Well this weekend I am here in at the GooglePlex at the Google Mentor Summit. Until two days ago – I had no ideas of the purpose of this meeting – but I knew it would be cool.
But as I traveled to come her – it dawned on me that the essense of the meeting is talking cross-project. I want to make sure to get contact with OLAT, Moodle, DSpace Drupal, Fedora, and Others. We have a LMS/CMS meeting Sunday morning – the discussions has already started with Moodle, DSapace, Sakai and OLAT.
Idea: We need a way for folks to have a badge for paying for open source software. Dang I have so little time!
It is amazing when smart people get in the same space and then start talking.

Just a little nugget:

if (strtotime($php_row->end_date) < time()) {
$php_bgcolor = $php_record_row_expired_bgcolor;
}

My version:

print "Updated at:".$track->data(updated_at)."\n";
print "File:".strtotime($track->data(updated_at))."\n";
print "now:".time()."\n";
$diff = time() - strtotime($track->data(updated_at));
print "Diff:".$diff;
$count = $track->data(count);
if ( ! isset($count) ) $count = 0;
// De-bounce
if ( $diff > 5 ) {
$count = $count + 1;
$track->setall( array( "count" => $count  ) ) ;
$track->update();
}

From: http://www.issociate.de/board/goto/926394/Comparing_PHP_Dates_with_MySQL_Dates.html

This should be good fun:
Industry Roundtable: Openness & Interoperability in Higher Education
Orange County Convention Center, Room W223, Thursday, October 30, 11:45 AM – 12:35 PM
Join a distinguished group of education leaders for a roundtable discussion on the emergence of open and interoperable technologies in higher education. Panelists will address how this trend is changing the face of teaching, learning and technology on campus. Confirmed participants include:
o Scott Jaschik, Editor, Inside Higher Ed (Moderator)
o Charles Severance, Former Executive Director, Sakai Foundation and Chief Architect, Sakai Project
o Serge Goldstein, Associate CIO and Director of Academic Services, Princeton University
o Michael Chasen, CEO, Blackboard
This is my first “real” Educause talk – usually – I just hang out in the trade show booths – the trade show is where all my pals hang out.

Yeah – I know I am not a political blogger – a large percentage of my blog posts include source code – but what the heck. I like politics and someday dream of being in politics – but it is a pretty idle dream. But just like Karaoke and singing – I will indulge myself in a political post just for fun.
I think that we are mistaken as the the root cause of the current economic crisis. We are collectively blaming the sub-prime market and all that – which of course is the proximal cause – however it is not the root cause. The root cause is “Oil” – whatever that means – the producers, suppliers, the speculators, etc – the whole market – except of course for the citizens that work at the local gas stations – they are just decent working people like the rest of us.
Over the past few years “Oil” decided that it wanted a bigger percentage of our income to go into their coffers. So for the past three years – we have this pattern where oil prices are driven up in the summer and then fall back down in the fall – but they never fall back to the place that they started from in the spring. So during the summer – Oil makes a lot more profit – and in the rest of the year – the still make more profit. Year on year -their profit was going up.
Since people naturally think in the short term – they mostly worry about how much higher or lower this weeks tank of gas cost versus last week’s tank costs. People of course have no choice – but since it seemed like the “really high” prices were always “temporary” – we could grit our teeth and throw a little more on the credit card for gas over the summer.
But quietly, year on year Oil had quietly doubled how much it takes from each of us in our cars and in our products that we purchase and use. It seemed as though the Oil companies could siphon money out of the US economy at will and as long as they kept us guessing – no one noticed it.
However, sooner or later something had to give – as money was sucked out of the economy – things got tighter – and in the past few months – the weakest link finally broke – the credit industry – was the weakest part of the economy – that ballon popped – and down we tumble like Humpty-Dumpty.
Now of course Oil is a little sheepish regarding destroying the US economy so they are dropping Oil prices really fast – kind of a big public apology. Kind of like a neighborhood kid saying “I did not mean it” after throwing a baseball through the front window of your house.
Sadly, the ten dollars I saved on gas last week does not make up for the ten thousand dollars we all lose in the market each week – so while I like to see Oil admitting responsibility for the crisis and trying to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again so we can get back to the old ways where they were siphoning cash out of the economy at will, it is just not going to happen.
My guess is that Oil will quickly tire of trying to help the economy and soon realize that they can suck money out of a bad economy just as well as they could suck money out of a good economy – and gas prices will get back to the $4-$5 range quickly. Once you get used to greedy ways – it is hard to get un-greedy.
Ah well – the good news is that my Honda 450 gets 45 miles per gallon cost me $1300 to buy and has really cheap insurance. I bought it to save money on gas with the idea that in less than a year I could pay for the bike in gas savings – with low gas prices, my payback is longer – ah well.
Here is a bit of good news though – in Michigan motorcycles are best ridden in the summer – when Oil prices go up. And then when I have to drive my 27 mile per gallon Buick LeSabre in the winter – Gas prices are lower. All in all – it seems like me and Oil have a pretty reasonable arrangement. Next year – with $6 gas – I will have my motorcycle paid off by gas savings by early July 2009.

