I ran into 2 new awesome open source tools within 15 minutes. I leave you to imagine the smile that was on my face and the number of open tabs in my firefox (:

I am blabbering about Kaltura.org and FreedomFone.org

Kaltura :

I was looking for a nice way to manage massive video content for a personal project or more like a personal idea. So all the nice and expensive “services” i could use were out of scope. I don’t want to upload to youtube and share the links (that’s a long story that has to do with copyright) and I want something more interesting than just a video player or at least a video player that can work on the lebanese connection and can handle good buffering of large files.

One link led to another and i found Kaltura projects

ONE OF their projects is Kaltura Community Edition (CE) – Self Hosted Online Video Platform - this platform enables video management, publishing, syndication and monetization, as well as providing a robust framework for managing rich-media applications, and developing a variety of online workflows for video. The latest version of the Community Edition also includes enterprise level administration and monitoring tools.

Kaltura Community Edition is ideal for:

• Publishers that want to host the video platform and content at their own datacenter or on the cloud
• Service providers or web-developers that want to provide video management and delivery solutions to the web sites that they build or provide services for
• ISV and Platform developers that want to integrate video into their platform, adding video management and delivery to the platform offering
• CDNs, ISPs and hosting providers that want to add video management and delivery services to their offering
• Enterprises that want to manage video and rich media content behind the firewall
• Universities that want to manage video in conjunction with their LMS, or a campus wide video portal
• Any site – combined with Kaltura’s extensions for leading CMS and LMS platforms (including Drupal, Joomla, Moodle, Sakai, Blackboard and WordPress)

I went to download page and put the file in queu – I had to go through the reality check that I am in lebanon and I have to wait for ages for any download to finish.

In the meantime – I kept browsing and found that if you are not a tech head, they also offer a free account on http://corp.kaltura.com/ with up to 10GB storage and access to a very good and pro dashboard for video managment. That should do for any blogger or at least it is fair. If you want more than 10GB – they have permium plans.

I will leave you to check out Kaltura – I will probably get back to it with a detailed review. If you found it cool and used it, it will be nice if you also get back to me with your progress about it.

FreedomFone:

Now time to share the second awesome tool I found thanks to @alaa ( again ! ) – The story is bit complicated and includes a 1 hour line of thought while stuck bus in lebanon traffic. So I am giving you the twitter version :

That’s when @alaa came to the rescue

” Freedom Fone is an information and communication tool, which marries the mobile phone with Interactive Voice Response (IVR), for citizen benefit.  It provides information activists, service organisations and NGO’s with widely usable telephony applications, to deliver vital information to communities who need it most.”

Freedom Fone is built combining the power of several open source projects that include:  FreeSWITCH,  Spidermonkey,  PHP5,  Cake PHP and  JQuery. Freedom Fone uses  Cepstral, a text-to-speech voice engine to synthesize voice messages.

So I added another file to that download list and I am still waiting.

I wanna give Freedom Fone a good try in some real case scenario – There is only one problem – getting hold of the hardware – I am not sure if it is banned in Lebanon as VOIP or not (another reality check on how ugly things are ) . Even if it is banned – I am working with some people who operate legal voip stuff and I can just add this to the purchased items list – but I am not sure if we will need a license to operate it .

So if you are an NGO or someone interested in this idea more – let us collaborate ( i have to finish paid work and the Kaltura project first, but doesn’t mean we can’t get started :P )

So those were my 2 new open source tools – hope you enjoy them.

A time ago I wrote an introductory tutorial on FTPying by using Filezilla.

Bassem ran into my post and thankfully left a warning on the dangers of saving passwords in the client, so  I asked him to write a full post  about it to spread the awarness.

So here is a link to his post, I hope you find it useful and make sure to check his blog, it is quite interesting imho (:

It was late night and I suddenly got into my reading mood – so i turned to twitter to get some book suggestions.

Thanks to @lammiia and @alaa – i got a pretty good refill of ebooks :) – I started reading the first one @lammiia sent me which is Hunger games written by Suzanne Collins.

The book is mainly a captivating science fiction/thriller that discusses stuff like govt. control, survival, basic instincts, love, deception, manipulation, poverty, revolution…

It is not a super deep book that will make you think a lot, but it certainly has some deepness in it while maintaining a very addictive aspect. It made me remember a quote from the movie gladiator that says something about wars not only being waged between the cold columns of the parliament but also on the hot stones of the Colosseum

I don’t want to ruin the story, but mainly a govt. ruling separated states,starves and divides citizens, then each year they make the people “celebrate” the “hunger games”.

In hunger games they take a boy and a girl from each state and put them in a death fight against each other in the wild.

So the states end up hating each other and in each state the families are divided.

The state that wins gets to live in prosperity for a year and the victor becomes rich and of course it is all a show for the capitol people.

The book is definitely a good read, you will not be able to put it down before finishing it for sure.
It is also a trilogy – I read the first, but not in the mood yet to read the other books- instead I am moving to something else – so suggest a book for me !

A while back I published an anonymous survey on poll daddy about love,relationships and sexuality.
People were not asked to enter their names but to choose questions to answer from the survey, not all fields were obligatory.

I was hoping by using the anonymous internet, ppl will feel more comfy and answer honestly, eventually we will be able to collect some actual data on the topic.

Plus961.com posted link to survey as header on his blog and many friends retweeted – (ok, i only tweeted 3 times about this) – the results were disappointing even tho i kept the survey open for a longer time, we only got 19 replies – a number not worth an infographic. i was hoping for at least 50-70 replies.

Anyhow, i am sharing with you a link to the csv file containing the results as promised. (Download)

Hope we get more lucky in the next infograph – till then keep me posted on any efforts you are doing to visualize information – Hope I will be able to help you collecting data and visualizing (: