Planet Sakai

I’m pleased to see that the Longsight Group is now offering a new Sakai trial service. They call it their Sakai Authentic Pilot and it allows an organization to have a fully supported instance of Sakai for up to 400 users for 6 months. You get this pilot service at no charge if your organization [...]

As part of the the Sakai 3 project (I should say, the 3akai R&D project that we intend to form the basis of Sakai 3) and the overall UX initiative, the Sakai Foundation, University of Cambridge and Georgia Tech recently engaged a User Experience Design Consultancy in the UK create a visual design.  The Sakai [...]

A couple of interesting things on web audio. Podcasts and public radio combined. convert this post to pdf.

Did you know that influential conservative Judge Richard Posner was, for a time, involved in the Microsoft Anti-Trust case an an independent mediator? When reading Ken Auletta's World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies, I was struck by how Judge Posner took time and effort to truly understand the technical aspects of the case, as well as the social and economic effects of the case's possible outcomes. Here was a man, I though, who was able to "get it" despite the fact that he wasn't on the cutting edge of technology.

However, a recent post on his blog (yes, he has one) has thrown all that into question...

More...

I recently upgraded Java to version 1.6 (build 1.6.0_13-b03-211) on my macbook pro running OSX 10.5.7 (leopard). It was a bit of a chore but it mostly sped things up and allowed me to run some of the newer apps that require Java 6.

I had a major casualty though when Aptana Studio stopped working. It would simply crash without even giving a decent error message and the logs were not helpful.I normally run the standalone version of Aptana Studio (1.2.7) which is built on eclipse 3.2. This seems to no longer run on OSX and Java 6 so I went in search of a fix. After lots of forum browsing, tweaking configurations, and reinstalling I ended up retiring version 1.2 and trying out version 1.3 (still in beta). It was hard to find the 1.3 downloads page so here is a link.

It installs quite easily and ran which was a major improvement. However, when I tried to install the features (plugins) I am used to, they all indicated that they were incompatible and would not install. This seemingly hopeless situation was actually easily fixed by updating Aptana Studio (Help -> Software Updates). Once that was done (definitely restart here) I installed the features (php, pydev, git) and plugins (epic) that I like and everything seems to work fine again.

Hopefully this will save someone a little pain.

I suddenly had an unplanned gap in my summer dad duties so I turned to my long list of neglected nerding.

I have been able to cajole my random-number-of-charges to help with installing Ubuntu on a stack of old machines prior to donation (5 so far!), taught some of them how to solder, and exterminated a horde of vermin from the call center, but no real traction. That will wait for summer camps to start!

After the last Stanford project I promised myself I would jump ahead from the 2.4 era of Sakai Stanford has been using. I took a peek at the K2 stuff - The white paper was sensible, Zach's notes useful... so I finally picked up Maven 2 and git. Too bad today was the same day the Sakai confluence was down for a brain trainsfer. I commenced to downloading the current binaries.

Onward!

One goal floating around is to upgrade the kitchen Mac Mini to an Intel based Mini. The current Mini becomes a server in the call center. I wanted to run a CZWXLLC svn server outside of the graces of Stanford, and so went through the steps to get a svn server on the G4 mini. I did the simplest possible thing I could do. That is to get the server deployed running via the svn:// protocol and constantly accessible from within the imperial home network.

It wasn't that bad. Here is a rough outline:

1. install the SVN package somewhere sensible. I used /usr/local/bin. that may not be sensible to you, but it was sensible to me.
2. figure out which user is the 'login' user, if you have one. The Kitchen computer happens to have one - we want Skype up when Mitchell is on the road, so it's always ready to go.
   
3. use svnadmin to create a repo directory somewhere where the login user has rights. I just used the user's home directory.
   
4. update the user configuration files with your various users and assign passwords
5. start svnserve

Now, this last bit is a bit trickier. You probably know about svnserve -d -r /path to repo and all that stuff. Firing up your svn server that way, as the login user, gets everything hopping along. Until restart.

To get your svn server to start up after a restart is the real goal. To do that you're going to have to use the Mac OS launchctl tool.

launchctl is used to configure the launchd daemon. The idea is that you want the box to boot, scoot through a set of 'scripts' and fire up basic services. init.d stuff like stuff.

The 'scripts' are XML configuration files. They are stored in /Library/LaunchDaemons, and by convention are '.plist' files. These contain a namespace registration mechanism and a way of passing in command line arguments. Take a look at the files on your own machine - it's pretty straight forward, yet as with most of these abstractions rather opaque - what the heck are the options? the options for svnserve itself are fine, but what about the OS?

For svnserver I used one found here. Be sure to change the path to the repo, the user and the user's group as necessary for your machine.

More sophisticated schemes would have non-login users, separate groups, etc., etc., but I didn't think that was necessary for getting off the ground.

As this repo is behind the CZWX firewall this is as far as I've gotten. If I put it into the DMZ when I drop it into the call center I'll have to upgrade the connections to SSL and all that jazz.

Onward! Next steps are to get the most recent Sakai checked out as well as the K2 stuff and see about getting some edgeless administration stuff going on these phones.

Here is an article from Jody Gilbert outlining 10 IT sills areas that are currently fading into obscurity. Laughingly, UHI employs 2 of them as core architectural components in its service provision, namely items 1 and 2! convert this post to pdf.

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I am an advocate for using Python as a first language and for using programming as a tool to explore abstract concepts and technology literacy (Informatics) starting in elementary and middle school. Here is a book written for kids using...

Here is the obligatory cute High School Graduation memories video for Brent Severance. This is a video which contains some early memories for Brent. The video includes video from the 1995 Easter Seals telethon and Brent singing at the Sycamore...

This is a video which contains some memories looking back at Brent Severance up through high school. The video includes video from the 1995 Easter Seals telethon and Brent singing at the Sycamore Elementary School Talent show in 1997, 1998, and 1999. Brent has Cerebral Palsy.

We last posted when in the throes of our design phase, with iterations of prototyping and user testing - very intense. We managed one round of conceptual design, paper prototype testing with users, a design combination and refinement, wireframe testing with users, and then final refinement.

We are now very proud to have a set of wireframes for one overall design concept which we have created through a full user-centric design process!

Since then we've been working on capturing our work and recording the details of what we have done, how others might do similar things, what results we've found and what we learnt, for future dissemination. The incredible density of activity through our research and user-centric design processes has lead to a huge amount of information, and crystallising that into forms which are useful to ourselves and others has been time consuming - but worthwhile.

We are also looking ahead to the next phases of our project; potentially another round of design and testing, and then integration of the system into new Sakai. Work on the backend engine of new Sakai ("K2") progresses apace, and we're also building some basic networking features into our user interface for Sakai3 as the first hint of what academic networking might become. This does not yet include the full power and excitement of the concepts this project is generating...

Meanwhile, the JISC Academic Networking project will be presenting in two sessions at the forthcoming Sakai conference in Boston, July 8-10th 2009. Look out for John Norman and Anne-Sophie de Baets there!