Time tracking in Dokeos’ exercises for 1.8.6.2

Dokeos 1.8.6.2 will ship a new beta tool, the time tracker for exercises. It’s been asked for since 2004, as far as I can remember working on Dokeos, but I have always refused to start implementing it, mostly because it was a risky business to have to support a JavaScript widget with the lack of portable JS libraries.

Since the adoption of JQuery globally in Dokeos though, things have changed, and although *nobody* financed that development (which I am quite disappointed about, actually), we have taken the responsibility to put it inside 1.8.6.2.

This is one more big step in the run against Moodle, which seemed to loose speed constantly for the last two years (see activity graph on Ohloh), and for which we were always getting justifications like:

• more flexible (we still have some work to do on the graphical flexibility here)
• supports UTF-8 (technically, we now do this as well, and support might actually be better than in Moodle, we didn’t check that)
• allows for timed exams (1.8.6.2 will support that)
• is faster/more efficient (I am still waiting for data to prove argument and I seriously doubt it)

We are also working constantly on improving the time and scores tracking overall, as this is a highly sensible matter for most of us.

The rest of the features set that varies is generally considered moot (=not important/useless) by users in many cases, but we have a bunch of things that Moodle doesn’t have yet.

Now as we prepare for Dokeos 2.0 and Moodle 2.0, I’m growing more curious about how this is all going to work in the future.

Great speaker tips

Tips on how to speak in front of an audience, by Professor Patrick Winston of the MIT. Great resource if you are doing a lot of presentations, be them courses, commercial presentations, motivational talks or any kind of meeting where you are the main focus of attention, actually.

Working on online translation for Akelos

We are currently working on the development (or co-development, as a base was made available to us by the Akelos team itself) of a plugin to Akelos that fixes the current problems of language variables duplication, deprecation and need for a manual edition of the files.

There are still a few things to be fixed in terms of getting that into a production environment for Akelos instead of just the development environment, but we’re working on that.

Sakai tricky to install from normal Linux distribution

We have a student working for us on comparisons between various LMSes here, and we recently moved on to Sakai. We’ve been looking a bit at installing it on an Ubuntu 9.04 and boy… is this a challenge.

While there seems to be a few sources of documentation around the web (including on the Sakai website itself) on how to install it, they’re all giving a 20 pages-long guide on how to install a specific version of Java (from sources), a specific version of Tomcat (from sources) and a specific version of Sakai (from sources as well). It seems like you need to be an active Java developer, used to the Tomcat stuff to actually get a chance to install it.

Now that makes me recall our numerous users who complained about the fact that installing the videoconference in Dokeos 1.8.5 was impossible. Well, let me say that you require at least double the skills to install Sakai.

The website mentions there are packages for Windows, Mac and Linux, yet the link to the corresponding page is broken (why’s that, I wonder).

An article from a Java developer gives you the impression it is a breeze to install, yes we are talking about a previous, outdated, version of Sakai.

A big negative point for Sakai (yes, you can try it online, but obviously you might want to try out scaling and building your own site on a local server).

100 resources for Freemind

I’m stealing a post from Marie here, to remind myself of a great list of resources linked to Freemind, that allow for extending the use of the tool: http://www.mindmeister.com/33158470/100-ressources-autour-de-freemind

No time to analyse now, but I will surely need that in the future.

Cal, Chris and Derick changing jobs

There seems to be a strange mood going on among a few of the top PHP activists and core developers. Chris Shiflett changed job recently (about two months ago), and today Cal Evans declared he would be leaving ibuildings, almost at the same time Derick Rethans stated he would be leaving eZ Systems.

The latter two indicated they would be looking for positions that really make them enjoy their professional activities. I believe Chris already found a new position (didn’t check that).

For the companies they are leaving, this must be a major concern (even counting on a few months to prepare for the cut), as they represent hugely recognized PHP developers in the face of the community.

This kind of reminds me that one of my personal objectives for the future releases of our solution is to improve the management of talent as a way to both retain key people by planning their needs of change and also make sure that, if people leave, they also leave behind motivated and capable people that will be able to provide continuity of their work.

Be an open-source start-up

To be a startup, a company has to be a product business, not a service business. By which I mean not that it has to make something physical, but that it has to have one thing it sells to many people, rather than doing custom work for individual clients. Custom work doesn’t scale. To be a startup you need to be the band that sells a million copies of a song, not the band that makes money by playing at individual weddings and bar mitzvahs.

This is a quote from http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html

Well… it certainly seems that funding is not considering with a nice eye the open-source start-ups :-D

What about Twitter, Facebook and Google? Their *initial* success was not based on selling (or at least not in the common sense of earning money). However, they are all considered as having been successful start-ups, or aren’t they?

Oracle Spatial with PHP (links)

Just to make sure I found this again later…

http://blogs.oracle.com/opal/2008/03/location_awareness_with_oracle.html gives an example of Oracle Spatial queried from PHP

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/php/index.html is the Oracle homepage for PHP Developers

Loop11 user testing web application

Today I found Loop11.com (through a job advert in the Australian Web Standards Group mailing), an interesting site allowing for user testing (for $350) of your site for up to 1000 users.

The application puts a JavaScript layer on top of your website and requires you to define tasks for your users to complete (without documentation, of course). You then invite users (you have to invite them yourself) to come and test your app.

I’ve tried the demo (takes about 3 minutes for 3 tasks) and I must say I like the idea (although I would love to see some results, which is apparently not possible through this part of the demo, but you can setup a trial account for a short user test). The only missing part would probably be to gather users for you (I don’t know… invite people to test in exchange of one dollar per test or something like that – I’m sure some unemployed people would spend days there.

GMail Sender header problem and using other domains

I’ve been using GMail for a while now as an SMTP server to send my e-mails from other domains, no matter where I am going.

What I realized later is that most of the e-mails I send are getting seen as sent by my account @gmail.com, while I’m actually trying to send them as if they were sent from @dokeos.com. Well, apparently the whole thing is quite compromised. There’s an interesting discussion about that here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?tid=2f66ff4e186cdc8a&hl=en#all, and apparently this is the correct way to do it for Google, so not much hope to get improvement there.

Another important point is that it is apparently a problem (in certain circumstances) with Google Apps, as the ‘On behalf of’ header is sent in the e-mail, indicating the e-mail you would have liked to send it from, instead of putting it in the ‘Sender’ header.

Well, that means I’m back to another SMTP server. I don’t want it to show as me@gmail.com to my customers.