Following a post by Scott Leslie mentioning the release of Sakai 1.0 rc1, I figured I'd take a swing at installing it on our shiny new XServe.

Installation was a piece of cake (just be sure to set all of the environment variables, and download/configure the ~/build.properties file so it can find all dependencies for downloading). Once the source was downloaded, it really only took a minute to compile and deploy the application (although I spent much MUCH longer than that twiddling around with configuring the build).

Actually, it finally arrived on Monday, after slightly over 4 months on the waiting list. After it was taken out of the box and plugged in, it took maybe 5 minutes to fully configure the machine. Now, we just have to copy some APOLLO apps and resources on it, and it's good to go!

This beauty sports dual 2GHz G5 processors, and a moderate-sized 80GB drive - we'll tie it into our XRAID as soon as the card arrives, so it will have something silly like 3.5TB of storage space. It's a little RAM starved at the moment, coming with the stock 512MB - that won't do for long...

Just found a link to Using XPath in Flash MX 2004. Might come in handy, so I'm saving it here...

Mike and I were discussing the XML stuff we've been doing the other day, and I suggested we should post the JavaEOXMLSupport framework and JavaXStreamDBAdaptor as open source, to test the waters. He agreed, and so I've created a project on SourceForge to host it.

Currently, there are only 2 packages available, in raw source form (with little or no documentation - actually, there aren't even READMEs in there yet!), but I'll be updating the releases as we move along, and adding documentation and test apps when they're ready.

Thanks again to CETIS. They've just published a link to the UNFOLD Learning Design Community of Practice. Looks like a good resource to keep tabs on for information on actually implementing IMS LD

I'm in the process of migrating a copy of the metadata records from CAREO into an XStreamDB database. As part of that process, I'm transforming all documents from various malformed IMS LOM versions to the clean IEEE LOM schema. I looked around for a batch tool, and didn't find one that didn't rely on VB or MSXML or something equally unusable for me. So, I rolled my own java command line utility, called "BatchXSLT".

I finally got around to removing some of the krufty old test records from CAREO. I did a few searches, and came up with a list of 76 records that shouldn't have been left in the "live" CAREO database - they got added during various stages of software building/testing, by various developers.

Searches should turn up fewer "testing" results, and the "Newest Objects" isn't polluted by crap added by folks just kicking the tires...

Just came across this entry by Jonathan Rentzsch that goes into the pros of using WOProject and Ant to build complex WebObjects projects.

Here are the summary bullet points:

• Cross-project dependancies
• Automated deployment
• Speed
• Open Source
• Transparent project description
• Cross-Platform

Sounds like it would be perfect for APOLLO, with its several frameworks and adaptors, needing to be built in a particular order, and deployed in particular places. I'll be investigating building an Ant project for the various bits of APOLLO, and seeing if it will co-exist with the existing XCode build process.

I just took this personality quiz (found via a link from Eric Meyer's weblog. Holy crap. It came out scary-accurate.

There has been some noise on the web because I've kept the password for posting to this weblog a "secret", and that may go against a decentralist philosophy.

The initial plan was to have this weblog used by the "in person" folks at the conference, and for those who couldn't attend personally to contribute via their own weblogs (hence decentralism). But such is life. This frankensession took on a life of its own long, long ago. So, let's adapt a little...

When Dave Hyatt announced some of the cool new additions to WebCore to support Dashboard etc. - via "extensions" made to HTML - my first reaction was "Hey, that's cool!", followed rather quickly with "but, doesn't that break the standards?"

Things like the cool new attribute (announced here) on the input element work great, look awesome, but as a result, make the source page invalid XHTML-Transitional. Doh.

The new element (announced here), which gives you a place to draw bitmaps via javascript (and is used by the analog clock widget in Tiger's Dashboard), also very cool and useful, but not in the standard...

Not sure if I'll end up using it as my email address, but dlnorman@gmail.com went live today. At first blush, it looks pretty cool. I'd love to be able to connect via IMAP, but that would probably kill the whole adsense interface that pays for the whole thing...

I know of 2 ways to get a GMail account:

1. eBay
2. As a registered Blogger user.

I'm cheap, so you can guess which one I used. Only active Blogger accounts are added to the GMail beta. Active is a somewhat arbitrary term, since you only need to have 2 posts in a weblog, with one posted sometime in the last 2 weeks. They can even be something creative like "Testing." I'm just saying...