July 31, 2006, 6:40 pm
Well the Sakai 2.2 release is out and it is a good time to core dump a few thoughts.
In a way 2.2 “completes” the work we started in the 2.0 release. Looking forward, we do not have any more “shoes to drop” as big as 2.0 and 2.2 releases. We can gracefully evolve Sakai without having to do major surgery for the next year or so. This should lead us to have at a 1-2 year period where we can focus on making Sakai better rather than having to “clear the decks” for a rewrite.
Frankly, we need to focus our energy on improving the end-user, developer, and deployer experience in Sakai if we are to truly reach our full potential. Brad Wheeler uses the term “user delight” – users should be happy to use Sakai.
Continue reading ‘Sakai 2.2 Status Update’ »
July 31, 2006, 5:58 pm
Two weeks back, I visited the Lleida in Catalonia – mostly to thank them for their internationalization work in Sakai 2.0.
I figured that I should write this up and share it.
Continue reading ‘The Story of Lleida’ »
July 31, 2006, 4:17 pm
We lost dial tone at home. I tried everything – unplugged all the phones and fax machines – powercycled the alarm system and still NOTHING. No dialtone – not even a click – not even the kind of echo that you hear when you have a phone off the hook.
The phone line was dead. As if disconnected.
I was about to call the phone company and be a wimp – but then I noticed that somone had taken a phone wire connected to a wall plug and connected it into a free port on the 10/100 switch!
that was indeed out of the box thinking as a possible ereason why Internet would be down – but it made the phone system *very* unhappy. Unplugged the Ethernet switch from the phone jack and viola – all better.
July 27, 2006, 7:55 pm
Fooling with an XServe. Not fully successful – probably a firewall. :(
Continue reading ‘XServe Notes’ »
July 21, 2006, 3:55 pm
It was great to meet Carles, David, Yolanda, Jose, Alex, and the whole Lledia team.
They have a very nice Sakai installation and are doing some very unique work using Sakai that they will share with the community when it is more mature. The short version is that they are building basic Enterprise software like helpdesk software, student evaluations and doing it all in Sakai, JSF, and Hibernate. Very Cool.
Lledia is a great place to visit – the weather is like Phoenix and flora is like Los Angeles. There is a neat castle in the center of the town. It is very hot during the day – often above 100F. But the evenings are *very* nice.
For dinner we went to a very very special restaraunt – it is a small family run restaraunt that makes the Llledia specialty – snails to perfection. The the photo blog for snal pictures when I get back and sent in all of the pictures.
This is not like french style snails – they are land delling snails. They are pretty small – about 1/2 – 3/4 incin across. The snails are arranged in a flat iron pan with their shell opening pointing up. They are alive. Then they are seasoned with some salt and some paprika and then they are cooked over charcoal.
Then after about 20 minutes, they come to your table and you use a sharp little needle like thing to get them out and eat them. MMM-good! Sometimes they are a little undercooked and the snail’s mucous did not completely cook away – you can either eat it or wipe it off.
The snails were so awsome.
Also Lleida has a beer factory – San Miguel – I liked the beer too – kind of a combination of a medium body with a very solid taste.
In Barcelona I met with cool folks from the Caalan Government and a very very cool open source lawyer (yes you heard me right – a cool lawyer). Malcom was his name (he is originally from London) and he was using his lawyer skillz to further the cause of open source and help make licensing better and help university lawyers and administrators better undertand open source. Of course I liked him!
July 19, 2006, 4:40 pm
Usually I don’t do basic, “dear diary” / “kitty blog” stuff – but I am so happy that my hotel in Barcelona has free wireless that I figured that I would use the free bandwidth to kitty blog.
My phone does not send pix form Barcelon so they are queueing up to be sendwhen I re-arrive in the US on Saturday.
Continue reading ‘Thoughts from Hotel H10 In Barcelona’ »
July 4, 2006, 9:46 am
If you want o do Sakai Development at Lancaster University whilst visiting, make the following changes. Make sure to remove them or comment them out when you leave.
~/.subversion/servers
[global]
http-proxy-host = wwwcache.lancs.ac.uk
http-proxy-port = 80
~/build.properties
maven.proxy.host=wwwcache.lancs.ac.uk
maven.proxy.port=80
