Generally when you are doing podcasts using Sakai you end up doing uploads using webdav because the files are so large – they end up busing the single file upload limit in the Resources tool.
I have become increasingly unhappy with the Apple’s Web Dav client built into Mac OS/X 10.5. It seems to be always downloading all the time – I am guessing that perhaps my operating system is trying to show me little preview icons in my finder view – so it downloads 300MB of data each time I mount the Dav drive.
Whatever the cause – Mac’s incessant unnecessary downloading was making my uploads unreliable – so I switched to Goliath.
Goliath makes up loads much nicer – it is a simple tool – it only retrieves information when you do something – more like a smart FTP. The built in support for Dav is using DAVFS – which is faking a real disk using webdav. This leads to some extra load on the server.
However Goliath marks the Mime-Type of the file as text – Yikes! My students download the podcasts and see gibberish in their browsers or end up with files with a suffix of .txt and Quicktime won’t play them! Grrr.
The Sakai Resources tool comes to the rescue – thanks to a feature added for OSP a long time ago, you can control the MIME-type of an uploaded file.
Go to Resources – find the file – and in the Actions menu (yay Harriet, Jim and the whole resources 2.4 re-design team) – find the Edit Details option.
Scroll down and change the MIME Type to application / octet-stream – save the properties – and viola – browsers save them properly – players play them – they end up with the right suffixes. All is well.

This week was really dominated by Teaching so I was only able to slip a few hours in on the weekend to work on MailArchvie performance.
I pretty much unbroke the MailAction.java bits – mostly making the single message view work again with the new focus on not reading all the messages into memory.
My next steps are doing the Oracle variants of the database limit stuff and testing. Then I make an initial back-port to 2.4 and have Thomas do some testing for me. Then it is on to cleanup and final testing of the post 2.4 and post-2.5 branches.
Then it is time to move this toward trunk and clean up bits of the Storage API while I am at it.

Teaching in a Web 2.0 world is a new experience for me. People pick technical things up so quickly that this saying summarizes my feelings about teaching technology:
“In teaching, I no longer have a goal to know more than my students and impart my knowledge to them – my new goal is to get my students to the point where they know more than me as quickly as possible.”

Wow – busy few days. I built three small distributions of Ruby on Rails 1.2.6 for use in my course. There is support for Windows and Mac OS/X 10.4.
The basic idea is to come up with a distribution that works from a USB drive for students working in a lab as well as a really simple distribution that does not mess with your system configuration and it can be put anywhere in a directory structure including on a shared file server.
Then I built printed documentation for each of them and a podcast for each version to walk my students through the installation process.
This whole thing is available at:
www.rubylearn.com
Have fun.

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Pretty much useless information – warning – this might mess things up.
gem environment
RubyGems Environment:
– VERSION: 0.9.4 (0.9.4)
– INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8
– GEM PATH:
– /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
– /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8
– REMOTE SOURCES:
– http://gems.rubyforge.org
cd /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8
rm cache/*
rm sourcecache
rm gems/act*
rm gems/rails*
rm specifications/act*
rm specifications/rails*

This is from Ian – I am sure that it will make more sense when the time comes for me to use it :)
https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/portal/branches/post-2-4
When you want to merge from trunk into a working copy of the branch. do…
to get the copy point do
svn log –stop-on-copy https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/portal/branches/post-2-4
then merge will be
svn merge -rxxx:HEAD https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/portal/trunk .
where xxx is the last copy point revision
into the working directory, followed by a commit.

Playing with MySql and the MailArchive Performance Fix.

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