This program dumps stuff out – it shows you the reason why you want to use

from google.appengine.ext import webapp

This is looks at the Google App Engine at its most basic CGI. Here is some really awesome CGI documentation from the early days:

http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/in.html

import os

import sys

# Print a form for testing of POST

print 'Content-Type: text/html'

print ''

print '<form method="post" action="/">'

print 'Zap Data: <input type="text" name="zap"><br>'

print 'Zot Data: <input type="zot" name="zap"><br>'

print '<input type="submit">'

print "</form>"

# Dump raw CGI

# http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/in.html

print "<pre>"

print 'Environment keys:'

print ''

for param in os.environ.keys():

print "%20s %s" % (param,os.environ[param])

print ''

# Dump the GCI data

print 'Data'

count = 0

for l in sys.stdin:

count = count + 1

print l

if count > 100:

break

print "</pre>"

# In case you want to test file uploading

# print '<form method="post" action="/" enctype="multipart/form-data">'

# print 'File Data: <input type="file" name="filedat"><br>'

					

You're so vain you probably think the web is about you!
Don't you
Don't you

Here it is:

<f:verbatim>
<iframe src="${PresentationTool.slide.url}" width="100%" height="1200px">
</iframe>
</f:verbatim>

I am guessing that this got much easier when JSP and JSF became friends…

The basic idea here is to build a device that connects to a computer display port (i.e. VGA, DVI, etc) and makes the display viewable over the Internet using a basic web browser. The device would digitize the video output and make it available over Ethernet, Wireless, or other network technology. The device would have a simple web server built in that used a protocol like VNC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vnc) to allow us to send the keyboard and mouse events back through the network to the device.
Some systems already have this built-in to allow remote management. This device would allow that capability to be added to any system as it simulates a standard keyboard, monitor, and mouse.

One of the things that you worry about when riding a motorcycle is when another driver about to pull out in front of you sees you or not. The issue is more of a problem in the day time

Saturday I worked for a while with WSDL, XML, and Schema – trying to make some extremely simple stuff work over SOAP in PHP. I finally got some stuff working but the stress of figuring it out took its toll. I hate being so non-productive – I like getting stuff done – I dislike figuring out crap rats nest data models in XML/WSDL/Schema.
It was so bad that I tried to get the poison out of my system by taking a long motorcycle ride to pick up a new batch of baby Sakaigers – no help. Sunday – I could not work – I spent most of the day laying in bed – mentally exhausted.
Then this morning – I woke up with a splitting headache and knot in my stomach – I could hardly stand up. I took a Motrin and laid back down – after about three hours the gurgling in my stomach ceased and I was able to stand up enough to drive into work for my 3PM meeting.
It is just really sad that WSDL/XML/Schema is so bad that it makes one sick to one’s stomach for a day and a half just by looking at it.
I figured that maybe I should try XMLSpy instead of looking at it all in vi – perhaps looking at xsd files in vi was what gave me vertigo. But of course – XMLSpy is not free – it is $149. Great market – the world has adopted these crappy standards and you have the only piece of technology to make them tolerable – and you only give a trial edition – not a free edition. GRRRRRR.
This made me more sick to my stomach – it has gotten to the point where you pay $149 for the right to view Schema without vomiting. We as an industry have built standards on top of XML and Schema that are so nasty that you need to pay some stupid company $149 to interpret them – where is the free alternative??
So I kept googling “free mac os xml viewer” and came across – Exchanger XML Lite – which was free. Their web site is:
http://www.exchangerxml.com/
Now I can load up the schema files and Exchanger will load the million external references and tell me where I need a string named “Fred” and it is up to 256 characters.
If we want object oriented stuff like extends and want to avoid repetitive code – then lets just make our specs be honestly OO and use open braces and close braces – then at least we can run JavaDoc and see what methods our ultimate object will have. Why add a zillion less thans, colons, and greater thans to completely obscure things.
I need to get back to making SOAP work – but I am nervous because I lost 1.5 days of productivity just by looking at XML schema – so even armed with Exchanger – I am fearful of diving back into the swirling darkness that is XML Schema.
Ah well – maybe writing this blog post will make me feel better. Or maybe someone will tell me a cool way to run a script that auto-generates PHP objects given some crap WSDL as input.
Comments
I’ve been building stuff in XML, XSD, XSL for a couple years using OSP. A good toolkit for free would have been great, but it isn’t out there.
However, OxygenXML has an academic license for $50 and works as an Eclipse plugin. I really like it.
Sean