Simple – Check out Sakai – check out /svn/portlet – checkout /contrib/portlets (yes – one is singular and one is plural – sorry).
Start with fresh Tomcat.
Compile everything – “maven sakai” or “maven bld dpl” depending on your fun. This compiles with the old jars – but is necessary to get everything downloaded to your maven repo.
Go into tomcat/shared and do “find . -name ‘*pluto*'” – blast everything – these should be the previous verison of Pluto – there should be four of them.
Edit master/project.properties and increment the version of Pluto
Go into ~/.maven/repository/org.apache.pluto/jars and wack all the files
Based on the URL in the message on the pluto-dev list, use CURL to pull down the most recent jars. You need four of them.
curl -O http://people.apache.org/builds/portals-pluto/m2-staging-repository/org/apache/pluto/pluto-container/1.1.3/pluto-container-1.1.3.jar
curl -O http://people.apache.org/builds/portals-pluto/m2-staging-repository/org/apache/pluto/pluto-descriptor-api/1.1.3/pluto-descriptor-api-1.1.3.jar
curl -O http://people.apache.org/builds/portals-pluto/m2-staging-repository/org/apache/pluto/pluto-descriptor-impl/1.1.3/pluto-descriptor-impl-1.1.3.jar
curl -O http://people.apache.org/builds/portals-pluto/m2-staging-repository/org/apache/pluto/pluto-taglib/1.1.3/pluto-taglib-1.1.3.jar
Go into ~/dev/sakai/portal
maven -o bld dpl
This makes sure you don’t pull the old jars back down.
Just for fun and to keep your mind at ease – go to tomcat/shared
find . -name ‘*pluto*’
There should be four files with the *new* version.
Start Tomcat – tail the log like any good hacker (or if you are cool use the debugger).
Make a site – add the “Test Portlet – Sakai Test Portlet (JSR-168)” to your site – it is the one near the bottom.
Click around – test everything – watch the log. It is normally quite chatty – so you are watching for failures.

Auto install the plugin in the master project.xml – then maven bld dpl will work everywhere.
This way – people the world over will never ever have to type this command again:
maven plugin:download -DgroupId=sakaiproject -DartifactId=sakai -Dversion=2.2

Well my garage rewiring task is completed. This was a critical pre-requisite to insulating and finishing my garage. I had the following requirements for Garage 2.0:
– An external permanently mounted photocell for 110V
– A set of outlets inside and outside that had always-on and switched on at night plug. This would be used for Holiday lighting and landscape lighting.
– A night light in the garage controlled by the outside photocell.
– Switch my carriage lights to being controlled by the master photocell rather than a switch so the carriage lights come on with the landscape lights and holiday lights.
– Add a switched flood light on the eves covering the front yard and driveway
– Move me landscape light transformer into the garage – again controlled by the master photocell.
Overall, the ideal also was to put in enough boxes that someone could re-configure which lights did which for a new owner of the house. For example, if they wanted the carriage lights to be switched again – it should be possible – if they want to switch the flood to be motion sensitive – it should be possible.
So there were extra runs of 14-3 and extra junction boxes to allow for re-configuration of where the hot, switched hot, and photocell hot were made available for easy reconfiguration.
It all went well. I am happy how it turned out. It took longer than I thought because my wiring design skills were a bit rusty. I made 9 trips to Menards and took back as much stuff as I bought. I found that I had to design iteratively – one wire run/junction box at a time.
But it worked out well.
Next steps are to insulate and drywall the garage – that will be a multi-person job and I will probably enlist my brother Scott in the effort.
After that it is on to Basement 2.0 – that will entail plumbing electricity, walls, – a bathroom, the whole shebang. But it will be fun and the last major fixup of the house.

I have started building the JSR-168 IMSTI portlet. The first challenge was getting a file uploaded in through JSR-168. I was nervous because I had never tested it in the Sakai JSR-168 and the first google searches of “JSR-168 portlet file upload” seemed to indicate problems and kept talking about Apache commons, etc – all stuff that felt rather non-portable.
The solution was found here:
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/portals-pluto-dev/200501.mbox/%3C41F67158.3080809@TheJavaThinkTank.org%3E
I will soon check this into SVN in contrib. On to the next thing – parsing the IMS TI descriptor with some code tha Anthony wrote.

I have resigned from the Sakai Foundation Executive Director position effective June 1. I have attached my resignation letter at the end of the blog post.

In the past four years, it has been an absolute privilege to be the Chief Architect of the Sakai Project and then the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation. This has been the dream job for me – for my whole career I just wanted to be part of something that has broad impact. I have truly enjoyed meeting all of you and working with you. We have explored Community Source together and found a way to develop software together with a team assembled from people around the world.

