Surprisingly good position in Dokeos-Moodle-ILIAS comparison

I was playing around a little bit with a code metrics tool on the Ohloh website and, although I’m sure there’s some kind of arguable element there as some included libraries add a lot of “noise” in code contributions, I was happily surprised to see that Dokeos isn’t doing bad at all and is starting to get back at Moodle, in terms of code, contributors and global activity. I’ll let you check that by yourselves (following the “code metrics tool” link, or just looking at the screenshots below).

Before you start thinking that this must be a distorted comparison as it is made by a Dokeos developer, I just want to let you know that Ohloh.net is totally independent in this case. I just ran a comparison because there was a tool to do that automatically, and thought the results were interesting and at the advantage of Dokeos and, as such, might be interesting to post here. I totally realise that there is no obvious conclusion to be taken out of these results.

In the screenshots below, Dokeos is marked as red, Moodle as green and ILIAS as blue. Claroline, which I have left out of the comparison because I can only compare three projects at a time, has about the same level in the three graphs as ILIAS (in blue).

The first graph is about the codebase (number of lines of code). The second is about activity in terms of code submissions. The third one is about the number of active contributors. As you will see, when Dokeos is not on top, it’s getting there, slowly. Lines of code for the three projects are all increasing at about the same rate though…

Dokeos-Moodle-ILIAS code comparison

Dokeos-Moodle-ILIAS activity comparison

Dokeos-Moodle-ILIAS active contributors comparison

The Dokeos position in that race is not surprising because I feel like crap, instead, it is surprising because it is generally much more heard of Moodle as an active open-source project than Dokeos, so theoretically, Moodle really ought to be on top of these three graphs… go figure!

From the graphs, it looks like 2006 has been a tremendous year for Moodle, and then it started slowing down a little. I don’t know much about ILIAS’ history, but I recently heard from a colleague that had had to compare Dokeos and ILIAS that ILIAS was no match (big flame wars starting here ;))

Anyway, the story of Dokeos still has a bunch of nice surprises to come as well. I hope the same is true for our competitors.

Just for the fun, if you want to compare Dokeos to Claroline and Ganesha, follow this link.

Dokeos in Peru

In case it would be of any interest to you, I am currently developing a kind of “branch” of Dokeos (although nothing legally-binding about the branch stuff) in Latin America, and more specifically in Peru.

Peru is still what I would call a developing country, so at the same time it is hard to get used to (living there) and possibly excellent for future business opportunities. Of course, “developing” comes from “development”, and “development” means investments, which means a lot of money could be made (theoretically) from being in the right place at the right time.

Although I feel I’m still a bit ahead of “the right time”, I’ve invested a considerable amount of my time in developing the presence of Dokeos locally, and until now (about a year on) it’s not been very rewarding.

As I’m writing these lines, however, I just finished my first installation of Dokeos, or rather its videoconference module, on a Fedora 7 system. It ended up working nicely, but there wasn’t really any other expected outcome.

However, the interesting bit here is that it’s my first contract in Peru (most of my work so far has been a continuation of my work in Belgium) and it comes with a lot of simultaneous requests for information. I don’t know exactly why it’s all starting at the same time, but it is. So I might only have finished my first Peruvian job, but I’m still with 4 very serious leads for large-scale installations and training sessions, and a few more of unqualified leads, plus a bunch of people that know they can act as resellers of my (or should I say “our” as we’re a company of three now) services and take a nice commission.

So today, I might only being up to my first install, I am really positive about the future!

One of my serious leads is actually for software development, and is a request for a quote about the development of an add-on to the videoconference tool that will enable teachers to pass the video and voice to the user to ask a question. The feature has been requested a few times in the past, but we never managed to suggest a development time that satisfied the customers. However, now we have a much more reliable videoconferencing system (thanks to Arnaud Ligot and Frédéric Burlet), this might be much easier to work on (and so, cheaper). If you have an interest in this feature and would like to contribute to make it possible, just give me a shout. Otherwise, there is still a possibility that this client will not be able to finance the development and that we just leave it for another client, later on…

It always surprises me, though, how people are happy to pay 10u a year for a finished product, but reluctant to pay 2u for the development of the only missing feature in a product that costs 1u… (values provided for demonstration purposes, it doesn’t match anything).

