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.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron Release Party, Lima

As Jesús Castagnetto was presenting a long talk on how to improve one’s PHP coding practices, I decided that the event was worthwile and went a little earlier to follow Diego’s presentation on GNOME and Fernando’s presentation on Drupal (although these two were of little interest to me, I still learnt a bit from both).

Diego was presenting GNOME 2.24 (if I remember well) but for some reason (I got there several minutes after he started) he didn’t have internet access, which seemed to prevent him from showing what he wanted. So I don’t know if that was intended but in the end he started showing how to develop a small window-size program in Glade, which got me to finally understand more or less what Glade actually was. I think it was too complicated for the audience though, as most people seemed to be looking at the screen with bright eyes just because he generated a window with a menu. Somehow, I felt like an Ubuntu release party was not exactly the place to be showing how to code, but nevermind… I guess it was all due to the Internet connection problem.

I’ve always wondered what exactly Diego was doing in GNOME. I went on his blog the other day and… well… I’m still wondering. [Diego, if you read this, do you mind telling us?]

Then came Fernando, founder of Drupal Perú. If I understood well, Fernando is a developer (if not the main developer) of the Organic Groups extension for Drupal. I had already seen him presenting Drupal at Linux Week and I cannot help but think that he needs a little more dynamism when presenting it, but I think it’s pretty much down to Perú itself rather than him alone. There’s something in Perú that seems to be making all people that want to look professional never smile or laugh in public. Weird.

Anyway, although it was pretty much repeating what I already knew, the Drupal presentation got me (in the end) to find out the name of the Drupal module that allows DHTML menus to appear on top of my Drupal website, as they do for my WordPress account. That’s called the Admin Menu module, and if you try to find it by name on the Drupal modules page, you probably won’t, so here is a link: http://drupal.org/project/admin_menu

I got to see a bit of the Panel and Zen modules as well, which seemed nice to change your site’s design (gotta try that).
Finally, Jesús came out of nowhere and started his presentation on PHP’s coding best practices (you can get it in Spanish from here). Very interesting talk. I have to admit that nothing was new, and he’s only translated and improved the work of others for this talk, but it was a complete presentation of all the things that you know you should do but never do all at once.

Of particular interest to me were the directions that PHP6 is taking (like E_STRICT and the removal of register_globals and magic_quotes) and possible efficiency optimizations (like using several parameters to echo rather than a concatenated string, or using ++$i rather than $i++).

He also told us that exception handling was generating memory loss in PHP5, which took me by surprise…

Anyway, globally, I’m glad I went and I must admit I’m surprise at the amount of initiatives promoting free software in Lima. It’s like hammering free software like we *should* be doing it in Belgium. But there are obviously more people around here ready to hammer that for free. Good thing, if you ask me!

Dokeos Latinoamérica at FLISOL 2008, Lima

My presentation of Dokeos, which was supposed to happen at 6pm, and then has been set to be at 4pm is actually split in two. So I will be at the UTP at 4pm and at the UNI at 6pm, one hour each side… Funny stuff!

I will be giving a speech at FLISOL 2008, Lima, Perú, on Saturday the 26th of April, around 4pm (and for around 1 hour).

You might want to have a look at the program if you intend to come…

Considering the main topic of the FLISOL 2008 (Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de
Software Libre) is the open-source software in education, it seems quite essential for me to be part of it. I’m currently discussing having a stand over there. The primary objective being to find new clients, I am not sure it’s the right event for that.

If you want to see a demo of a fresh Dokeos 1.8.5 or to discuss the development of Dokeos, feel free to come around.

Spanish version

Estaré dando una charla en el evento FLISOL 2008 de Lima este 26 de Abril 2008, en la Universidad Tecnológica del Perú, cerca de las 4pm. Como el téma es sobre el software libre en la educación, era bastante importante para mi de participar.

Estoy conversando tambien en este momento para tener un stand en el evento.

Linux Week in Lima

Next week (from 2008-03-10 to 2008-03-14), the Linux Week event is taking place in Lima. There are a few presentations of direct interest for me, like, on Monday: Desarrollo de Aplicaciones Web con Eclipse and Desarrollo de Aplicaciones Web con PHP; on Tuesday: Drupal, más que un CMS and Aula Virtual: Sistema de videoconferencia avanzada para la web; and finally on Thursday: Aplicaciones Web de Alta Disponibilidad con Apache y PHP

The entrance is free (like in speech and beer) and it is happening in the Universidad Catolica, which is one of the biggest of Lima (yes, they have a real-size campus), and is located just at the limit between the districts of San Miguel and Pueblo Libre. All the talks are in Spanish though.

2008-03-11 update: After two evenings of assisting the event, I think I can say it’s pretty much all introduction level. Introduction to open source, introduction to wireless networks, introduction to distributed logs management, etc. Not much worth my time for the contents themselves. Luckily, some of the speakers are promising. Like Marco Villegas, which apparently is also a Drupal developer, and is one initiator of a Peruvian group for Drupal developers.

Also, I’ve indirectly provoked (but not initiated - Diego Escalante kindly took the responsibility to do so) a set of very nervous questions and answers geared towards the difference in conceptions of the need to publish or make available in any way the source code of a GPL application. The talk was given by Alfred Kobayashi from E-volution Hypermedia, in Trujillo, who talked for half an hour about the good things of open-source software before admitting that the software they were developing (an event organiser) using so many open-source pieces of software was in GPL but that you couldn’t get its sources unless you paid the normal product price. In fact, the preamble to the license is the only part where something is said about some kind of obligation to make the code available on request, but it is only applicable to people having received a version of the software. So following the license, he was right, but that didn’t really make the audience less nervous about it. It’s true that for a GPL-software developer that publishes his work, it’s a bit hard to take that another developer uses his work to do other work that he licenses as GPL but keeps the code inaccessible to non-clients. But hey, these are the licensing terms…

Where it ceased to be that clever is when Alfred tried to argue that the code was not published because:

1. it was their economic model, so basically they are basing their economic model on something that could change from one day to the other (any client could publish the code, thus reducing the economic model to dust)
2. it was not mature enough (code-wise) to release, so the image of the company would be affected, yet the presentation was all about coding standards and how coding using XP or UML techniques was so much better.
3. they were involved in open-source so much that they *had* to make it GPL, philosophically (Alfred is a high ranking member of the APESOL apparently - yet another open-source association in Perú)