The RoboCup Soccer Simulator – The RoboCup Soccer Simulator is a research and educational tool for multi-agent systems and artificial intelligence. It enables for two teams of 11 simulated autonomous robotic players to play soccer (football).

Brain workshop – Brain Workshop is a Python implementation of the Dual N-Back mental exercise. This exercise is the only mental activity that has been scientifically shown to improve your short-term memory (working memory) and fluid intelligence.

View your mind – is a tool to generate and manipulate maps which show your thoughts. Such maps can help you to improve your creativity and effectivity. You can use them for time management, to organize tasks, to get an overview over complex contexts

Sweet Home 3D – Sweet Home 3D is an interior design Java application for quickly choosing and placing furniture on a house 2D plan drawn by the end-user, with a 3D preview.
What are the ones that you find interesting?

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is something that I talk about at a high level when I deliver social media training. Here is the long version of this story.

• Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd)

This license is the most restrictive, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

• Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa)

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.

• Attribution Non-commercial (by-nc)

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

• Attribution No Derivatives (by-nd)

This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

• Attribution Share Alike (by-sa)

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

• Attribution (by)

This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.

There is a lot more to CC than these six categories. There is an organization called CreativeCommons.org, it’s a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.

They provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

They are based in the U.S.A therefore it’s unclear if all their licensing rules apply globally.

There is another category called CCO that applies to your own work that you can waive your rights and make it completely available to the public without restriction to copyright and database law. This category applies to scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content.

We all need to earn a living, so who would be crazy enough to use these licenses?

The best known example of course is Flickr, they have incorporated these licensing into their offerings.

Wikipedia, Google and Open course ware. The most interesting one is a band called Nine Inch Nails, who released some of their songs for FREE as well as a limited tired step version of other products, services etc…This had an amazing effect whereby they had a sold out tour and sold their other products as well.

If you are thinking of incorporating CC into your business or otherwise, there are great guidelines on how to go about this. Since we are here in Canada, then how do we know if all this is relevant to the laws here. I am happy to say that we do indeed have a CC Canada.

Q What are you doing?

A 140 characters to answer

Update

That’s it in a nutshell however it has some really cool features which I will share at length here.

This is what the home page looks like.

What are you saying?

This is where you say what you have to say about whatever you want to say.  The catch is that you have only 140 characters to say it in.  Click update when you are done.

It could be some thing serious like a product launch or just as simple as where you are having you next cup of java.  If you share a link, it does shorten the link, tinyurl, thus maximizing on the 140 characters.

Like most web 2.0 or social networking sites it’s evolved from a purely social to business related as well.  I find it very useful for following the latest product launches, news, ideas, information and whereabouts of people.

Someone mentioned that she turns twitter on her mobile when her spouse travels on business.  He is very good about posting updates like boarding plane, plane landed, renting car etc. It puts her mind at ease to know that he is ok.

If you like short and simple then twitter is for you.  It’s not for lengthy posts with comments.

Let’s explore the top navigation bar.

Profile

This shows every tweet you have ever made.

Find People

You have the option to invite people from other networks.  Once logged into your email it will go through the list and see who from your address book are already on twitter.

Select those that you’d like to start following.  Continue.

For those that are not there you can select people that you want to invite and click on send invites.

The other option is to invite via email.  Twitter will send an automated email inviting them to join, a standard in the social networking world.

At first I had a hard time with this feature as most people I knew were not on Twitter nor had the desire to be on it.  So using my address book from email did not work well.  As I started networking and hanging out in the Social Media spaces I found a lot more people to follow.

Settings

here are the usual Account and Password settings.  Fill out whatever information you want displayed.  If you are a very private person you do have the option of protecting your updates.  Note you will not be on the public timeline if you select this option and only people following your updates will see them.

Devices

Everything is mobile these days.

So do add this feature it will go a long way in sending those instant updates.

Notices

This is a great feature.  “Nudge me if I haven’t updated in 24 hrs” a txt to you phone.

@ Replies – this is very important as this is the filter for the volume of information you want to receive.

The usual email me for updates and newsletter gotchya.

Picture

Great to personalize your profile.  Note size only 700k.

Design

This is twitters attempt at customization.  This is definitely an area that needs improvement.  It’s best to select a current theme as attempts to customize fail miserably.

Now the Right navigation bar.

You will see you photo, name.  Below this you will see ….

Following

Tells how many people you are following, in this case I am following 105 people.  Clicking on this link will give you the listing of all of these individuals.  You do have the option of removing them or inviting more people.

Followers

Shows how many people are following me.  In this case 35.  Clicking on this link gives a full listing.

Updates

This indicates how many updates are there, 39.  I guess I need to start tweeting more : )

@Replies

This shows all the tweets that have been in response to my tweets

Direct messages

This is where you can send a direct message to the people following you. It has the usual Inbox and sent folders

Favourites

Star your vavourite twitter updates and they get saved here.  A great feature if you have you find a link useful for example.

Everyone

Well it’s what it is, everyone who is tweeting on twitter!!!!

Following

This shows a summary of the people you are following with the option of showing all.

Device Updates

This is where you set up you mobile device, got to add this to my to do list.

Well there you have it, Twitter 101.  So if you are not on twitter go ahead and try it out.  I will share my thoughts on the good, bad and ugly of twitter in the new year.

Now that you know what RSS is all about, here’s a little information on RSS readers/aggregators. RSS readers are very similar to email clients. They are free so if you don’t like the functionality of one you can quickly and easily move to another.

Some?of the RSS readers are?

• google reader
• bloglines
• newsgator
• my yahoo
• feedburner

They all work on the basic principle of

• creating an account
• logging in
• adding the URL of the site you want to follow

The alternate way to follow a site is to look for one of the icons above, this will automatically open the reader of your choice.

So try it out and see which reader you like.

Here is a RSS in Plain English?still confused how about RSS the Oprah way.

Have you bookmarked your favourite websites and check them on a regular basis? If you find this rather time consuming and frustrating when the website you look at has the same information from a couple of months ago then?RSS is for you. ?

RSS aka Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication?is a format for delivering regularly changing web content like headlines, update notices, blogs, wikis etc…?directly to you.?It saves you time and helps you to get the information you want quiclky, after it was published.

Another analogy is a magazine subscription, only in this case it’s delivered to your RSS reader everytime there is an update?

For you geeks out there, RSS is an XML-based format for content distrubution. Webmasters create an RSS file containing headlines?and descriptions of specific information.

A lot of websites these days offer RSS feeds. It’s easy to see if a website has an RSS feed, it will have the orange button in the link window.

RSS is a free and easy way to promote your website without the need for complicated contant sharing partnerships.