http://qtitools.caret.cam.ac.uk/

Sometimes I come up with an idea that I want to patent but I am so busy that I just blog it instead. Hopefully this will make it into the internet archive and folks can send me money when they want to license my invention.
This idea is pretty simple – headphones with a retractible cord. Basiclly I just want *everything* on the planet to have a retractible cord.
Here is my picture:
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/11/index.php?img=07-11-06_042259_01.jpg
I scribble these patents on scraps of paper and then type them in later.

Sometimes I come up with an idea that I want to patent but I am so busy that I just blog it instead. Hopefully this will make it into the internet archive and folks can send me money when they want to license my invention.
The basic idea here is to put RFIDs in luggage. This way the systems at airports can slowly develop a profile of a pices of luggage.
How many times have we seen this luggage?
What countries has this luggage been to?
How many times has this luggage been pulled for security check?
Who has used this luggage?
We can either manufacture this RFID into luggage from the beginning or can add it after the fact. For those of you in Homeland Security – you could evne slip this into baggage while it is in the airport. Or perhaps you could work with TSA and voluntarly have them install their RFID.
You can establish the identy of the person who is associated with *this* piece of luggage each time a person checks in. This could also be done at a security checkpoint if we got some type of air traveller ID or perhaps we put RFIDs in passports.
So most folks would think of this as “Big Brother” – sure – like you being uncomfortable with Big Brother stops it from happening. If you don’t want to be tracked, photographed, searched, etc – stay away from public transportation. As far as I am concerned once I get near a plane – my life is an open book and I expect that the rest of the folks sharing that transport with me are equally willing to be scrutinized.
Ah well – this is not about politics – this is about roylaties for me and my patent.

Sometimes I invent things and don’t have time to file a formal Patent – so I just Blog it.
The basic idea is to be able to take a completely dynamic video or audio on demand system and allow arbitrary groups to create synchronized shared experiences. These groups will self-organize and membership will be dynamic.
This will allow a person working with a VOD system such a as a digital CATV system. The idea is that instead of simply starting the program – one would indicate that they want the program to start at a particular time in the future – typically in 10 minutes or so. The VOD system would display a “joining code” on the screen and count down to the start of the program. This join code could be send to friends or other groups who want to watch the program in a synchronized manner – those other folks would enter the join code on their systems and become part of the synchronized VOD stream. You could even join after the program started. The likely distribution of the code will be IM, SMS, Phone, or E-Mail. Maybe even the CATV system would have a notification mechanism or a group capability.
So the upshot is that you and your group can watch the same thing *at the same time* – all on demand – effectively this is VOD for groups. This has a number of aplications – teaching, learning – where there could be IM or other out of band communication to allow rreactions – also you could collectively pause to discuss things. Other things would be effectively like watching a movie Saturday evening with pals around the world – they might also have separate monitors with webcams so follks could interact and hear each other’s laughter or screams. Effectively creating a distributed theater.
So where did I come up with this idea? Well on a A330 coming to England I watched as two children next to me struggled with their individual VOD systems so as to watch the *same* movie at the *same* time. They navigated to the start of the movie and pressed “Play” at the *same* time so they could share the experience.
As we get to the point where we can completely isolate ourselves with totally customized entertainment – we will slowly yearn for group interactions. And the beauty is that adding a group interaction layer on top of a completely personalized system – this also saves bandwidth, etc becuase information can be multicast and precious resources like Digital channels can be used for multiple destinations at the same time.
This provides a nice hybrid between pure VOD and the “movie will start in 35 minutes” of partial VOD.
Please call me if you want to license this patent :)

I was in Australia last week at Charles Sturt University. I had many meetings – in one with CELT (Center for E Learning Technology) – Matt Morton-Allen said I could not say *anything* nerdy.
He helped me with this little outline – which I need to turn into Powerpoint. I put this down so I can throw the paper away:
– Pedagogy focus – hot tech but not luddite either
– What are others doing
– How does the community organize itself? Working and Discussion Groups.
– Talk about Bodginton
– Accessibility
– Usability
– Goal Aware Tools
– Talk about Wiki
– Talk about ePortfolio
– Relate to Moodle
– Talk about Samigo
– Talk about training and communities of practice (Etudes example)
– Prioritization and requirements process
Looks like a good outline.
Thanks Matt.

