This is my abstract for my faculty visit presentation next Thursday at the UM School of Information.
We have been hearing for sometime about Web 2.0 and how Web 2.0 allows to create new functionality by remixing and reusing existing content to produce new derived content. However, we can only go so far when the only thing that we can “mash up” is the content – we need to begin to have the ability to mash up functionality as well. The Sakai (CTools) software is successful as increasingly more capabilities are integrated into the software. This leads software that continuously increases in size and complexity simply to be successful (kind of like dinosaurs that kept evolving to be larger and larger – until a comet hit to wipe them out). This leads to efforts like Microsoft, Apple, and Google where slowly but surely they need to reinvent, rewrite, acquire, etc enough functionality to cover their entire scope of their domain in their own proprietary manner. At the same time we are seeing increasingly rich and powerful focused point solutions such as YouTube or Skype that would be a nice addition to any application – but are used in isolation. There is an intense need to build interoperable capabilities that can be mashed up to make new meta-systems. But this is difficult to do in a clean manner because of issues like identity, authorization, storage. This is particularly acute in the teaching and learning area where there in nearly an infinite variation of approaches to teaching which are desirable. Almost by definition, no single piece of software will ever cover the scope of teaching and learning. Customization, innovation, and extension must happen at the level of an individual user and yet these systems must be as robust as any other enterprise wide application with 100% availability and extremely scalable performance. The goal is to architect applications which meet the seemingly conflicting goals of enterprise scalability and reliability with individual extension and customization. Teaching, Learning and Collaboration systems such as Sakai (CTools) are in an ideal position to make a breakthrough innovation in functionality mash up because the need is so great. I will give a vision of the next few years of evolution of systems like Sakai to make those systems to address both important dimensions of the next generation of enterprise applications. The vision will outline the needs and goals of these next generation system as well as the challenges that must be faced to achieve those goals.
Dr. Charles Severance
http://www.dr-chuck.com/
http://www.dr-chuck.com/dr-chuck/resume/index.htm

In preparation for my faculty visit to the UM School of Information, I found I needed to recover some old media that I only had in Real Media – I had lost all the copies of the final video.
Several things did not work which I describe below. What did work is
Real7ime Converter (R7C) is a converter of any RealPlayer(tm) streaming medias (video and sound) to AVI/WAV/MP3 format. It is a realtime converter because it does not manage Real Time Streaming Protocol(tm) (RTSP) directly so the needed time to convert a media will be greater or equal to the time of the media.
This can be downloaded from http://r7cproj.euro.ru/indexe.htm
I also installed a copy of real Player 8 from my own archival copies – It worked with this Real Player – I don’t know what other versions it works with – thankfully in the mid-90’s as Real got weirder and weirder – I had the forthought to keep copies of all of the Real distributions :)
This worked swell – I got an uncompressed 320×240 AVI that I turned into Flash Video and MP4. Here is the result:
Understanding the Posix Open System Reference Model
Pretty cool – since I was dead in the water otherwise.

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