So I belong to a bunch of listservs as part of the ongoing communication aspect of my job as media architect. One of the listservs I have been on for years is “Calico-L” or the CALL (Computer Aided Language Learning) list. Wednesday after noon at the end of the day a message was sent out to the list:

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If there are any CALICO members who also have Google Wave accounts and would like to start one or more CALL waves, please send my your wave address and I will add you to my CALL wave.

Cheers,

Scott

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This has prompted an avalanche of messages from people looking to get invited to Google Wave. For those that don’t know, Google is seeding accounts to this service, by handing out invites to users with accounts, to send out to new people. The bulk of the messages look like this:

————————–

Hello,
An invite to Google Wave would be appreciated:
name-excised@gmail.com
Thanks
Khalid
IUP-class’02

————-

…. me too
would u please send me an invitation to Google wave .

name-excised@gmail.com

thank you
Siham

——————

Hi,

Would you please send me an invitation,

Thanks in advance.

Brahim

EFL teacher, Morocco.

————————

My inbox looks like this:

I have an account,  harlanwallach@googlewave.com, and frankly I have no idea what to do with this service, or why all these people want it. Never the less, it is something, apparently very much in demand. Google has really promoted and driven a web based promotional campaign for a new service, that is frankly, astounding. No real surprise there I guess.

If anyone want to share a wave with me, or whatever, feel free.

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In one week, 20,000 downloads of Wordpress for the iPhone. So, I figured I should try it out.

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If you would like to have your Login and Admin sections on a Drupal site use HTTPS there is a very simple and easy solution. Open your settings.php file that is located in drupalroot/sites/default/settings.php.  If you have set up the $base_url variable replace it with the following PHP code.  If you haven’t set this up, use this code and replace the base URL with your site’s URL.

if (!strcasecmp(substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],0,5),'/user') && !isset($_SERVER['HTTPS'])) {
header("Location: https://" . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
exit();
}
if (!strcasecmp(substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],0,5),'/user')) {
$protocol = "https";
}
else {
$protocol = "http";
}
$base_url = $protocol . "://www.example.com";


Enjoy!

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Thomas Lee, graduate from Northwestern University, a student in one of my web design classes, ex-NUAMPS student employee, has been dedicated to becoming a top photo-journalist since leaving NU. This week, his work is featured on line and in the magazine with his photos about the tuna industry and the impending population crash and environmental disaster from eating and harvesting too many Bluefin Tuna. Congratulations to Thomas on the great feature on a very important topic.

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From Dries Buytaert:

Whitehouse.gov using Drupal

Big, exciting news! The flag ship website of the U.S. government, Whitehouse.gov, just relaunched on Drupal. This is a big day for Drupal, and for Open Source in government, and something all of us in the community should be very proud of.

The Dries Buytaert site make a pretty broad linkage to Drupal and the Obama administrations dedication to”open and transparent government”.

I guess I’d rather say they are using Drupal because they are really smart.

A tip of the hat to NUL’s Bill Parod for alerting us to this .

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One of the numerous web projects that NUAMPS has been working on has officially launched!

We’re Northwestern University’s newest online publication for research computing.  We’re here to bring you information and stories regarding the wide range of computational science activities that are underway at the University.

Check us out!   The quality of research done at Northwestern has been recognized around the world for many years running.  The degree to which Northwestern’s research advances often depend upon innovative computational practices…well, that has often been overlooked.   Not anymore.

Check out the site here, and if you have a NetId at Northwestern, login and post in the forums.

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The third annual meeting of the Oncofertility Consortium will be held next week, September 13-15, in Chicago, Illinois. Over 150 participants from the U.S. and abroad will discuss the latest breakthroughs in the science and clinical applications of fertility preservation methods for cancer patients. More information on the event, including a meeting agenda, can be found here.

NUAMPS is doing a three camera shoot as well as broadcasting the conference using Adobe Connect. Mark Skala is directing and Mike Curtis is providing support for Adobe Connect as well as coordinating the presentations.

Tune into the conference using Adobe Connect here: http://nwuniversity.na3.acrobat.com/oncofertility/

For more information about the Oncofertility Consortium check out: http://oncofertility.northwestern.edu or http://blog.oncofertility.northwestern.edu

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Marc Andreessen, one of the original developers of Netscape (remember that?), has announced that he is backing the new browser start-up ‘RockMelt‘. While not released yet, could this browser add to the steadily growing list of those we web-developers must use for our standard site-checks? The last year or two has seen an increase in that list which now includes multiple (and very different) versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and recently Google Chrome. While RockMelt is just a name right now, the fact that the New York Times is prominently covering the announcement might be indication that the browser could get enough traction out of the gate to matter… Or maybe this will be the only mention you will ever hear of it.

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… a campus-wide project at Northwestern University designed to foster common intellectual discourse among students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members. During the 2009-2010 academic year, we are reading Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – And How it Can Renew America by New York Times journalist and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman.

NUAMPS worked with Science in Society to produce the blog for One Book One Northwestern.  We are hoping to have a constructive dialog about the book and the ideas presented by Friedman.  Check out the blog here.

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As part of our ongoing work with the Northwestern University Archives and Northwestern University Library Digital Collections we get the opportunity to do some really great digitization projects. This was a single one off project, but the digitized object is one of very interesting historical significance to Evanston, the location of one of the NU campuses. The 1876 map had significant conservation work done before it was imaged by NUIT A&RT NUAMPS employees Stefani Foster and Dave Look. Stefani appears in the video below.

Library Restores and Digitizes Oldest Known Map of Evanston from Northwestern News on Vimeo.

The map in all of its high resolution conserved glory can be seen on the NUL website: http://www.library.northwestern.edu/archives/exhibits/map/index.html

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