk.  Black-out drunk is different then passing out because the individual is still awake and doing things.  But as anyone who has experienced black-out drunkenness knows, you have no idea what you did.  I have never been black-out drunk, but I have known people who have been.  You actually have a higher chance of getting black-out drunk again if blackouts have happened to you before.  Some people's brain chemistry is just prone to having them experience black-outs.

What happens when you black-out?  Its caused by changes in brain chemistry.  Alcohol interferes with glutamate, one of the most abundant neurotransmitters in the brain.  The interference occurs most in the hippocampus which is in the center of the brain and is in charge of spacial memory creation as well as navigation.  When the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate can't excite neurons the neurons create steroids and there is poor or no communication in this area of the brain so it can't do its job.  If it can't do its job memories don't get stored or in the case of brown-outs they don't get stored properly.  Brown-outs are when you can only remember if someone reminds you of the event.  The hippocampus is one of the first areas affected by Alzheimer's so if you know what a black-out is like you have an idea of what it is like to have early stages of Alzheimer's. 

Steam Controller's New Design

So have any of you heard of the new upcoming Steam Machine Consoles?  Well they have been working on the controller for some time now and this is what the latest design looks like.  For those of you who don't know, Steam Machines are Consoles that let you play PC games in the living room.  All the keyboard and mouse controls get mapped to this control and its special dual touch pads.  There are going to be 14 Steam Machines to choose from in the start.  The Starting price is about $500, similar price to the XBox One.  It is expected to be released for sale in the fall of this year.  These controllers will also work with a normal computer so you can play your games in the same way you do in the living room.  Steam Machines will in most cases out perform the current set of consoles such as the PS4 and Xbox One.  They will run their own SteamOS, a Linux based operating system designed to bring a living room suitable experience to Steam.  I will talk more about this new console in future blog posts.  Facebook share, Google+ and comment on this below.

Helicopter Air Drop for Easter

This year for Easter Spring Creek Church in Pewaukee, Wisconsin is going to be having an Easter egg hunt that is nontraditional for most churches.  They have an Easter egg drop by helicopter.  The helicopter will fly over the church grounds dropping loads of donated Easter candy.  Its something to get the kids excited for and there is so much candy dropped that there is sometimes more found long after Easter.  This has been a tradition only at Spring Creek Church to the best of my knowledge.  Over 600 pounds of candy have been dropped each year in the past.  They are taking candy donations right now.  If you have kids you might want to drop by Spring Creek Church and see if you can signup for the event or donate some candy.  Its a great way to get the kids interested in learning about Easter and the reason we have Easter...  Jesus!

Open Source Gaming in Firefox with Unreal Engine 4

Last year there was a demo of Unreal Engine 3 running in Firefox at what was then called near native speeds.  What was considered near native speeds back then was only 40% of actual native speeds.  Now Mozilla and Epic have put more work into bringing you a console like experience in the web with open source technologies.  They currently have a demo of Unreal Engine 4 running in Firefox, and now the speeds are even closer to native.  This demo runs at 67% of native speeds and Mozilla is claiming they will make it even faster.  Mozilla points out you still have browser choice with this technology, they are just working on making it fast, especially on Firefox.  Imagine marketing a download quality game with just a web link, this is looking to be what the future is becoming.  Monster Madness was the first commercial game published on the web using Unreal Engine and the open source asm.js tech.  This asm.js way of bringing games to the net is great because it allows one version of the game to run on Windows, Mac, Linux, and any platform that complies with newer web standards.  If you want to check out the Unreal Engine 3 demo click here.  I can only find a video of the new demo. 

