Planet Sakai

October 10, 2008

Gonzalo Silverio

RTL Sakai

Back in Sakai 2.0 I went through an attempt to serve up a Right To Left language Sakai experience. At the time this was just an academic exercise, as there were no language resource bundles for Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, etc. I just wanted to torture test the framework, frankly. It was amazingly simple to modify [...]

by gonzalosilverio at October 10, 2008 03:19 PM

October 09, 2008

Angela Henry

August 18 - September 21, 2008

Angela's back...

It's been a month. Remember when I said I would update the blog every two weeks? Oh, well... I've been a bit (actually a lot) under the weather for the past 2-3 weeks and my poor blog is suffering from lack of attention. Easily resolved - today I return!

Since my last post, I have been familiarizing myself with the kind of documentation that Sakai needs. I started working on documentation for the Assignments tool, but due to my background in training end users, the documentation was focused too much toward them and not enough to the QA tester. I've made the adjustment - in the process of regression testing the Assignments tool (on QA3-US), I saw exactly what was needed and set to work. There are many areas where the test conditions exist but need to be fleshed out, and I've been eagerly ceating Excel spreadsheets listing the test conditions for various tools. After I attend to this blog, my next step will be to update my Wiki page with the documentation I've created.

For the past month, I have worked on the following:

  • Documentation - Assignments and Resources
  • Regression Testing - Assignments (create, submit, grade, full regression suite)
  • Regression Testing - Resources (full test conditions)
  • Testing - Samigo Tool (SAK-13930)
  • Testing - The win demo version of Sakai 2.5.3

I'm currently working on testing the win binary version of Sakai 2.5.3

See you again in two weeks...

Angela on Sakai

by ajhenry777 (noreply@blogger.com) at October 09, 2008 07:31 AM

September 22 - October 5

Back again,

Still recovering from illness, but during this period I worked on the following:

I've also been following up on the distribution list emails. Immersing myself in them is helping me to get a good overall picture of the project (it's big :-)

Best,

Angela on Sakai

by ajhenry777 (noreply@blogger.com) at October 09, 2008 07:13 AM

Steven Githens

bill mcglaughlin is on!!

It’s only now that I looked at a schedule and realized Bill McGlaughlin is on every day!! Bill McGlaughlin is unstoppable! He’s so excited about classical music in a really nerdy and intense, yet contained way. I discovered Saint Paul Sunday when I was living in Minnesota during summers in college, but didn’t realize he had a regular show too.

WFMT Feeds:
http://www.wfmt.com/main.taf?p=4

Exploring Music with Bill McGlaughlin:
http://www.wfmt.com/main.taf?p=1,1,41,7

by githens at October 09, 2008 12:20 AM

October 08, 2008

Sean Mehan

Google now using techniques to protect you from your own bad impulses

In an astonishing pilot service, Google is proposing a new filter on gmail that will prevent you from sending embarrassing or damaging emails when you might not be in total control of your actions. This is interesting, and the service could be extended in different ways. convert this post to pdf.

by Sean at October 08, 2008 08:21 AM

October 07, 2008

Sean Keesler

Open Source Portfolio Screencasts - Exploring the Tools

I just created a few screencasts about the Open Source Portfolio. Hopefully this documentation (funded by Weber State University) will help others understand how to use the OSP tools in Sakai.

I start by introducing how to setup a worksite in Sakai, how to import data structures from the community library and how to recreate a teaching "Best Practice" from another university as a way to jump start the portfolio discussion in just three screencasts.

See the complete docs here

Setup a demo site

Import and export a form

Recreate an Existing Portfolio Best Practice from the Community Library

by Sean at October 07, 2008 08:12 PM

Michael Korcuska

Sakai Conference: Virginia Tech

Don’t forget to register for the Sakai regional conference at Virginia Tech. The early registration deadline is Monday October 13th. More conference details, including a tentative schedule, can be found on the wiki page. Remember that the cut-off date for hotel reservations at the guaranteed Sakai rate of $129/night is also Monday, October 13, 2008. To [...]

by Michael Korcuska at October 07, 2008 11:09 AM

Steve Swinsburg

Leaderboard takes shape

Now that SakaiAdminX is released, I've been able to get back into developing my Leaderboard app for Sakai. Its already taken great shape, thanks to the Wicket framework. 