Well, anyway, the point of this article was to let you know a little bit about my stuff, locally. The next articles will be a bunch of incredibly technical stuff, so this was just a big breath before the dive.

Dokeos single database - don’t let yourself get tricked

I wanted to write this post for two reasons:

1. to remind everybody that we (the Dokeos company) continue to vaguely support this mode because we understand it is still more practical when installing it on a free/cheap hosting server
2. to help you avoid the tricky issue in the installation process when deciding which main db name to use

As the first point is pretty much complete, I’ll go straight to the second point. In the Dokeos installation process, the database configuration screen asks you for a prefix and a database name. It’s all OK, but the tricky thing is that the default value that are given are “dokeos_” for the prefix and “dokeos_main” for the main database.

This might lead you to think that the database created will actually be called “dokeos_main”, while in this context of leaving the options by default, it will be called “dokeos_dokeos_main”. Yes, the prefix is added in front, as any prefix is.

I know, it’s not very intuitive so I’ll try improving that for the next version, but at least you’ve been warned!

Video activity report for Dokeos

There’s some new stuff on the net in terms of code analysis. If you already knew about the CIA project and the Ohloh.net website, and you liked it, you might get a good interest in code_swarm, a java tool that uses SVN logs to generate a (good-looking) video of the project activity in terms of code development.

I played with it a little bit for you, and this is what it looks like…

The video itself doesn’t look too great once it has been processed by YouTube, but you can get a better quality one from here (about 7MB): http://www.dokeos.com/download/dokeos-activity2.avi

Howto convert AVI to DIVX with mencoder

As I was looking into reducing the size of a video, I felt upon this wiki page, which proved super-useful:

HOWTO Convert video files

In short, you can use something like this for a quick fix:

mencoder <filename.avi> -ovc xvid -oac mp3lame -xvidencopts bitrate=687 -o <output.avi>

or maybe something like this:

mencoder <filename.avi> -ovc xvid -oac mp3lame -xvidencopts bitrate=-700000 -o <output.avi>

(setting a negative bitrate lets mencoder calculate the bitrate automatically to reach a file size of the given negative value in KiloBytes, although this doesn’t work for me…)

No security flaw so far…

It might seem kind of weird to mention it, but I had somewhat of a big scare when Secunia sent us an e-mail entitled “Security Patches in Dokeos 1.8.5″. If my fears had been right, it would have meant that we would have needed to re-package 1.8.5 only two days after the official release. Not something I would have liked to do…

However, it was just a basic “request for information” e-mail asking what security improvements had been added to Dokeos 1.8.5 as we mentioned so in our changelog.

The answer is that we integrated Dokeos 1.8.4 SP1, SP2 and SP3, as well as improved input filtering all over (more than anything in the survey and forum tools).

So we still have a robust 1.8.5, which makes me very happy.

Dokeos 1.8.5 released!

Dokeos 1.8.5 has been released, after a long 8 months development! Check it out on http://www.dokeos.com/download.php

There’s a lot to say, so I won’t comment about the release itself in this post. You can find out more about this release and what it brings you on the official website, by following the link on the right panel.

We are sorry to have kept you waiting for so long for a new version, but we’re sure you’ll understand why when using it!

Dokeos 1.8.5 released… kind of!

It’s still a bit premature because we’d like to try it out a few times more before officially announcing it on the website, so if you want to help, feel free to download your version from here: http://www.dokeos.com/download/dokeos-1.8.5.zip

In a few hours from now we will make the official announcement, so the official release date will be the 12th of June anyway.

If you happen to witness some wierd thing in the install or upgrade procedure, please, let me know as soon as possible!

Otherwise, just enjoy the ride. Dokeos 1.8.5 is concrete-stable, and this is a stability we will now be able to build on for the next version.

UTF-8 and resistance to change

Wouldn’t you know… While we (european people at least) are trying to make more and more open-source product use UTF-8 by default, so that we can (finally) share the same encoding with people that use character sets so different from us (mostly Middle to Far-East), resistance to change seems to be an important problem in Japan as well (as everywhere else).