Alltop.com

Hi everyone, I just wanted you to know my blog feed is now available at alltop.com. 
Alltop was highly recommended to me as a way to promote my blog.  It seems to be working because now I am getting visitors from other countries.  Countries other than the U.S. and Germany.  I want to shout out to the visitor in Germany.  Thanks for coming back several times and I added a translator widget for you!  Any who more about Alltop.  I really like their setup, you can just browse blogs by topic and the cool part is how compact the feed page is, all the posts from the blogs are previewed by mouse overing the title.  So check out Alltop and find me and others under the tech topic.  Its a great way to find other blogs and meet other bloggers. 

reEarCandy Now Avaliable as Free Software

I uploaded reEarCandy from 09/2012 for free downloads.  For those who don't know reEarCandy is a program that uses Pulseaudio and SoX to easily record your music from both program sources and tape, record, or radio sources to the OGG Vorbis media format.  I originally tested it on Ubuntu 12.04 with Firefox, Spotify, and even to record tracks from VH1 on cable by plugging in a TV to my line-in on my computer.  You can get cords from RadioShack or Amazon to make such connections.  I am open sourcing this under the GPLv3 license for anyone who asks.  Please send me donations once I get a way to accept donations.  You will be able to download the source and binary build of the software as well as make donations to me through the reEarCandy page on the menu above.

Please leave any questions and comments in the comments section of this post below.  Thanks and help me improve this software, maybe we can get it working on Mac and Windows.  I also want to get automatic tagging working in it. 

Coffee Prices Rise

Thanks to the drought conditions in Brazil coffee prices are rising.  Over the last four months, arabica coffee prices have almost doubled from $1.06 per pound in November to more than $2 per pound currently.  Thankfully Starbucks won't raise their prices because they are locked into the old price for a year.  Because of their locked price it won't affect their profitability either.  The current coffee prices are higher than they have been in two years.  Don't expect to get coffee cheap anytime soon till a new season brings better conditions to the coffee growers of this world.  I will be sticking with synthetic caffeinated drinks.  You can still get over a pound of pure caffeine for under $15.  Might be time to get a soda maker. 

Power Sleep, Super Endurance and Genetics

Genetics is being found to control a lot of things.  And we are going to control these super genes for our advantage using a new generation of drugs.  Imagine only sleeping 6, 4, or 1 hour a night and waking up refreshed and ready to go with no caffeine and you can just go all day long until the same time the next night, not feeling drained.  Or what if you could just start running and keep running the length of a marathon with having no prior training or habit of exercise in your life.  These things a small percentage of people can do naturally and soon you might be able to too.

It was discovered that there are genes which control our need for sleep.  One of these genes is called DEC2 and allows for people to have no urge to sleep more than 6 hours.  DEC2 is a very rare gene mutation that only occurs in about 1% of the population.  There are expected to be many more sleep gene discoveries.  One of these discoveries I saw on the news last month and they claimed it crammed more REM sleep cycles into a shorter period of time and people typically only slept 4 hours, one individual claimed he was happy with 1 hour.  I think cramming in more REM sleep into a shorter period of time could help people that have serious sleep disorders that might only sleep an hour but wake up not feeling refreshed.  It might help anyone who needs more REM sleep.  People that have this sleep gene also have an easier time recovering from sleep deprivation.  According to doctors they can make a drug that does the same thing as this gene.

Hearing about this in the news also reminded me of a NOVA show I watched talking about the discovery of a gene that allowed humans with no experience to just run a marathon with no training, and not get tired.  They were able to breed rats to have the same gene and they would just not get exhausted when they were pushed to the limits of a hamster wheel.  The doctor who discovered this claims to already have made a drug that activated this gene.  You might ask how can a person get a gene activated, weren't we born with our genes?  Well we where born with genes but according to epigenetics each gene has something like a dimmer light that can be partially activated or partially turned off.  This drug would crank up the light.  I could see how a drug like this would be beneficial for obese people who get tired out easy while exercising and choose to stop or quite the effort all together.  In fact this gene works by telling the body to burn fat first which has 9 calories per gram as opposed to 4 calories per gram for carbs and protein.  Having these extra calories to the disposal of the individual is what gives them the endurance. 

Thanks and leave your comments below.  Share and Google+ this as well please.

