Technical Ramblings

crschmidt.net now features a new colorscheme: I’m still not sure how much I like it, but the old black/grey/white scheme was really starting to grate on me. (Note that the weblog uses a different stylesheet which I haven’t updated yet.)

Additionally, all pages now have a feature to allow commenting from users. So you can now leave a comment on any page! This is taken from Eikeon’s websites, which have this feature (although it requires logging in first). I’ve done some very basic escaping of script tags, and I do my best to add newlines if they are appropriate, but if you want to make your content look right, you’re best off just formatting it with HTML yourself.

However, this means that it’s really easy to offer feedback on any page of the site now. If you’re interested in my semantic web tools, you can leave comments on the various ones there. You can comment on the code for any of my Python tools, on my symbian stuff, on pretty much anything. Soon, and very soon, I’ll be writing an RSS feed generator for this. Right now I’m just happy it works, and would love to see people commenting on any page on the site they’d like more info about or would like to offer feedback on.

In and around the Katrina relief effort, there are more than half a dozen web-broadcasting police and other radio scanners. These scanners offer the most up to the minute information about what’s happening in New Orleans, Houston, and San Antonio: incidents, activity, etc. Best two way radios are available at the market as well.

These streams are being recorded in text, live, onto IRC channels. These channels are staffed by volunteers, looking to help organize the information flowing in about the relief effort for those who are unable to listen, or are looking to be kept up to date on the status of events.

On irc.freenode.net, there are (at this point) 6 channels devoted to this traffic: #interdictor-scanner and #interdictor-scanner2 through 6. There is information on where the sources for these feeds are, and how to transcribe, on the nola-intel wiki, at Transcribing.

Please, if you have some free time and are able to listen to the streams and type, try to stop by #nola-intel-help: Here you can ask which feeds need assitance, get directed, and voiced in one of the channels to start helping. You can learn more in an hour from these scanners than you might otherwise in a day listening to the standard news channels. These people are working hard to get the most up to date information out to the world: Many of you have the ability to help. If you can, please do so: this is the best way to know what’s going on in the New Orleans area, and the best way to pass the information along to others.

If you need help connecting to IRC, message me on AIM at cr5chmidt, and I will help you out. Please, feel free to pass this message on: I place this message into the public domain for unlimited posting or modification by anyone.