I've been working on the app that manages workshop registrations here in the Learning Commons, and have been tackling one of the major problems in the current version - people can enter invalid email addresses, and may never even know they did it. They won't receive confirmation, and can't receive updates/modifications.

Often, these addresses are trivially incorrect (an errant space, a missing . or whatever).

Anyway, here is the code I whipped up for the app to attempt to verify the email address. It relies on the Java InetAddress class, and does a lookup of the hostname. If there's a machine at the hostname, I'll assume it's correct. (could get fancy and look up only MX records etc... but it's a start.)

The big Pachyderm 2.0 Kickoff Meeting in San Francisco is just about wrapping up now. It's been amazing the last couple of days. This group is simply incredible, with representatives from museums, universities, colleges, and the corporate world.

And they all Get it. The energy and excitement in the group is tangible. They are here for the collaboration and the process, not for fame or fortune. It's awesome.

We've broken off into working groups. I've been placed into the Software group and the Metadata/Interoperability group.

I've just put together a prototype Sherlock channel for APOLLO. Easy peasy tool to write (actually, 99% of it is the default Sherlock channel template file, with a couple of minor tweaks.

This is starting to feel much more useful (to me, anyway). An all-in-one application interface for searching and viewing learning objects.

Next, I want to complete the tool to use a SOAP interface (rather than the DOM-based screen-scraping it's using now) so I can have a little more control over what gets sent where. Sherlock made the screen-scraping version much easier than the SOAP version, though...

Panther simply rocks. At first, I thought it would take a while to get used to Expose (I am/was a die-hard Virtual Desktop user) but I'm actually quite liking it. The whole thing feels like a much faster OS (not sure if it actually is or not - who cares? perception is everything).

This is a scaled screenshot of Expose at work. The effect is awesome when viewed live (check out the vidoes on the Apple site). It's surprising how much info you can have available at once...

I just came across the MT-Blacklist plugin for MovableType. It seems like the perfect solution to the extremely annoying problem of weblog spam.

Over the last 2 weeks, I've had to remove over 100 spam comments on this weblog. Over 99% of them were apparently from bot software that spiders the blog to bump up the Google ranking of the target site.

Anyway, long story short, I've installed this plugin (relatively painless), and it doesn't require any modification to the MT code. Just drop 3 files into place, make sure you've got Storable.pm on your system, and configure away...

We're still in the planning stages for the next version of the software that runs CAREO and friends.

This would be a Good Time to send in wish lists for things that you would like a learning object repository to do, things you like/dislike/can't stand about the current version of CAREO, or even (especially) Pie-In-The-Sky wishes/dreams about what you would like to see.

Ideally, feature requests would point toward making the software more usable in a real-life context (i.e., "This is what it will take for me to use LO Repositories in the classroom..." etc...)

I stumbled across the "L Company" mentioned on a couple of RSS feeds I subscribe to. Their products sounded interesting (a 17" notebook, and a 45" flat panel display), so I checked out their website.

Welcome to Bizarro Apple. The site is an attempted 100% knock-off of another well known website.

Except, these guys just Don't Get It.

From a snazzy flash intro (Welcome to the Web, Circa 1997!), to the WinXP garish colours, to the flashing/blinking bits all over the site clamouring for attention... Oh, and the 20-scrolled-pages product info pages... These guys completely blew the rip-off.

I was just iChatting with someone, and the topic of Macromedia Breeze came up. I suggested it would be cool if Keynote could do that kind of thing, and he dryly mentioned that, since it’s just XML, why couldn’t it?

So, I’m poking around, trying to see what it would take to turn a Keynote .key file into a happy standards-compliant MPEG4 .mp4 file that could be played/streamed anywhere.

Looks pretty straightforward (not trivial, though). Start with the Keynote .key APXL file, run an XSLT transformation to an MPEG4 XMT file, compile that into an MPEG4 BIFS file, and then stream it to any compliant player.

I've mentioned Pachyderm a few times, and hinted at it more than that. So, what is Pachyderm, and why is it interesting?

For starters, take a look at some sample projects completed using Pachyderm 1.0.

Pachyderm is a project started by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, out of a need to create some kick-ass interactive pieces from their collection of assets (images mostly, but also audio and video). They built a tool that took what are now called learning objects, and with some input from a curator, generated a highly interactive Flash piece that was way more than just a bunch of images.

We just heard official notification that Pachyderm was given the green light! That's such good news. We're going to be working to make it easier to make really high-end aggregate learning objects...

I'll post more tomorrow...

I’ve had 6 video conferences today, using iChatAV and iSight. Coolest thing ever.

When I got the iSight, I honestly didn’t think I’d actually use it - I figured “Hey, cool toy. Sure is shiny!” and assumed it would sit on a shelf somewhere.

Now, I find myself plugging in the camera right after the keyboard, mouse, and power when I get into my office in the morning. The thing Just Works. It works amazingly well. And being able to see the people you’re working with is pretty cool (as long as they remember to shower and get dressed first… ahem).

I just tested installation, configuration and operation of CAREO on an unnamed, still-in-beta operating system.

With the installer, it took me all of 5 minutes to get all the bits in place, running a new instance of CAREO and ALOHA Server.

This included copying the disk image over from my TiBook, running the installer, and hand-configuring the WebObjects app (since I haven’t gotten around to getting the installer to do that automagically yet).