Upgrade of PMAL

“The time has come”, said badger….

To put in a proposal to upgrade the Ploughshares Media Arts Lab. Right now we have 5 PowerMacs and 5 PCs. My proposal is that we move all the video editing to the Macs and use the PCs for Finale and drafting (Mickey White). Thus I propose that we get 10 replacement Macs and upgrade the PCs to Windows XP and the latest version of Vectorworks but remove Photoshop, Premier, etc

PMAL upgrade proposal

Lab hardware

1. 10 2GHz iMac with 20” screen, 2Gb memory and 400 Gb drive. This will see us clear for at least 3 years. $2306 per machine. $23,000 for the systems. This will provide enough local storage for large projects. Remote storage on XServe.
2. USB audio input switches
3. midi keyboards
4. upgrade the Gigabit switch to accomodate 32 or 24 ports.
5. new plotter (Epson??) which will print poster size. Epson Stylus Pro 9800, 44” wide, $5,000. Mac OS 10.4 supported.
6. sort out cost of redoing the furniture. Space for keyboards.

Configuration

— server and clients on LDAP. Users log in as normal and retain their configurations on local machine. Xserve acts as fast access backup for projects.

Server

1. Apple X-Serve 2GHz CPU, 4Gb RAM, 1080Gb storage space, Combo drive. $5,500.

Software

1. iMac. Final Cut Pro, Photoshop Elements v3, iLife (bundled). Finale. Sundry creative utilities.

Course idea

Talking to ‘his coolness’ Kevin Miles about a dead brill course idea:

Modern Media and the Shaping of Cultural Consciousness

To Do:

• plan for Spring 08
• make Ford-Knight proposal Fall 07
• get PDF support for summer 07
• outside money — grant applications?
• find some other places which have done similar things and get ideas
• have F-K students specialise in one section and build a repository of media fragments to use.

V useful documentary :
Advertising and the end of the world

Media:

• film — advertising clips. Have students remix clipettes into their own advertising critique
• audio — podcast including radio commercials perhaps …
• billboards — create big billboard
• print

Switch to Firefox

Berkun blog » Blog Archive » Why I switched to Firefox. Fascinating article on Firefox User Interface

Slides from tonights Seattle PMI presentation »

SpamLookup plugin for M.T

SpamLookup is a M.T plugin for identifying and eliminating weblog trackback and comment spam. Works with M.T 3.1 but is rolled in to M.T 3.2

So…. we really do need to have a conversation about blogging software directions. It seems to me we have three options:

1. Rely solely on the blogging module coming up for Moodle
2. Stay with Moveable Type v2.61. Pro — it works. Con — but for how long? Cumbersome to set up, and not likely to be used much.
3. Move to M.T v3.x. Pro — supported, and lotsa useful plugins. Cons — costs money for licence.
4. Move to Wordpress? Pro — it’s free, has built-in wiki. Cons — needs MySQL & Php. Pro — no ‘rebuilds’, easier to set up. Cons — single blog per user.