Monthly Archives: July 2006

Sakai 2.2 Status Update

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 →

The Story of Lleida

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.

Here are some pictures from the trip (sorry my photo blog is out of order because of the inconsistent delivery of SMS messages from Spain).
Neat Barcelona Architecture:
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1256004.jpg

The Lledia Team:
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1250003.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1257004.jpg

Eating Baked Snails – A Lleida speciality
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1257003.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1257004.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1257005.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1256010.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1256011.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1318004.jpg

Drinking San Miguel – A Lleida specialty
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1257007.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1257008.jpg

You may not know the history of Lledia and Sakai – so I figured that I would write it down and share it.

The University of Lleida was looking for an open source course management system early in 2004 and was considering CourseWorks from Stanford University. When Stanford joined Sakai, Lleida turned its attention to Sakai.
Lleida evaluated the Beta release of Sakai in May of 2004 and was pleased enough to put it into pilot production. Since Lleida is part of Catalonia there was a need to translate Sakai into the Catalan language. The Lleida technical team did this work by locally modifying all of the text in the Sakai source code. This was completed and placed into production at Lleida. Lleida quietly continued to run with their modified version of the Sakai 1.0 Beta for over a year, giving support to 80 course sites and 200 students for the pilot.

During 2004, the Sakai project quickly went from a small effort to a worldwide activity. When Sakai 1.5 was released in December 2005, I made a list of what I felt would be the “impossible challenges” that I felt that we had zero chance of compling by Sakai 2.0. This was simply sent out in a spreadsheet to the development list. One of the items in the buried deep in the spreadsheet was generalized internationalization for Sakai.

Several days later I received this simple and direct message from Lleida:

On 12/13/04 7:25 AM, “David Barroso” wrote:
Hello Charles,

We, at University of Lleida, can do the internationalization
work for sakai 2.0.

We are very interested in it !!

When can we start job ?
Regards,

This started a three-month effort during which the Lleida technical team, composed of four developers (Alex Ballesté, David Barroso, José Garcia, and Carol Manchó) took the entire Sakai 1.5 code base, one section at a time, and internationalized the code. Then they prepared the English localization and Catalan localization as well. Each element was carefully tested and given back to the Sakai team for integration.

Beth Kirshner at the University of Michigan acted as the “traffic cop” for the process, making sure that the Lleida team was given the right versions of each section of the Sakai code, and then integrating the changes back into the Sakai source tree. This work was done in parallel with the massive rewriting activity and significant development effort of the Sakai team to produce Sakai 2.0.

Because there was so much rewriting going on throughout the rest of the Sakai code base, each element to be translated had a very small window of opportunity for success – so each time we handed a component to Lleida – they had to work at breakneck speed so as not to slow down the rest of the Sakai 2.0 development effort.

The team was able to maintain the fast pace and the work was completed in March 2005, in plenty of time to make the June 2005 release of Sakai 2.0. The Sakai 2.0 release was the first release of Sakai that was heavily used outside the United States of America and we were very fortunate to have Sakai internationalized for the Sakai 2.0 release.

Lleida as a campus is committed to open source across the board and is very willing to invest the effort to make open source a success. Nearly all of the desktops on campus run Linux and Open Office.

What happens when you plug a phone line into a 10/100 Switch?

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.

Lledia – What a wonderful trip

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!

Thoughts from Hotel H10 In Barcelona

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 Barcelona so they are queueing up to be send when I re-arrive in the US on Saturday.

Barcelona is a nice city – I am not sure I saw any Spanich people here – so many tourists – it looks like Disneyland :). The cathedrals and squares and the Gaudi house all were pretty cool. Couple of hours walking, and a subway ride back, and in one evening I got the outline and a few blog photos to prove I was there. The subway was quite clean and easy to figure out – unlike Paris there is a single price (1.20 Euro) so you don’t have to have a Phd in Metroology to buy a legit fare.

Things in Sakai are going great. There is a lot to do – I stay nervous about the 2.2 release. Lately, we have gotten used to “not slipping” 2.0 and 2.1 were right on schedule. Later, we can wonder why we slipped – to me it really comes down to several “include or not to include” decisions we made back in May. We thought a couple more things “would not hurt” and low and behold a 5 week slip – wearing out the QA team and getting us dangerously close to Fall for folks who want the release for a few months before going live.

But the release is looking good and those fetures will hold us in good stead for the next year – probably worth it in the final analysis.

Coming off a lot of travel since the Vancouver meeting. UK is busy this time of year. The sequence was Vancouver(Sakai + JASig), Indianapolis (TeraGrid), Indianapolis (Alt-I-Lab), London UK (holiday), Manchester UK (gave talk), Cambridge UK (gave talk), Lancaster UK (played cricket, worked, gave talk), York, UK (went to meeting), Toronto CA, (meeting), Edinburgh, UK (gave talk), and now Barcelona (meetings).

Wow – Not home for more than 48 hours since June 1. But a LOT of cool stuff got done. The Edinburgh meeting was invaluable – it was basically folks mucking around int he portal world sharing their deepest secrets and stories. The data we got from each other would have taken a very long for each of us to figure out independently. Nicely Sun and IM were there too which caused some cool discussions.

I got inspired by both Jason Novotny and Marcus Christie’s talks where they postulates that in the future we will want portlets in “web sites” rather than making all of our web sites these “portals”.

This got me all charged up to dig up an idea that I had for a while – taking some Ian Boston Sakai 1.5 code and see if I could create the “smallest possible portal” that was not the null portal (i.e. the 0.00001 portal)..

I am almost done.

TTFN dear diary.