At last Thursday’s OLC/OPLIN RightClick 2015 ice breaker, the casual conversations around the room lead to the sharing of some interesting information, and it seems like it’s only right that we should continue the sharing and talk about some of it in this post. (We also all had a great time. Sorry, we can’t share that in a blog post.) The hints below are an even mix of non-commercial and commercial solutions and are not ranked; our free-and-rather-imprecise applause meter app gave every idea the same score, so these are just in alphabetical order. RightClick 2015 was so good, planning is already starting for RightClick 2016, so watch for future announcements and plan to attend if you want more than just four good ideas.
- Bitnami (thanks to Matthew Augustine) “Bitnami is a library of popular server applications and development environments that can be installed with one click, either in your laptop, in a virtual machine or hosted in the cloud. We take care of compiling and configuring the applications and all of their dependencies (third-party libraries, language runtimes, databases) so they work out-of-the-box. The resulting packaged software (a ‘stack’) is then made available as native installers, virtual machines and cloud images.”
- Gigalearn (thanks to Melanie Wilson) “Gigalearn provides technology education for libraries, schools and private clients in the Cleveland area and beyond. Our mission is to help students and educators thrive in the digital age. Sure, it’s a big task, but we eat obstacles for breakfast. We lead creative technology classes out and about in the community, help private clients get computer confident and competent, and we partner with our non-profit customers to provide wrap-around services including strategic planning, staff development, and grant writing.”
- Librarygame (thanks to Chris Krumnow) “Librarygame is a web application running on a server that is either remote or local to a library management system. Librarygame links into the LMS to collect participating user activity. When a Librarygame user borrows or returns an item (and other types of activities) the LMS sends this information to Librarygame, where it is processed. No manual input of information is required by the user. Certain activities will earn users points and occasionally award them achievements and badges.”
- SmokePing (thanks to Karl Jendretzky) “Smokeping is a latency measurement tool. It sends test packets out to the net and measures the amount of time they need to travel from one place to the other and back. For every round of measurement smokeping sends several packets. It then sorts the different round trip times and selects the median, (ie. the middle one)…. Sometimes a test packet is sent out but never returns. This is called packet-loss. The color of the median line changes according to the number of packets lost. All this information together gives an indication of network health.”
Articles from Ohio Web Library:
- BitNami Cloud Hosting offers an easy way to set up and host Web apps. (eWeek, 3/7/2011, p.28-30 | Jason Brooks)
- Just a game? (American Libraries, Jan./Feb. 2014, p.26 | Meredith Farkas)
- Bufferbloat: Dark buffers in the Internet. (Communications of the ACM, Jan. 2012, p.57-65 | Jim Gettys and Kathleen Nichols)
