Michelle made a good point in an email. I’d overlooked the value of collaboration at a distance, because I really take it for granted now. I’ve been working with folks over the ’net for years, but much more intensely over the past year.
The Learning Object Syndication with RSS presentation(s) (here and here) wouldn’t have been possible without iChatAV, wikis, and weblogs.
And the Pachyderm install would have cost a few orders of magnitude more without these tools (well, we really only used iChatAV/Trillian). The cost of travel between Calgary and California would have been waaaay too high, since it would have meant a few trips to get it running.
Josh and I have been poking at the Pachyderm for the last few days, and have finally convinced it to do something other than stare blankly at us.
Josh wrote some PHP script mojo to suck the Filemaker database (used to manage assets) into the SQL Server DB (used to author presentations). Works like a charm, once you know where the hidden landmines are. Like, say a field name has the wrong case. Or, say, records in one (and only one) table aren’t actually saved when the rest of the database is (so they have to be manually re-entered every time the database is opened. No hassle there…)
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.
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
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.
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…