This is my first venture into Wicket and I must admit its refreshing to be able to code pure Java and pure HTML and watch them come together into a fully functional application. No messy mixes of HTML with some other type of coding (JS Trimpath control loops, Java wrapped around JSP when there was no JSP tag to suit <insert other messy framework here>). What's even better is Wicket has its own AJAX API for making your app more asyncronous, and works 100% with jQuery for some cool UI enhancements.

Lots of prototyping at this stage, should have something concrete shortly. Stay tuned.


by Steve Swinsburg (noreply@blogger.com) at October 07, 2008 09:23 AM

October 06, 2008

Peter Knoop

Cambridge Hackathon -- 7-11 July 2008

News Item edited by Nathan Pearson

The weeklong Sakai Hackathon has come to an end, and its been an interesting week. During the course of the week more than 15 people from over 10 organizations participated; though not everyone was able to be present for the entire week, including a few key folks, such as Nicolaas Matthijs and Nick Desmet, who were only available for the first part of the week due to prior commitments, and others were distracted at times by production issues at home. The overall goal of the Hackathon – exploring the implementation of designs from the UX Improvement Project using Cambridge's MySakai and sdata approach – was a general success. While the UX scenarios from the Improvement Project were not completely implemented by the end of the week and accessibility and internationalization were not entirely finished, our collective understanding of what it will take to do so was greatly increased. This work also helped demonstrate another approach to usefully separate back-end development (e.g., java) from front-end, user experience and interface work (e.g., javascript, html, design). Such a separation can certainly help facilitate collaboration in a community such as ours, where the full complement of skill sets required for completing a project can be drawn from multiple organizations.

The work initiated at the Hackathon will continue beyond just this week. (Cambridge, in fact, will be offering much of this functionality and some redesigned tool interfaces to their campus community near the end of this month!) We hope to have a server available soon where you can explore the outcomes of the Hackathon and think about where you could contribute to and leverage this effort yourself. Please contact me for more information. In the meantime, some key points of interest are:

  • A dashboard.
  • Add-and-remove widgets.
  • Drag-and-drop rearrangement of widgets.
  • Accessibility for the overall page (e.g., dashboard view) and within widgets, using tabs and arrow keys; the Tools widget was the one prototyped during the Hackathon.
  • Internationalization for widgets; the Tools widget was again the prototype, and while the internationalization infrastructure was basically completed, time ran out before any translations were made in order to fully demonstrate it.
  • It all can be run alongside the current Sakai experience, if you have users who would prefer the existing interfaces for the time being.

Thanks to the folks at CARET for organizing and running the event!

by Nathan Pearson at October 06, 2008 09:42 AM

October 05, 2008

Michael Feldstein

Thomson Suing Zotero: More Info and More Thoughts

Stephen Downes and Scott Leslie have both expressed concern that my original post regarding the Zotero lawsuit was possibly too charitable toward Thomson Reuters. Sadly, as more information comes in, it’s beginning to look like they were right.

(...)
Read the rest of Thomson Suing Zotero: More Info and More Thoughts (886 words)


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by Michael Feldstein at October 05, 2008 04:48 PM

Ian Boston

OSGi version resolution

OSGi version resolution looks great, but there is a problem that I am encountering. I can deploy more than one version of a jar as seperate OSGi bundles, but unless the consuming bundle was explicity written to specify a range of versions that bundle will not start.

Bundle A was built with a dependency on package org.apache.commons.useful;version=1.0.2, which means any version > 1.0.2.

I deploy bundle B with org.apache.commons.useful version 1.0.4, great no problem.

Bundle C depends on org.apache.commons.usefull;version=1.0.8,

So I deploy bundle D with 1.0.8, great for Bundle C, but now Bundle A can see 1.0.4 and 1.0.8 and wont start, due to a constraint violation.(at least in Felix).