Google Drive Got New Low Prices

Google drive is two years old already and as a result we are seeing a gift from Google, price drops!  You used to be able to get 100GB of storage for $4.99 but now its only $1.99 a month.  1TB was a whooping $49.99 now its only $9.99 a month.  Plus there is a completely new storage option.  10TB or more starting at $99.99 a month.  As before the 15GB tier is free for all Google users who use Google drive. 

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/save-more-with-google-drive.html

Record Music Streams the Right Way

So there is this really sweet application called Replay Music that I ran into back in 2007.  It allows you to record Internet Music Streams while you are doing other stuff on the computer.  So I decided to buy it, or actually they had a promotion to get a Premium Rhapsody Service and get the software for free.  I say it lets you record the streams, or radio, while doing other stuff because it won't pick up audio from other applications, like WindowsXP sounds or Youtube videos.  I got a ton of music from rhapsody radio this way.  It literally filled up my 60 gig hard drive to the point I thought it was time to reinstall Windows.  It automatically split the audio up into proper tracks and labeled them using Acoustic Tagging. 

I decided I wanted to make something similar for Linux.  I run Ubuntu and saw they were having an app contest for the new Ubuntu Software Center Store.  So I thought this would be a great app to enter.  I had done research on how to do this for the 6 previous months.  Its really just a hack of Pulseaudio and SoX command line.  The app took me 2 weeks to code and test.  I never had experience making a Gui application with C++ before.  Or any C++ application that was beyond a unit converter.  That was about as advanced as college intro to C++ was.  So what I came up with lets you hit a record button with a specific application targeted for recording.  It will record from that application and nothing else.  It will split the recording up into tracks and for now if you want to tag them you will have to use a third party application.  I am looking into a way to build this into the app reEarCandy.  I got a few sales but for no known reason the app got taken down from the store.  So I am open sourcing this and you can send me money if you would like to.  ;)  I have had this work for Firefox, Flash, and Spotify even though Spotify no longer wants you to legally record from them.  You might be able to get this to work with windows if you play around with the source and setup Pulseaudio right.  Check back here for a download of reEarCandy and its Source.  We will see who gets audio tagging done first me or you. 

Here are the links from Replay Music and my reEarCandy.
http://applian.com/replay-music/
https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/re-ear-candy/

Cannabis - What MS and Alzheimer's Have in Common

Multiple sclerosis is an inflammatory disease involving damaged nerves in the brain and spinal cord of the sufferer.  Alzheimer's is a disease involving plaque buildup in the brain which negatively affects memory and other cognitive functions.  What do they have in common, well they both affect the nerves and they both have symptoms of inflammation.  Inflammation can be very damaging, more damaging than you might realize, for example migraine head aches are caused by inflammation and it has been discovered that if you have as little as one of these a month over a prolonged period of time, brain lesions can form on the white matter of the brain.  These lesions are like holes on the surface of the brain.

In Alzheimer's there is a problem with plaque build up in the brain causing inflammation of neurons eventually leading to cell death and a shrinkage of the brain.  Each neuron holding a memory that dies is another lost memory.  You might be asking what can cannabis, or  marijuana, do for these diseases.  Well compounds in cannabis like THC, which gives marijuana's high, and others like CBD, CBN, CBV, and THCV can treat neurons by ridding the nerves of inflammation and doing other good things like increasing the production of myelin, the insulator of neurons, and even promote neurogenesis, the growth of new neural pathways.  These things that cannabis' compounds, known as cannabinoids, can do are beneficial to both Multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's, not to mention any disease that has neural inflammation involved with it.  Some of the diseases Cannabis can help include but are not limited to: Cancer, Lupus, Dementia, Diabetes, Epilepsy, Schizophrenia, Parkinson's, Migraine Headaches and more.

For Alzheimer's a 2006 study actually showed cannabis does far better than the current prescriptions on the market.  On a CNN special I watched just yesterday, they showed a girl less than two that went from over 70 seizures a day down to about 10 just by using cannabis, a form that doesn't even get you high.  There is no good reason why cannabis that doesn't get you high should be illegal.  I urge you readers to support legalization and research of cannabis.  We have made some progress here in the U.S. because there is a prescription legal form of THC called Marinol.  However it is only approved for nausea and appetite in AIDS / HIV patients and those who are undergoing Chemotherapy.  As a UK research doctor said, cannabis could provide us with 40 years worth of new medicine. 