On the php-i18n mailing list (see post here), Dietrich Bollmann took the hassle of posting a list of comments he gets from time to time regarding the implementation of UTF-8 inside websites and e-mails, from web developers and web authors. Let’s give him some space for a large quote and then I’ll give you a few personal views about all this (note that “cellars” actually mean “cellulars/mobile phones”):

Here a list with some of the answers I got (as I got them):

- Most cellars don't work with UTF-8.

...this is the one most important answer I got as lots of
people in Japan use the time they spend in the subway to
read and write their email with their cellar.

Only some cellars work with UTF-8 , most don't. And I often
was told by friends that my email program (I normally use UTF-8 )
"doesn't work correctly" : )  More often I just didn't get any
answer at all...

Based on this experience it is just natural that people don't
switch to UTF-8.  And even if more and more of the newer programs
also work with UTF-8 , probably it will still take a while until
this "tradition" in the Japanese software developer community
will change.

continuing with the answers:

1. I don't like UTF-8.  It is too new, everybody is used to JIS and
  when using UTF-8 there are always lots of problems.
  With JIS things work well out of the box.

2. The file size becomes bigger as there are so many different Characters
  which have to be encoded and Japanese characters are encoded with
  three bytes in UTF-8.

3. There are too many different versions of UTF-8 which create problems.
  There is only one version of JIS which and therefor no version
  problems arise.

4. I only use UTF-8 if absolutely necessary, for example when Chinese
  and Japanese texts are on the same page.

5. when using UTF-8 the characters do not look nice.

6. There is no need for UTF-8 : Japanese and Ascii is all we need in
  normal circumstances, why bother about other languages?

7. Similar Characters are grouped together
  and differences between similar Japanese Characters get lost.

8. Doesn't look good.

9. When only Chinese or only Japanese it looks good, when mixing
  languages the Characters the page gets ugly.

So, what do you think of that? I couldn’t imagine easily that reaction. In fact, it made me think about the North-American reaction to other charsets than ASCII. It’s a strong resistance to change, expressed in many different ways (particularly strong in point 6).

This list is particularly useful in understanding the problems end-users are facing and how things could be improved at the technical level for them to get a better experience with UTF-8.

There is a difference between coding systems and charsets (and I recommend following the link in the side-menu to understand that a bit better), but to be short I think the charset might influence the fonts used, in that every computer has a long list of charsets available and, for each of these charsets, there is a set of fonts (some of them being usable by several charsets, some of them not), that some people actually drew. Now this means that, if the guys that drew the images for “ttf-mikachan” (for UTF-8 ) are not as good as the “xfonts-jisx0213″ fonts (JIS only?), then people looking at UTF-8 text will think that, because it’s UTF-8, it actually looks worst, although they could just change fonts and it would look nice too. Changing default fonts, however, is not the easiest thing to do on a computer (and it might just be impossible on mobile devices).

So, if you, out there, are looking into implementing UTF-8 on your website or your e-mail client to communicate with Eastern people, please try to take into account the list of reasons why they don’t like it, and hopefully we’ll all end-up with better applications and a full adoption of UTF-8.

Dokeos 1.8.5 Beta 2 available

Alright, so I did release a little brother for Dokeos 1.8.5 Beta today. We needed it for a customer of ours which is in development phase, and we had made a series of small but useful improvements to the Beta 1, so we decided that “why not?” and that a little Beta 2 couldn’t be harmful.

It can be downloaded from here

Basically, improvements are:

• LDAP (tested in authenticated mode and added a field to define which value to search for in trying to recognize a teacher)
• forum post alerts by e-mail
• improved interface for creating new documents
• removal of *many* notice-level warnings
• speed and info improvements on users lists generation
• isolation of exercises (was causing problems when opening an exercise from a link)
• several fixes to buggy statistics for single DB mode
• fixed courses descriptions bug (couldn’t edit course descriptions)
• added informational messages in course copy to avoid user confusion

We are still working hard to try and get a definitive stable version out by the end of May or early June. We still intend to add several features to the whole thing (like *maybe* some kind of web services interface) which do not alter existing functions.

Can’t promise anything right now, but I’ll keep you informed.