As we mentioned in posts earlier this year, we’ve written and have now submitted a proposal with the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) to fund an open source initiative to develop software for computer-based interactive exhibits.  Our preliminary Website for the Open Exhibits project is now available at openexhibits.org.  The new site contains a screencast introducing the project along with a description of this planned project.

Also on the Open Exhibits site, you’ll  find results from the survey we conducted in April and May of this year. We had a total of 125 responses from 110 museums.  The survey results can be filtered by small and large museums, as well as informal science institutions.  You’ll also find  links to our Facebook group, YouTube page, and Flickr presence.   Please join us on these sites and we’ll keep you up-to-date as we  (hopefully) start this new initiative.

Remember running your operating system off of a floppy disk? I recently came across the Vintage Mac Museum via a post on the Design Museum Blog. I found myself feeling a bit nostalgic for my orginal MacPlus, loaded with a full megabyte of RAM. The online Vintage Mac Museum shows a series of screen shots from the original Macintosh operating system.

In the image above, the icon in the upper right is from a 400KB floppy disk. Hard disks were just starting to become available, but they were still very expensive.

All this brought back memories of the coolest early Macintosh I owned. (Yes, even cooler than the MacPlus.) It was an original Mac “clone” and one of the first Mac portables. It was called the Outback, and it was developed, as the name suggests, by a company in Australia.

The company basically ripped apart Mac SE computers and repackaged them in a portable format. The battery for the laptop was a standard camcorder battery. If I remember correctly, Apple eventually sued the makers of the Outback and won, and the Outback went out of business. Several years ago, I donated my Outback computer to the Obsolete Computer Museum. You can see the full-entry for this unique, portable computer here.

For an upcoming project, we’re developing an application that automatically takes a snapshot of a Web page and produces a variety of thumbnail-sized images. This application was developed using Firefox on Linux along with some C programming and a little bit of Ruby on Rails development. Please try out this prototype: grab any site you like. Let us know how it works.

Try the Site Screen Shot v.01

(Update August 6, 2007: We’ve taken web page image capture prototype down permanently. The RSS Mixer prototype is still available and there are no plans to take it down.)

Last month I had the good fortune of attending RailsConf 2006 in Chicago, the first official international conference dedicated to Ruby on Rails. For those of you who are out of the web development loop, Ruby on Rails (or simpy Rails) is an open source web application framework written in the Ruby programming language. In short, the Rails framework gives developers the power to create powerful web applications quickly and sustainably using much less code. What follows are some highlights from the conference.

WalkingBoss, a GPS/Google Maps/Flickr Mashup
Doug Fales gave a great presentation on WalkingBoss, a mashup that plots GPS data and photographs on a Google map. The basic process involves uploading a coordinate file generated by your GPS device, and then uploading photos or hooking it up to a Flickr photo collection. From the uploaded info, the site plots out a full course along the map with photo markers along the way.

This presentation was particularly intriguing to me because of its similarity to a project we’re currently working on at Ideum. Using PHP, we’ve built an Ajax-driven recycling site that plots recycling centers on a Google map. After seeing seeing this presentation, it became apparent that the site could be built more easily with Rails, making use of such features as built-in Ajax functionality, form validation, Scaffolding, and simple Google Maps integration using JavascriptGeneratorTemplates.

A few map-related links..
Google Maps Mania Blog
Google Maps Blog - Geocoding at last!
RailsConf Facebook
RecyleMap Torrance (coming soon)

BBC on Rails
Matt Biddulph, former Head of Plugging Things Into Other Things at the BBC’s Radio and Music Interactive, gave a great presentation on how they used Rails to create the BBC Programme Catalogue site, a searchable index containing details on nearly a million BBC radio & TV programs, dating back 75 years. His talk covered the ups and downs of converting the BBC’s database from an internal green-screen application into a publicly accessible Web 2.0 site using Rails. The resounding message of this talk was that Rails can easily be put to use for large-scale web applications.

Why the Lucky Stiff
A welcome performance was made at the otherwise exhaustingly technical conference by why the lucky stiff, a writer, musician, artist, and computer programmer best known for his work with the Ruby programming language. He graced the audience with a rousing show full of poetry, improvisational music (with three backup singerettes!), a smattering of hand-animated existentialist videos about computers and technology, and powerpoint slides of dysfunctional, redundant, and inherently illogical code snippets. A niche performer, you might say.

Oh yeah. He wrote a Ruby book too.

Other Things I Discovered at RailsConf
Rails incorporates the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, which separates a web application’s data model, user interface, and control logic into three distinct components so that modifications to one component can be made with minimal impact to the others. I didn’t really fully undertand the importance of this design metaphor until attending this conference. MVC makes applications easier to build, maintain, and, as Dave Thomas (not the Dave Thomas you’re thinking of) pointed out, easier for other programmers to read.

Siege is an http regression testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure the performance of their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet. It lets the user hit a webserver with a configurable number of concurrent simulated users. Those users place the webserver “under siege.”

Shopify is fancy shopping cart creator built in Rails. It lets you build shops with as much style and flare as you see fit. When you signup for Shopify, you can choose from one of our growing number of custom-made designs or get really creative and create your own designs.

Camping is a tiny web framework, less than 4k, basically a Rails microcosm. Built by why the lucky stiff.

Rails Weenie - find answers to your Ruby on Rails questions

End
All the cool kids say Rails is awesome. And from what I gathered at Railsconf 2006, they appear to be right. We’ll keep you posted as our relationship with Rails blossoms.

New proposed legislation that would abandon Network Neutrality could impact all of us. Learn how you can do your part to Save the Internet.

Internet Freedom is under attack. Congress is pushing a law that would abandon Network Neutrality, the Internet’s First Amendment. Network neutrality prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deciding which Web sites work best for you — based on what site pays them the most.

Check out the site, learn more about the issue, see where your representative stands, and send a message to congress.

Update: TPM Cafe has a related article, Congress is Giving Away the Internet and You Won’t Like Who Get’s It.