To make this work I have to go back to bundle A, and rebuild it with version=”[1.0.2,1.0.8)” meaning “I depend on any version >= 1.0.2 and < 1.0.8|. Thats all fine, but, now every time I add a second version of a jar to OSGi, I have to go back and repackage all the bundles that dont have precise enough version numbers.

You might argue 1.0.4 and 1.0.8 are equivalent so dont deploy bundle B anymore, but the same problem happens when you try and deploy bundles container 2.0.6 and 2.5.5 when 2.5.5 is not fully backwards compatable.

Worse, this also means if I took any 3rd party bundles without precise version ranges, I will have to work out how to rebuild them. Not exactly and inviting task when you have > 100 bundles in a container. Makes me wonder if its worth all the hassle.

by Ian Boston at October 05, 2008 09:55 AM

Casey Dunn

QuickTime and iTunes

So you may recall that I'm writing a Java desktop application for delivering Language Assessments. The Application is a 'remote' Sakai tool running on the desktop but talking back and forth to Sakai. One thing that is bugging me is this: I can create a QuickTime movie containing the desired audio track. I can annotate the QuickTime movie with a text 'track' which serves as a label for the

by noreply@blogger.com (caseyd) at October 05, 2008 12:37 AM

October 04, 2008

Dr. Chuck

Putting an iFrame into JSF - Not so hard these days

Here it is: <f:verbatim> <iframe src="${PresentationTool.slide.url}" width="100%" height="1200px"> </iframe> </f:verbatim> I am guessing that this got much easier when JSP and JSF became friends......

by Charles Severance at October 04, 2008 07:30 PM

Chris Coppola

Boxing with a beehive

In a recent article about the Jacobsen v. Katzer case Bruce Parens, the creator of the Open Source Definition (OSD), warns that "taking adversary action against an Open Source project is like boxing with a beehive."

I think he's right. In my own experience with the Sakai project I've seen boxers like Blackboard stung repeatedly as the education market, led by the education open source community, swarmed against them for their predatory behavior using bogus patents. Recently we're seeing signs of a similar swarm related to the Thomson-Zotero suit.

Yet the stinging power of the open source community (at least legally) has been uncertain--until recently. In August the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued it's ruling in the Jacobsen v. Katzer case. This was the first substantial legal test of the open source license in a reasonably high US court. The ruling sounds to me like the most important legal victory for open source--ever.

The Jacobsen v. Katzer case is between a model train hobbyist and open source software developer named Bob Jacobsen and Matthew Katzer, the owner of a proprietary model train software company. The district court hearing the case issued a potentially disastrous ruling that the open source license terms were contractual covenents. Based on that ruling Jacobsen may be entitled to monetary damages for breach of contract, if in fact there was a legitimate contract. He would not, however, be entitled to more substantial copyright infringement remedies like injunctive relief (court enforced compliance with the license terms).

As I understand it, the substance of this ruling has to do with whether a judge interprets the terms of an open source license as a contract that requires both parties to agree, or a license that does not have such a requirement. This determination between contract and license determines the extent to which the license can be enforced, and the kind of remedies available when the terms are violated.

In August, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed the lower court's earlier decision. We're very fortunate that legal experts and others seized this opportunity and donated their time and money to help defend Jacobsen and set a precedent for all open source communities. Without such help it may have been cost prohibitive. According to Mark Radcliffe the decision sets forth the basic rule very clearly:

“Copyright licenses are designed to support the right to exclude: monetary damages alone do not support or enforce that right. The choice to exact consideration in the form of compliance with the open source requirements of disclosure and explanation of changes rather than as a dollar-denominated fee, is entitled to no less legal recognition.”

One effect of this ruling is that our communities can be confident in the terms of our licenses and in our ability to defend them. Because the ruling interpreted the open source license terms as conditions on the scope of the copyright license, copyright law remedies such as injunctive releif, attorneys fees, actual damages, and statutory damages may be applicable.

Boxing with a beehive doesn't seem like a good idea in the first place but the new ruling makes it even more reckless and dangerous for the would-be boxer. The open source bees have been africanized!

by cdcoppola at October 04, 2008 07:12 PM

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