Blender and Audacity

Blender -
What is Blender – a 3d graphics generator and animator. An application could be a physics application. It is a C++ application that can utilize python scripts. (I wonder if Louise used this during her undergrad work in art.)

This is way cool stuff I think I found my next career!

Audacity and Gimp also talked about.

“The Gimp” is an opensource option for photoshop.

Session on Open Office

This presentation comes from a small (200 FTE) seminary associated with a a small liberal arts college. It is a unique environment as they are service a population of students that ranges from recent graduates to second career seminarians. They moved toward open office in part due to licensing issues/costs.

The implementation was very seamless as Open Office is easy to use.
They have gained many advantages -

• no longer have hassles of trying to support users that have sub-standard word processing programs with Windows
• Removes licensing issues
• truely standardized the productivity suite on college owned computers and personal owned computers
• able to continue to remote install practices with open office.
• many of the questions that are likely to be asked are already answered in the forums.
• PDF generation
• Ability to package presentation as a flash file or slideshare supports the open office presentation format.

Concerns

• Open-office Interoperability with Office 2007 (issue of the .docx)
• has left the default save extension as the .odf (openoffice format) developed a document standards policy.
• make sure the decision making process is
• making open office work pulling information out of the SIS.

Recommended book – OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and Thunderbird…

It is interesting that a common question that who do we call when their is a problem. We often ask this question and it is nice that others have the same question but collectively we laughed at how often we actually place those calls and get answers that isn’t spend more money and upgrade or buy this service.
The presenter puts forth that the drive and direction of this product is most likely to come from developing countries…
It was noted that – Neo office the open office version for the Mac is maturing…

The idea of portable apps was floated as a way to handle remote presentations where one can not assume