Josh and I have been slogging through the Pachyderm installation/configuration process. It's been a whole lot of one-step-forward, two-steps-back, but sometimes things just kinda work.

The commons thread we've come across is basically a version of "never, EVER use Windows on a server. Or, on a desktop, if it can be avoided."

Anyway, we've got it mostly working, thanks mostly to Josh's fancy PHP scripts to import data from the Pachyderm Filemaker database into the SQL Server database. That part works like a charm.

Just came across this link from John Dowdell. I'm adding it here so I remember to check it out. Looks like someone has experimented with rendering MXML into a UI on the client side, emulating Flex, without the server. Sounds like something that could be useful for Pachyderm...

I've been wanting to migrate my MovableType installation from the default BerkeleyDB to MySQL, in order to better facilitate backup/restore and data editing, as well as allowing the MT plugin to automatically close comments on posts after X many days.

I've been trying this in fits and starts for a couple of weeks, and keep getting bitten by what appears to be corrupt data in the BerkeleyDB database. The import process (mt-db2sql.cgi) barfs on the Comments, Entry, and Theme tables. The import is rather useless without these three types of data...

I've just added some potentially cool functionality to CAREO. Every object in the repository now has a link to its own Wiki page, where a freeform discussion or whatever can take place.

I'm not sure if people would actually use it. I think it's different enough from a traditional threaded discussion to warrant inclusion of both solutions.

In my head, I'm picturing the Wiki pages becoming more teaching-oriented than a threaded discussion could. Something more like the Wikipedia.

Interesting list of suggestions for describing RSS for the layman in 10 words or less.

My personal fave: "Remember Pointcast? Kinda like that, only actually useful."

Although, perhaps more appropriate and accurate may be: "Speed Reading the net."

I just threw the switch to enable Wiki Formatted Text in CAREO, specifically in learning resource descriptions (any time you see a resource listed - search results, main page, whatever), and discussion post entries. This will let folks just go ahead and enter plain text, and CAREO will try to Do The Right Thing to display it as nice HTML.

Something like this discussion on "Earth At Night" looks a wee bit better now that it's not all munged into one paragraph per entry, or faking formatting using the icky

 tag...

After way too long, I've taken some time to re-implement the RSS feeds from CAREO. The new implementation is infinitely more scalable than previously (now uses periodically updated static files, rather than regenerated-every-time live queries).

The downside of this new implementation is that you can't create your own feeds from any query. I'll add any new feeds that people want, but I preferred the personalized and on-demand nature of the previous implementation.

I've been playing around with interim builds of XStreamDB 3.1 Beta, and it's coming along REALLY nicely. It's pretty cool when the president of the company is the guy running the beta program. Jim's been awesome, feeding tips and pointers to the new stuff.

They just added/enhanced scoring of fulltext queries, so we can have results sorted by descending relevancy to a query. It's freakin' fast, too. I've added 3734 XML records from CAREO to XStreamDB (which is also running on the CAREO server - a G4/500 Desktop box, not fast by any stretch of the imagination - to keep the playing field level). Scored and sorted queries are returning results in well under a second. Great stuff.

I just enabled an RSS feed for upcoming workshops conducted by the Learning Commons.

Haven't added the orange XML link to the workshops pages yet, but here's the link. It updates every morning at 1:00am with the upcoming workshops.

Ferdinand Krauss is preparing for a presentation he'll be giving on designing effective learning objects.

Presentation available here (but requires some form of MS browser, which I don't have handy :-(

UPDATE: If you get the warning: This presentation contains content that your browser may not be able to show properly. This presentation was optimized for more recent versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer. - just click on the "do it anyway" link. It works OK in Safari here, I was just daunted by the "You don't have Explorer" warning...

Just updated CAREO to WebObjects 5.2.3 (and MacOSX Server 10.3.3, Java 1.4.2). All appears to have gone well, except the WebObjects StartupItem got eaten. Empty. nada.

I copied the working one over from my laptop, and all's well. Caveat emptor. Yadda yadda.

UPDATE: Yup. Just updated commons.ucalgary.ca, and it borked the WebObjects StartupItem as well. I had tarred the previous one, so it was just a matter of tar -xf WebObjects.tar to get it back, but it makes me wonder what else might be messed up...

We've been taking a look at Macromedia Flex, and it seems like a pretty cool technology. It manages data modelling, UI generation, and presentation of an interactive application (as a .swf) to the user. Some cool potential there.

The data modelling stuff feels a lot like WebObjects EOF. The UI description stuff (MXML) is much like Mozilla XUL. The end product looks like a plain old Flash .swf, that can be presented anywhere.