Opensource

After yesterday's big announcement, I thought I should give BigBlueButton another look. An open source alternative is pretty attractive, now that the others are all absorbed into the Bborg.

I played around trying to get BBB to install in my Ubuntu Server VM in VirtualBox, but made the mistake of updating Ubuntu to 10.0.4, while BBB only works on 9.0.4. Oops. But BBB provides a VM disk image, making the process of setting up a fresh VM server absolutely trivial.

I must have blinked when this was announced, but OpenAcademic.org sounds like a perfect scenario. Development efforts to integrate some of the biggest open source tools used in online education. It sounds like the goal is to come up with a way for Drupal, Elgg, Mediawiki and Moodle to all play nicely together, in such a way as to be easily deployable and maintainable by even the smallest school. Rather than attempting to build The One True LMS, they're taking the approach of playing to the strengths of the available tools, and putting the effort into integration.

I had been making a case to attend OSCON2006 this year, the logic being that it's a better fit for what I'm doing now than WWDC is. OSCON is a gathering of open source projects and programmers/developers, with tracks on various cool open source technologies, methodologies, etc... WWDC is a corporate developers conference, aimed specificially at core Apple technologies (with some obvious trickle-over into open source as well).

The sub-thought was that I could save some coin in our budget by going to an open source conference, rather than a high-end corporate one.

Teemu Leinonen posted a link on the IIEP-OER list, referencing the LeMill project he's working on. I just checked it out, and it's pretty cool. This one is based on the Plone content management system / framework, so it's great to see what can be done on top of these maturing platforms.

It's still being developed, but it looks like LeMill is another great option as a CAREO replacement. It's got some things in it that CAREO lacks (collections - an evolution of "subscribed objects", tagging), but doesn't have comments/discussion for each item (yet?). It's multilingual, easy to install, and runs just about anywhere.

Flock hit beta 1 (or 0.7, depending on how you count) yesterday, and it seems like a really solid release. My favorite feature isn't even part of the core Flock code - it's got more Extensions enabled, including Mouse Gestures!

I'm hoping they nailed down the nasty memory leaks that plagued previous builds, and cleaned up the window opening code, which could take several seconds to spawn a new browser window. But it's definitely on the right track.

I hinted at this in a previous post, but it wasn't "official" yet so I didn't provide any details. It's now official. The University of Calgary just finished the official CMS selection process, including input from ~140 web folks on campus and 6 presentations on 6 different CMS options. I was asked to present on Drupal, drawing on what we've done on some projects, and how it might fit into a larger community and workflow on campus.

To prevent myself from backing away from this, I've gone ahead and requested a new project on Eduforge.org to host the mythical EduGlu application development.

I've got no idea what this thing might be - not even what language it will be written in - but I'm sticking a flag into the sand to say I'll help build this sucker.

It's going to have to be a spare time / after hours project for me, since I'm already way booked at work. If it turns into anything, I'll try to address any issues that come up there. That'd be a good problem to have, though.

One of the extracurricular activities after Northern Voice included a quick excursion led by Jon to The Railway Club (a couple of blocks from Robson Square). We wound up sampling the überbrü - the Open Source Beer.

Brian had written about überbrü a while back, and I was intrigued by the idea - an open recipe for a brew, for sale only in local micrew bars (or at home).

Yet another good conversation, lubricated by a surprisingly good beer.

I'm trying out Unison File Synchronizer as a way to keep my two machines at work in sync. Unison inherits many concepts from source code management tools like CVS and SVN, and can manage bidirectional updates (even merges). I've done a test sync, firing the contents of my Powerbook over on top of my deskop's home directory. It took only about 20 minutes or so to copy stuff over, but a long, tedious process of approving or reconciling conflicts made the process last many times longer than that.

Well, it's officially in alpha anyway. I just created an account on OurMedia.org - a joint venture between Marc Canter's folks and Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive group.

Marc was pimping the project back at Northern Voice - but it was undergoing last minute tweaks so wasn't officially released then.

It offers free hosting for content (audio, video, images, etc...) for eternity, as part of the Internet Archive project. Very cool.

The OurMedia.org website is a Drupal site (put together by Bryght, it looks like) - it's quite nice. I may have to will borrow some ideas from it for weblogs.ucalgary.ca.

Just came across this comparison of open source licenses from OpenFoundry.org.

Almost plain english, and provides a nice at-a-glance table of key features and restrictions of the various licenses. They compare the 10 most popular licenses, as used by projects on SourceForge.net

This should be a useful companion to the listing of actual OSI-Approved licenses from the Open Source Intiative.

I've updated the ImageMagick shell script I use to generate the various image sizes used by Pachyderm.

The new version is a bit cleaner, and optionally takes parameters on the command line OR runs in interactive mode to determine source and destination directories.

It also provides a little more feedback now, so you know WTF is going on.

Here's a link to the script.