SXSW won't have downloads?

Looks like SXSW may not have downloadable sample tracks anymore.  This is sad news to me.  The reason?  They have switched to the SoundCloud service for apparently all audio content.  There are ways to download from SoundCloud but none of them are legal to my knowledge.  So if you don't like this new way of doing business you might want to find a way to contact SXSW and tell them we want some downloadable sample tracks again.  Earlier in the year you could download sample tracks hence my previous post about the archived torrent.  On the bright side SXSWfm is pretty sweet you can get an app for it on Android and archives of the broad cast are on SoundCloud.  In a later post I will tell you how to record any radio station on Windows and with a project I have worked on for Linux. 

Japanese Ear Twitch PC

Have you heard of Google Glasses?  Well Japanese researchers have come up with another type of wearable computer.  This one fits on to your ear like a Bluetooth head set.  I remember when Bluetooth ear pieces first came out.  I was working at a gas station and people would come in to the store talking on them out of the blue, no pun intended.  It made them look crazy as if they were talking to themselves.  Well this Linux powered ear PC can make you look even more crazy because you have to control it by making face expressions.  Some of the face expressions the devices IR sensors can understand include eyebrow movement and tongue positions such as clicking your tongue or sticking it out.  All this is understood by sensing muscle movement near the ears.  The face movements were chosen over hand movements because it allows hands free operation so working individuals or people with disability are able to use it.  The device will connect to other mobile devices much like the new android watches are able to connect to your phone.  It is reported that the ear PC should be ready near the end of the year 2015.  As always share your comments below. 

SXSW Music Festival 2014

You want free legal music take a look at SXSW Torrents.  SXSW is a music fest that takes place in Texas and I discovered it a few years back by looking for legal torrent files.  I was just looking on twitter and saw it was trending #SXSW.  The site bellow has a torrent of part 1 and there are usually 2 parts a year.  So you can grab part one NOW!  If this is new to you you can grab archives all the way back to 2005 which is when the official SXSW site started putting up tracks from the music artists playing at the fest.  The official site doesn't keep the tracks up for download for long so thank God for this torrent service.  Use social media to spread the word of this blog post and share what tracks you liked with the comments below.  

http://www.sxswtorrent.com/2014

TeeSpring is Kickstarting Clothes

So if you don't know already TeeSpring is a great place to design your own shirts.  Its being compared to Kickstarter because you need to set a minimum goal of sales before your product is produced and sold.  Its also a place to buy shirts from more creative individuals then your typical Kohl's department store.  You can make shirts for events you want to hold, causes you want to support, or if you have some smart-ass comment you want to share with people.  They have logos from an art library of their own which even contain controversial symbols such as a cannabis leaf.  You can even upload your own art so if you are an artist sell your art in a way that may gain more attention, on a shirt.  I highly recommend you try this out.  One catch you need to market and advertise your shirt designs in the beginning.  Once they become popular however, they will be displayed on a page with featured products that have been successfully funded.  I have made a pro cannabis shirt you can check out and support if you like.  I may have set the minimum sales too high at 1000 units but I will lower that so you can still get it if I still get enough sales to not loose money.  That is another thing, you are given one chance to lower your goal sales if it looks like you won't make your goal but still want to get product out and make some cash.  You may wonder why I made a pro cannabis shirt, I am no pot smoker but I have been reading about its benefits since it has been getting more publicity with states legalizing it on the news.  I will talk more about that in a later blog post.  Below is the link to my shirt which if you look at the back will give you a little insight before my next post.  Remember to Facebook like and Tweet about it even if you don't buy.  Send in some shirts to this site, I am interested into seeing what your imagination creates. 

http://teespring.com/weedcare