Unclasses

Hey thesethings, you have indeed made the correct assumption. I am on a Mac.

I’m sorry for the lack of communication for the past week. I was away at Railsconf all week. If there is still interest i’d be interested in setting something up within the next two weeks.

How would that be?

I’m almost done evaluating the various software options. Ted, when you have a chance, can you confirm my assumption that you have a Mac? The teacher is the one who has to install special stuff, and I want to make I write all the steps, etc.
As for us students, we basically just need Flash.

Ted,

I’d be into taking a remote learning class on this topic. I’m coming from Ruby too, but would still be interested if it were taught from the PHP angle.

Sarah

Feel free to randomly invite me to test classes if you need a guinea pig for testing.

OK, I’m tasking myself with doing a light comparison of the tools Jeffrey, Ted, and I referenced in Twitter.

Priority to me:

1) Seeing teacher’s screen, specifically his/her Terminal.
2) Audio from teacher
3) Being able to ask questions (chat)
4) Being able to ask questions (audio)
5) video of teacher’s face (nice to have, but not important compared to crisp view of screen)
6) video of students (nice to have)

We’ve all been to a million “webinars” where there’s no facial video, just a Powerpoint with live audio from speaker and chat from students. I think it works pretty well.

Feel free to add thoughts…

Ted, thanks for taking this on. Should we maybe plan on using some kind of desktop-sharing conference-call thingie like Dimdim?

I guess Ruby would be OK although I don’t use it (PHP would be ideal for me), but I’m guessing that just getting the setup and indexing strategy figured out would be more important than choice of programming language.

Am in Portland, would love to lurk if Ted Han ends up teaching. As he pointed out, we really only need screen sharing, and really only his needs to be shared…
Let’s take him up on his awesome offer?

Hey guys, i’ve had Sphinx running in production for a while now…

I could give you guys a quick rundown on the sphinx basics and some of the conceptual stuff behind it (i’m a computational linguist by degree), if there was interest.

Only thing is, I’m not in SF, and the implementation language i’ve used w/ Sphinx has entirely been in Ruby (Not that i couldn’t hack something up in PHP, i just vastly prefer Ruby). So, if people are still interested, i’d be willing to Skype in or video chat it up on one of the several nifty video conference flash sites that have popped up recently.

So, any feedback/interest?

this class needs a teacher, as your friendly (un)classes ambassador, may I suggest recruiting through your friends on Facebook and Twitter?