Blog Posts

Ubiquitous Computing, Periphery, and Knowledge Management

This link to an article on Micah’s weblog came to me via Bruce Landon’s Weblog for Students. The summary is a nice overview of how peripheral knowledge (i.e., not “core”) helps us to understand our way through the world.

Working on XStreamDB WebObjects EOAdaptor

I’ve got some time to play with XStreamDB now, so I’m working on the EOAdaptor that King started, trying to flesh out the functionality for use in CAREO/Extreme.

The fun part will be mapping EOQualifiers normally intended for SQL-ish things into invoking XQuery-ish things… It may not be difficult after all, but there is definitely a learning curve in my near future.

It does have a good “code smell” - letting EOF do all the heavy lifting involved with caching, locking, sharing the records, and having the code that invokes the queries be relatively transportable to other technologies (once appropriate adaptors are written).

James Gosling trying out weblogging

I just stumbled across this while poking around the new java.net community website.

James Gosling has started blogging. No RSS feed (yet), but it should be an interesting read.

UPDATE: There is an RSS feed, after all.

Interesting paper on overcoming limitations of learning objects

David Wiley just published a draft of his next paper, “Using O2 to Overcome Learning Objects Limitations”. Interesting read, as usual, and he makes some good points re: granularity and reusability.

Some of the things he talks about are already in the plans for CAREO (i.e., being able to use anything as a learning object, regardless of design and format, and have it Just Work. I’m planning to extend CAREO’s media playing capabilities to better wrap various media files and automate the reporting/tracking of status in order to feed data back into CAREO, similar to what an LMS would do with SCORM).

One source of increased CAREO traffic identified

Someone in Trenton, New Jersey, is hammering the RSS feeds in CAREO. Sending fresh request for a bunch of RSS feeds every minute or two. They’re currently running over 70 simultaneous sessions in CAREO, but this has been over 300 in the last few days. They’re not running a webserver on their IP address, so I’m guessing it’s a desktop aggregator set to “stun”.

I don’t think they mean to be sending all of these requests, but this really underscores the need for caching RSS feeds (either at the aggregator/displayer or at the repository level).

CAREO Traffic Higher than Normal

I just checked WOMonitor for the deployed version of CAREO, and it says we’ve got 75 simultaneous users hitting it now. Yesterday, we had over 200. 30,000 hits in a week.

Something’s up… I wonder who’s using it lately? It looks like everyone is hitting it as “Guest”, so there isn’t any login data to tell anything. Time to crunch the Apache access log…

UPDATE: I combined all logs from careo.ucalgary.ca into a single 88MB log file to crunch. This might take a while…

CAREO 3.x Development Freeze Broken

I’ve been a little busy lately, largely because I had to break the CAREO 3.x development freeze to meet some requirements for the MedCIS integration. That project is coming along well now, but there are still a few more tweaks I’ll need to do in order to deliver it as required in the timeline they need.

Basically, this means I have been forced to ignore CAREO/Extreme, and let King run wild with it. Actually, that’s probably a good idea, anyway. He seems to do his best work that way. It’s going to be cool to see what he’s come up with when I can finally come up for air.

Annoying conference calls

This is the second conference call in a row for an unnamed national project that I almost walked out of. Can’t get a word in edge-wise, and when asked a direct question, am cut off before I can respond.

Complete and utter waste of time. Why are people such asses in these things? If the call is really just a platform for a couple individuals to spew their agendas, at least have the courtesy to advertise that fact ahead of time so the rest of us can skip it and get some work done instead.

Question: What Do YOU Need from a Repository Server?

We’ve been working with some interested groups, in order to get CAREO “out there,” and I’m just trying to get a better handle on what our potential end-user institutions need from a repository server.

UPDATE: Please provide feedback on this, even (especially?) if you agree with the assumptions. Clarity is a Good Thing.

Here’s the assumptions we’ve been working under. Institutions will need to (in no particular order):

Host their own instance of the repository (or have it hosted by another group)

Mozilla as a Debugging Tool

I was just tweaking the “Add Object” page for the MedCIS installation of CAREO, when I noticed that the funky cross-browser-window communication used to update the location of the uploaded file in the IMS Metadata record was failing.

Safari didn’t help, it just borked silently. I fired up Mozilla Firebird, and it did the same thing. Tried Mozilla (the Full Meal Deal) and opened up the Javascript Console (Tools: Web Development: Javascript Console) and cest voila! There’s the problem! Had it fixed in about 30 seconds after that.

MedCIS CAREO Integration Back on Track

After a little while spent spinning wheels, we’ve gotten the MedCIS integration of CAREO back on track.

It turns out that it may have been a minor config oops, where CAREO was directed to use a URL that may have had intermittent (or otherwise badly behaving) DNS, so the XML-RPC requests were barfing all over the place, for various reasons.

I changed that instance of CAREO to use 127.0.0.1 as the host to use for the JUDURL parameter, and all appears fine now. Absolutely weird, since it shouldn’t make a bit of difference.

WWDC 2003

I just found out that I’ll be heading to WWDC2003 this year (June 23 - 27).

This is the most amazing conference I’ve seen, with an extremely diverse mix of folks (from MS R&D to indy developers). The sessions are all top-knotch, and it’s more than a little like drinking from a firehose. Can’t wait to see what’s coming in MacOSX (I remember the Quartz Extreme demo last year, and that was freakin’ amazing…) and WebObjects specifically.