Let's have another progress report - we haven't for a long time

One: It's growing - what? IPSIS portal. Bravo administrators, do bravely, do more, fill it with quality.

Two: Research: We have two dear social-work students who are doing their practical work at the Association. Girls will make a research on GLS. This is in preparation phase...

Theee: Education: Vjeko and I talked about the need of making a course in usage of the portal for our blind computer users. Vjeko shall visit each of them and show them how it works. Education shall start next week because there is still not schedule agreed upon.

Four: Publicity:

ay: Dražen has submitted an abstract for DORS/CLUC Conference that shall be held on FER, Zagreb, 18-19 April 2002. For that purpose Dražen and me are preparing a full-text article.

be: Sven is writing an article for "Spring librarian school" - something on digital libraries and potential benefit for the blind. I hope Sven will tell you more about that later.

ce: I have submitted an abstract on IPSIS project to "8th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs", 15 - 20 July 2002 University of Linz (Austria). The article has been accepted as poster.

Five: Donations: OSI has made a contest for Open-Source project to be financed through them. "New Technologies and Society (Support for innovative approaches to development and usage of information and communications technologies (ICTs) by civil society) ". That's our field isn't it? Deadline for submission is 12.4.02. Dražen and I shall go to "Mama, because guys there are willing to help us apply for that donation.

tada

Danko Butorac

    www.ipsis.hr is working. If you haven't noticed, we have our owndomain now.

U the "base" all the same - servers falling down, portal is slowly getting some content, Mirko and Mico are debugging, and Drazen is working on a TTS-api. Plum has started to learn from Mirko about python and the things Mirko programmed. He will slowly take over that piece of development.

Dražen and I have started the search for a new programmer to continue GLS development, especially OCR. Ask your friends. Maybe we could find some space in budget for these people.

Come on now! Get a little bit more active so we don't look like snails anymore. And give me your ideas about the Mini-ICC camp for IPSIS testers.

ta-ta

Danko Butorac

Last year we achieved great result. Look at the internal web, and English version is there! www.ipsis.inet.hr/static/index.html. But that's not the reason to get lazy, and do nothing this year. I am telling you this because of you list-members, you are all so quiet. There is 25 list-members and not one mail from you....:(

A sad status report follows:

Why sad? Because our forces got savaged by some viruses and other diseases. Ogi is four days in knockdown now, and Vjeko was out 2 days - he still sounds funny when he speaks. Mićo had a twisted ankle, and after that a flu. Koraljka has constant cramps. Romana's old PC is slowly giving it's last, and the new one is still on the way. Is that some kind of conspiracy against us??!??!

Vjeko and I got a new server for Internet connection, which, for now, works only when Vjeko is around. But the important thing is that it works. Well, the server is still a baby, and it needs a mother once in a while.

Mićo and Mirko are deep into debugging, and Dražen always brings something new with the new version of speech-API. But, the new things never fit exactly to Mirko's concept, and every time Dražen changes things Mirko gets grumpy. As good as the extreme-programming approach was in the beginning, now it seems to eat up lot more time. Well, Dražen knew that in the beginning, and never seemed too upset about that. There is no reason then to get upset about it, I guess...

Koraljka found two new students to work on the digital collection. I would like a status report about that matter. Kora?

Ogi and Mirko are done with the service in a month. There are new people coming.
Introducing TADAAAA! Šljiva (Plum) - AKA Branko Šlivarić.

Plum is a great programmer, right beside and a good friend of one of the TLB fathers, Mirko Karas. (no, Plum is not coming here on recommendation ;)). What's more, Plum will be here on Feb., 4th and he'll have enough time to have Mirko showing him all the advantages of the work (and the waitress in Vidra :).

After Plum TATATATAAAA! Comes Sven.

Sven Cvek is one of the founders and editors of one of the best digital magazines in Croatia (Libra Libera www.zamir.net/libera), great English teacher, and master for all other things. He'll be here on Feb, 18th to help Ogi, and to start with hard work on the collection and all things connected.

Okay, enough from me, now you! I want comments, questions, wishes, greetings, debates, anything will be welcome on this list. Enough of the snow and hibernation, let's get active.

If you don't have anything else to do, there is a heap of literature here to learn from, just ask.

Over and out,

You know the drill. It goes from one to....

1. Carnet (Croatian Academic research network) blessed the project of digitizing books and making e-books for web-distribution. I'm heading there today to make the donation/collaboration contracts together with 'em. We shall sign the contract till the end of the year.

2. Iskon Internet is our donator for the cheapest Internet access (according to their pricelists). They also gave us 50MB server space with access to MySql and PHP4. We shall have 20 e-mail addresses on the IPSIS domain, but we shall deal with that sometime in February. Can't wait to have you write to me to: danko@ipsis.hr:))). We will have to pay Iskon for a static IP address though (around 1000Kn/year - that's not so terrible).

3. Waiting for Ministry of work and welfare to give us their agreement for us to register an ipsis.hr domain. They said everything is OK with them, but their paper is still not here.

That's it from me.

Hmmm I guess we need to enhance our donators list with Carnet and Iskon internet.

bye :)