The University of Michigan has offered me a position where I can continue to be involved in the Sakai Community going forward and allow me to focus on technical aspects of Sakai. My travel budget will likely be much lower – so I will probably not come to as many of your offices as I have done in the past – and my photo blog will be more boring :)

Like most of my life, a partial explanation can be found by carefully reading some PowerPoint I wrote :).

Software to Fit Teaching and Learning Practices (December 2004)

Resignation Letter

Date: March 2, 2007
To: John Norman
Subject: Resigning as Executive Director

I would like to cooperate in any way possible to ease the transition to new leadership. I am happy for the resignation to be effective anytime between now and three months from now. I would like to hand over my responsibilities for the operation of the Foundation and interaction with the Foundation board to someone else and to turn my focus to transition issues and my career options looking forward as quickly as possible

I *never* ever thought I would ever write a blog with this title. This weekend I wanted to track the NCAA Basketball and NIT Basketball tounaments while I was attending the CCHA hockey tournament – so I turned to trusty Google SMS (46645) and started typing in things like “NIT”, Wolverines, etc and I got nothing back except a stupid message about what Google SMS does. I tried NCAAB – one of its suggestions – and still nothing but a blank stare.
I wonder what happenned – I used to think Google SMS was the bomb – it was as if a bunch of people were there ready with the answer in 4 seconds. But now it cannot even seem to get the simplest thing right. I have given up on it.
On the same weekend – I installed Comcast Digital cable – the box that costs me $1.00 per month. This is AWSOME – it has so much free stuff – on-demand old movies and on-demand old TV shows and HD radio are probably the best – but things like Karaoke, extended previews and PPV are cool as well. I wasted hours this weekend exploring.
All this for only $1.00 – dang! This will save me a bunch at he video store. I got two of the boxes and probably need to get three more (at least).
Technical note: My only gotcha was that I had one TV behind too many splitters – the signal was not too great – the digital box would not sync up until I dropped back to a single splitter. So if your TV signal is snowy – fix that before trying to go digitial. Luckily I was doing two boxes at the same time and the second one worked perfectly on the basement TV – so I swapped the boxes – the box still worked downstairs but not upstairs. So it had to be the wiring – dropping down a Splitter solved the problem.

There is a disucsison about sunsetting the Chat tool and replacing it with a new JSF/Hibernate Chat Tool.
This is an important discussion as the sunsetting of a tool is as important a process as the bringing up of a new tool.
Here are my thoughts.

Continue reading →

I was sitting in Marcus Christie’s office Wednesday and saw him use this new cool terminal program – tabbed terminal program – called iTerm – I made a mental note to figure out where to get the software.
Then Friday my pal Paul Hubbard posts a blog post and sends me a note about it:
http://www.phfactor.net/wp/2007/03/16/iterm-and-distraction-free-computing/
FYI,
Paul
Now I have it and it is installed. The only key is that Command-T opens a new tab.
This will help me a lot because no I can have *ALL* my windows full size – I normally run with about six terminal windows (vi, find, and grep are my IDE).
The problem is that tiny fonts make one’s eyes get weaker. So now I will experiment with iTerm full screen with large font – should be nice.

Today is the nominal day for code freeze for Sakai 2.4 – of course Sakai 2.4 is the major release for Sakai for 2007. For me I have been a bit more technical the last few months in my push to get JSR-168 and many other portal features into Sakai.
Code freeze is good because it focuses one – but I have been letting my non-technical duties slip a bit the last six weeks. Particularly my inbox which has balooned to 920 unprocessed messages. Aargh. But the fact that the portal is in good shape thinks to Ian Boston and David Dewolf – I can get back to answering all the mail and putting “sorry it took so long to respond” in front of each message..
I think it will be worth it – 2.4 will be with us for a long time as with all of the other Sakai June releases – so we might as well make it as awsome as possible.
:)

Did some QA of the Sakai JSR-168 portlet support with Marcus Chirstie and Marlon Pierce of Indiana Unviersity. Found a bug and decided that we needed Help and Edit mode support. Off goes two solid hacking days :)
But code yeilds eventually and I just committed the stuff. Interestingly – this makes my todo list for 168 realy short – and just in time for code freeze.
To test, do this
check out a copy of sakai
The also check out the portlets into the source directory:
svn co https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn//portlet/trunk/ portlet
and them compile it .
The Sakai Test Portlet shows up in the site list.

Continue reading →