This is a Netherlands week. Monday I am doing a video shoot of some K12 students using Sakai and portfolio – with JJ Doherty. I will edit and publish as soon as possible. This is more in my video series on “Using Sakai”.
Tuesday through Thursday is in Maastricht at the IMS meeting – at the Open University of the Netherlands – my first visit there. The meeting will be cool – I hope to see IMS Enterprise and IMS Tool Interoperabiltiy v2 move forward as well as IMS Common Cartridge.
I feel bad that we don’t have more representation and technical involvement in IMS from Sakai schools. I keep going to the meetings but I am weakly covering three technical areas. Josh Holzman has gotten involved in the IMS Enterprise – that helps a lot. Zach Thomas and others did all the technical work on Sakai’s IMS Common Cartridge. Of course Steve Lay of Cambridge is an IMS icon in the QTI space. I just wish there were more folks that came to the meetings and helped with the technical work. This really is not a “Sakai” responsibility – Sakai is not a member of IMS – this is something that our schools need to do as schools.
Ah well enough whining – I look forward to meeting folks like Rob Koper and getting totally immersed in the Learning Design stuff – this is a great meeting to come up to speed on *that* topic. Also I will run into Kerry Blinco of DEST fame and catch up – there are lots and lots of fun topics to talk with Kerry about from RAMS to CORDRA to Arrow – etc etc etc.. The Aussies have some fun stuff going on in the area of data repositories.
What a week it looks to be. And JJ is picking me up in an hour to go to the video taping..

I am in the Netherlands this week to attent the IMS meeting in Maastricht. I had to stay a night in Amsterdam so I picked the Movenpick that we will use at the Sakai meeting in June
I took some blog pictures as I found my way from Schipol to the Movenpick. To save money I took EasyJet from Gatwick – a lot less convienent than Nowthwest direct to Shipol airport. As you see Schipol is already decorated for Christmas – makes sense since Schipol is an Airport, Trainstation, and mall all rolled into one.
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/11/index.php?img=05-11-06_115244_01.jpg
Overall this is an excellent hotel. The decor is totally modern – reminds me of a W but with lighter woods and lots more color. They give you a glass of juice when you check in. The wireless is open and free (at least in my room). Tomorrow morning I will Blog some pictures of my room and the hotel when it is light.
=== More Review
Breakfast is excellent – the only weird bit is the chairs. The decor is totally modern and the chairs are these cool backless cube things with pads. The problem is that they are heavy and you need to bend way down to move a chair and at the four person tables you share a moveable bench with one other person. They are going for a faux-Japanese look – the look is a 150% winner – functionality is not so good for us chubby American travellers. But all in all a delightful breakfast.
In terms of location – it seems that the hotel is 15 minutes walking distance from the fun bits – but the tram stops *right* in front of the hotel – so we will all might as well learn the tram system and buy that multi-day tram pass as soon as we get off the airplane :)
http://www.gvb.nl/english/travellers/maps/lijnenkaart.html
Zoom into Centraal Station and look for the red tram line from the Centraal Station to Piet Heinkade.
The view out of the window to the northeast back towards Centraal Station is almost a clone of a view from the JA-Sig hotel in 2004 in New Orleans:
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2004/12/index.php?img=05-12-04_1752001.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/11/index.php?img=06-11-06_014426_01.jpg

/sbin/iptables -L
[root@s-sakai-1 etc]# vi /etc/sysconfig/iptables
# Chuck ports
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state –state NEW -m tcp -p tcp –dport 8090 -j ACCEPT
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state –state NEW -m tcp -p tcp –dport 8092 -j ACCEPT
# Lancaster ports
root@s-sakai-1 etc]# /sbin/service iptables restart
Flushing firewall rules: [ OK ]
Setting chains to policy ACCEPT: filter [ OK ]
Unloading iptables modules: [ OK ]
Applying iptables firewall rules: [ OK ]
[root@s-sakai-1 etc]#
Grrr – I dislike fancy newfangled things – in BSD 4.3 – we did not have to do this!
——– Comments ——-
Too bad you don’t allow comments in your blog. :)
Anyway, I wanted to share an iptables tip – to restart it, it’s safer to use iptables-restore:
iptables-restore < /etc/sysconfig/iptables This will do a syntax check and only reload it if it's correct - useful when hand-editing. The other way could stop the firewall but not bring it back up if the syntax is off. Mike Osterman Whitman College

Sakai will not start up with the default JVM settings. You need the following:
[csev@s-sakai-1 ~]$ grep OPT .bash_profile
JAVA_OPTS=’-Xmx512m -Xms512m -XX:PermSize=16m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m -XX:NewSize=128m -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+UseParNewGC’ ; export JAVA_OPTS
Here is the message you get when you forget this:
INFO: Deploying web application archive sakai-help-tool.war
java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:585)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.start(Bootstrap.java:294)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:432)
Caused by: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space
Exception in thread “QuartzScheduler_QuartzSchedulerThread” java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space
Exception in thread “QuartzScheduler_QuartzScheduler-s-sakai-1.dmc.dc.umich.edu_MisfireHandler” java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space

The following URL – based on code from John Leasia gives you Google Earth version of the Sakai Map data.
http://www.sakaiproject.org/sakai-map/kml.php
You have to save this as a file with a .kml extension and then open it in Google Earth.
If anyone knows how to make it auto start in Google Earth let me know.