This has been demoed publicly before, so shouldn’t be a big NDA risk. I just held a 4-way video conference using iChat on Tiger. It was pretty darned slick, and I think was only limited by bandwidth.
Note the cool reflections on the “desktop”, and the viewing angles of the participants. Seems much more natural than just tiling a bunch of video views into a window… And you can add people to an open video conference just by dragging them from your buddy list into the video window. Slick.
I’m a big fan of the concept of “code smells” - the notion that you can subconsciously evaluate the elegance/correctness of a code by how it “smells” to you. Similar to “beauty” in mathematics or physics, I suppose.
A code smell is when you sense something is not really right and the code can be improved by refactoring. He defined “super” code as having the following 4 S’s: “Safe, Succinct, Straightforward, Simple”. Code smells when it violates one or more of those principles. He noted that sometimes comments can be considered deodorant for “smelly code” - better to refactor (and fix the problem) than simply add comments (to document the problem)!
Have you ever been on the hunt for a particular song? Some obscure indie rock tune or rare jazz performance you heard on the radio? You might have to shop at more than one store before you find the song you’re looking for. Having the flexibility to choose from over 1 million tracks of music from multiple online music stores such as MSN Music, Napster, MusicMatch, and Wal-Mart can be the key to getting the music you want. Several stores even offer subscription services so you can download all the songs you want for about the cost of a CD each month.
Part of the functionality of the Pachyderm authoring application is the dynamic and on-the-fly resizing of images to whatever dimensions are required by the flash templates that are used to display a screen in a presentation.
I wrote the first version of the image resizing code using Java Advanced Imaging (JAI), and it worked quite well. But, during the authoring of the Mavericks prototype, it became apparent that the quality of the resized images wasn’t quite up to snuff. I tried setting JAI to use bicubic interpolation (InterpolationBicubic and InterpolationBicubic2) instead of the default nearest-neighbour (InterpolationNearest) method. Still produced inconsistent results.
I just received word that our proposed session for NMC 2005 was accepted! The official title is: “Creative Action at a Distance: Practical Tools for Effective Online Collaboration”, and we’re planning on describing and demonstrating the techniques that we used to develop the Pachyderm software with people scattered across North America.
Fun stuff like pair programming with VNC, iChatAV, wikis, weblogs, Breeze Live, SubEthaEdit, etc…
My co-conspirators in this are Joshua Archer and King Chung Huang. If you’re going to be at NMC2005, I look forward to seeing you at the session!
weblogs.ucalgary.ca has been running for almost 2 weeks now, and I’ve been receiving many requests from users for features and/or refinements. Some of these may require modifications to Drupal, some may just involve configuring the existing software.
Here’s the laundry list of desired features:
Ability for users to make their blog look like their own. This includes the page for each blog post as well. The sections.module will let an admin set up a theme to use for any section of the Drupal site (including a blog), but it gets downright funky (or impossible) to have all blog posts made by a user use that same theme. Also, an ordinary user can’t select the theme to use for their own blog - only admin users can do it. Ideally, on a “My Blogs” section, there would be a widget to let them pick (bonus points for edit as well) a theme to be used for their blog as well as all of their individual blog posts.
Multiple blogs per user? Instead of all blog posts going into a single blog for a user, there may be a need to set up multiple blogs (perhaps each with their own theme, as well)
Multiple authors per blog. I can use something like Organic Groups to approximate this, but it’s less explicit. Also, the ability for a user to specify the theme that will be used to display the group blog.
When viewing a user’s blog, the “Recent Comments” and “Recent Blog Posts” blocks should only show the comments and posts from that blog - it’s confusing to users to see a global list of comments and posts on a user’s indivudual blog.
How to export content in a usable format? Users are concerned that if they spend a bunch of time and effort contributing content to the Drupal site, that they are then locked in. They can’t export to an interchange format and then bring the content in, say, to MovableType or WordPress, or whatever. Lock-in is bad.
If these things are already possible, and I’ve just overlooked a module or setting, then that’s even better. If they aren’t possible now, I’d like to start figuring out what it would take to implement them. The “My Blogs” and related theme selection stuff is quite important for adoption on campus.
UPDATE: I was wrong about who was behind the project. I made some assumptions. You know what happens when you do that… It’s a collaboratiive effort, started (apparently) by Charlie Lowe (et al).
Boris and Will have been busy… They’re working on a distribution of Drupal that is tweaked for use in education: DrupalED.
I’m not sure how much of this distro is just pre-selecting modules, and how much is hacking on the core, but it’s cool nonetheless. It’s still pretty young, but it would be trivial to switch weblogs.ucalgary.ca to a different distro of Drupal.
Real reusability becomes more difficult (and less useful) as a resource becomes tailored for any specific context (by adding complexity via structure and content). This is David Wiley’s “reusability paradox”, and there’s no easy way to get around it.
CAREO is mentioned specifically, and the concerns with it are entirely valid. It should be noted that CAREO and its ilk are from the first generation of learning object repositories - a necessary step in the evolution of the concept - and we’ve got some stuff that begins to address many of these concerns (Pachyderm, APOLLO, etc…).
I just got word that my proposed session for Faculty Technology Days has been accepted/approved/whatever.
Academic Publishing with Weblogs and Wikis – D’Arcy Norman
This session will provide an introduction to personal publishing and collaboration tools, including weblogs and wikis, and will demonstrate potential application of these technologies to support teaching and learning in an academic setting. These tools allow anyone to easily publish, find and use information on the internet without needing to know HTML, FTP or other geeky acronyms.
The sad part? I have the exact same dice set in my basement somewhere… Anyone need some DM guides, circa 1977?
Um… ouch?
You are a four-sided die, a d4. Otherwise known as a tetrahedron, a “Caltrop”, or (to a lesser degree) “Ol’ Pointy”. This crap bores you, so I’ll get to the point. Others tend to see you as petty, conniving, manipulative, argumentative, defensive, greedy, and needlessly antagonistic. You see yourself as focused, effective, efficient, influencing, shrewd, tactical, and direct. Both points of view are in fact correct. You always know the best way to get things done, a fact that never wins sympathy with others. Whenever you manage to gain control of a situation, your solutions are swift and brutal. Unfortunately everyone else is convinced that granting you such power is, “a bad thing” and often conspire to keep it out of your hands. Such short-sighted fools!
