Handling video files produced for a MOOC on Windows with git and git-annex

This post is intended to document some elements of workflow that I’ve setup to manage videos produced for a MOOC, where different colleagues work collaboratively on a set of video sequences, in a remote way.

We are a team of several schools working on the same course, and we have an incremental process, so we need some collaboration over a quite long period of many remote authors, over a set of video sequences.

We’re probably going to review some of the videos and make changes, so we need to monitor changes, and submit versions to colleagues on remote sites so they can criticize and get later edits. We may have more that one site doing video production. Thus we need to share videos along the flow of production, editing and revision of the course contents, in a way that is manageable by power users (we’re all computer scientists, used to SVN or Git).

I’ve decided to start an experiment with Git and Git-Annex to try and manage the videos like we use to do for slides sources in LaTeX. Obviously the main issue is that videos are big files, demanding in storage space and bandwidth for transfers.

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Présentation du projet Debian par Nicolas Dandrimont lors de la Debian release party de Jessie

Nicolas (olasd) Dandrimont est venu présenter le projet Debian à Télécom SudParis lundi 18 mai 2015, pour la petite fête de sortie de la version majeure “Jessie” que nous avions organisé avec MiNET.

Les transparents de Nicolas sont disponibles sur son site.

Updated : Voici l’enregistrement de la conférence sur YouTube :

Merci aux membres de MiNET qui ont joyeusement participé à cette petite fête.

Voici quelques photos :




Vous pouvez aussi revisionner l’enregistrement de la conférence de Stefano il y a 4 ans.

Avec MiNET, première Debian release party française de Jessie le 18 mai à Télécom SudParis

Vous étiez frustrés de ne pas pouvoir fêter Jessie en France dignement ?

On a pensé à vous, avec MiNET.

Le 18 mai entre 17h et 18h30, nous fêterons ça à Évry (Essonne) à Télécom SudParis, avec la participation de Nicolas Dandrimont en guest star, pour présenter le projet.

Attention, inscription gratuite par avance en contactant les organisateurs, compte-tenu des contraintes de sécurité pour l’accès au site (vigipirate).

Plus de détails sur : https://wiki.debian.org/ReleasePartyJessie/France/Évry

A howto record a screencast on Linux and tablet

I’ve documented the process of how I’m trying to perform DIY screencast recording, for the needs of a MOOC.

I’m working on my Debian or Ubuntu desktop, using an external graphic tablet with integrated display for annotating slides.

The main software used for the process are xournal for annotating PDFs and vokoscreen for the screen and video recording.

Here is the documentation : http://www-public.telecom-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/screencast-linux.html

And here’s the companion video : https://youtu.be/YxcUNqXPYZE

I hope this is useful to some.

How to publish an HTML5+RDFa Web site from org-mode

I’m a big fan of org-mode (see previous posts), and I’ve started maintaining (sic) my professional webpage(s) with it.

But I’ve also recently tried and publish some more Semantic/Linked Data aware documents too (again, previous posts).

Ideally, I think my preferred workflow for publishing articles or documents of some importance, would be to author them in org-mode, and then publish them as HTML5 including RDFa meta-data and annotations. Instead, I’ve more frequently been doing conversions of org-mode to LaTeX, in order to submit a printable version, and later-on decided to convert the LaTeX to HTML5+RDFa…

But one of the issues is how to properly embed the RDF meta-data inside the org-mode documents, so that the syntax is both compact and expressive enough.

I doubt there’s a universal solution, given that RDF tends to be complex, and graphs may not project easilly along a mainly linear structure of an org-mode document, but anyway, there seems to be possible middle grounds that are practically good enough.

I’ve tried and implement a solution, which reuses the principles set by John Kitchin in Extending the org-mode link syntax with attributes, i.e. implementing an HTML exporter for a particular custom link type, which will convert the plist-like syntax to some RDFa constructs.

Here’s a description of the whole solution : http://www-public.telecom-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/test-org-publishing-rdfa.html

The nice thing about org-mode, and its litterate programming babel environment, is that it allows to embed the code of the links exporter inside the org document, avoiding to dissociate the converter from the document’s source, making it auto-complete.

Next step will probably be to author a paper (or convert back a “preprint” of mines) with org-mode, in order to provide Linked Research meta-data.

Stay tuned for more details, and in the meantime, I welcome any improvement to the org/babel/elisp setup.

Edit: I’ve recorded a webcast to provide a bit more details, available on YouTube : https://youtu.be/OyI3DVqllx4