ResearchBuzz

I’m still trying to find the ideal Linux distribution to use in Internet access terminals at work. I have tried Ubutunu (too slow), Xubuntu (couldn’t get it to work), and Puppy Linux (great but it refused to recognize any of my USB devices.)

Reader DM suggested I take a look at Damn Small Linux, available at http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ . Damn Small Linux (which is also called DSL, and isn’t that nice and confusing) is a 50MB download which is designed to fit on a mini CD, a USB pen, flash drive, or whatever.

I downloaded it and recorded it onto a CD, and ran it as a LiveCD. It ran at least as fast as Puppy Linux, and accepted my USB devices with nary a complaint, so in that respect it was great. It also automatically configured my ethernet connection, which Ubuntu did but Puppy didn’t. (In Puppy’s defense, it was really easy to set up the ethernet connection and took about 30 seconds.)

Using Damn Small as a terminal, I don’t expect to have any problems — it’s going to be used for Firefox and Firefox only. If I were using it for anything more extensive, however, I’d be nervous. I am a Linux newbie and didn’t find it friendly at all. There’s no menu bar, which makes it difficult for me to figure out what’s going on. If you’re an intermediate Linux user, you’ll probably like it a lot more than I do.

Here’s where I am right now Linuxwise. If it would run my USB devices, I would be sticking with Puppy Linux. If I could figure out why it runs so slow and fix that, I would be trying to put together an Ubutunu Linux computer for my mother. And once I get some more Linux experience under my belt, I’ll be taking a closer look at Damn Small…

Thanks to reader KM for pointing me toward VideoLectures.net ( http://videolectures.net/ ), a collection of over two thousand videos related to science. It’s currently in beta and looks like it covers a variety of topics, from Web technologies to translation tools to math to logic.

The front page points to several different lectures and lists the most prolific authors. There’s a search box, but I skipped that in favor of browsing the most popular videos, which included folks like Tim Berners Lee and some dude named Noam Chomsky. Click on a video and you’ll get a page for the video and a brief description as well as a list of related videos (”The people who watched this video also watched…”) You’ll have the opportunity to leave comments as well. Click on the thumbnail to start the video. Some lectures are set up as a series of videos.

These are not the two minute videos that you might be used to from YouTube. These are lectures; all the videos I looked at were well at least an hour. Their quality varied a lot; Bettina Berendt’s discussion on Web usage mining was interesting but sometimes she was hard to hear. On the other hand, Kamal Nigam’s lecture on Text Information Extraction was extremely easy to hear and follow.

There are a couple of problems with viewing lectures this way. I could never see the slides/presentation materials to my satisfaction. As I mentioned sometimes the lecturer’s voice is hard to hear. And of course you can’t ask questions! I did like the caliber of what’s already been gathered at this site, though. Now if only all the lectures included PPT files and transcriptions…

An Oneida tribal elder and a University of Wisconsin-Green Bay professor have teamed up to create an online database of Oneida language resources, available at http://www.uwgb.edu/oneida/ .

The language site has several different tools available. There’s a background to the Oneida language. There’s a downloadable Oneida grammar, which is available in about a dozen different files or one large 26MB download. (The downloads are PDF files with include sound files. Click on the bold Oneida words to hear them spoken.)

On the site there’s a searchable English to Oneida dictionary (Oneida to English will be available at some point.) You can do a word search or a phrase search. I did a search for tree and got 25 results, ranging from the word tree to “beech tree with face in it” to “tree noise in winter” to “hang a tree up on another tree”. If you click on the Oneida word, you’re supposed to be able to hear it, but alas the whole thing is triggered through a Java applet and I had trouble getting it to work in Firefox.

The site’s clearly under development; the dictionary is nowhere near complete and there’s a “sample texts” page that isn’t functional yet. But the dictionary and downloadable grammars are well worth browsing if you’re at all interested in languages or Native American cultures.