IMS Meeting – Seattle Karaoke Notes

Looking for karaoke Box close to Redmond WA – the closest were about 15 miles away.
Confirmed:
9PM Wednesday
Venus Karaoke
#102 – 601 S. King Street
Seattle, WA 98104
(206) 264-1779
Notes:
This is a 20 minute drive to the south side of Seattle downtown – pretty simple and direct drive from Redmond.
No Liquor license – BYOB – Need a Washington Personal Liquor Permit – whatever that is.
Potentials:
Karaoke Box
140 University Wa N.E.
Seattle, WA 98105
(206) 632-9260
I called this Karaoke Box at 11PM – no answer – not a good sign.
I have not yet called this MARS yet.
MARS INTERNET/KARAOKE BOX
18230 E Valley Hwy
Kent, WA 98032
425-291-9777
This is north of Redmond WA – looks like a less
convienent drive.
Karaoke Club is closer to Redmond.
It is important to know which nights these folks do Karaoke – a phone call is required
Maple Leaf Chinese Restaurant
707 148th Ave NE
Bellevue, WA
98007-4710
Phone: (425) 747-8700
2.2 Miles South of Microsoft
They have a karaoke bar, which has also been deserted every time we’ve been –
maybe they do some major business on the weekends and that’s why they can afford to have an empty dining room most evenings?
Seoul Olympic Korean Restaurant
(425) 455-9305
1200 112th Ave Ne
Bellevue, Washington 98004
5 Miles South of Microsoft
Shi-lin Cuisine of China
15932 NE 8TH St
Bellevue, WA
98008-3908
Phone: (425) 644-1010
2 miles south of Microsoft

Testing Pluto 1.1.4 QA

I tried to re-compile Sakai with Pluto 1.1.4 and apparently an API changed:
/Users/csev/dev/sakai/portal/portal-render-impl/impl/src/java/org/sakaiproject/portal/render/portlet/services/SakaiPortalCallbackService.java:128: org.sakaiproject.portal.render.portlet.services.SakaiPortalCallbackService.SakaiPortletURLProvider is not abstract and does not override abstract method isSecureSupported() in org.apache.pluto.spi.PortletURLProvider
class SakaiPortletURLProvider implements PortletURLProvider
Probably no big deal – just part of the Pluto QA.

Things to try in the Portal

The 2.4 release has basic support for PDAs – see /portal/pda in your server – the PDA portal has its own style sheet:
/portal/styles/portalstyles.css
The 2.4 release also has the workgroup portal support as well:
https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn//reference/trunk/docs/architecture/sakai_workgroup_portal.doc
Sakai 2.4 also has support for RSS, Atom, and OPML:
/portal/rss /portal/atom /portal/opml
These show sites, announcements, etc – give them a try.
After 2.4 was release a bunch of features were added to trunk in /portal
Making the PDA portal optionally eliminate iframes – experimental feature
Hierarchical site navigation
I include some properties to play with.

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Next Rev of DashBoard

I have to run off and do family things the rest of today – but I just updated the portlet – and it works swell now in uPortal 2.5 – previously it did not work so well – missing commons-collections.jar.
A cool new feature is that parameters in the portlet.xml can be overridden by adding preferences in the uPortal admin interface – so you should *NEVER* have to touch the portlet.xml file.
Another cool feature is the mighty-morphing web.xml which works in either Pluto 1.0 or Pluto 1.1 without needing a patch – just drop into Sakai’s or uPortal’s webapps directory and let it fly!
Two important parameters to set in uPortal’s channel setup are:
sakai.host = http://localhost:8083
sakai.secret = plugh-xyzzy
And another fun one is
sakai.allowpref = true/false
If this is set to false – the user cannot set prefs via Edit-mode. Of course in uP2 you can disable the Edit button – but for portals that show the edit button – this pref stops pref changes from happening even if users find their way into edit mode…
If you want to hack look and feel – open up the war and edit “feed.vm” – a Velocity template for the output production.
Documentation is coming.

One war to rule them all – Building a war portable across versions of Pluto

I made the following web.xml in my war – and it works directly in Pluto 1.1 and Pluto 1.0 environments – at least it works in Sakai 2.4 (Pluto 1.1) and uPortal 2.5 (Pluto 1.0).
I initialize the servlet with both sets of parameters (thankfully no overlap in names) and then provide two servlet mappings.
It seems deceptively simple. Of course this is doing wildly different things at run-time – but depending on whichever Pluto you are running – it sees what it wants to see and ignores the rest.
Comments/feedback please.

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Sakai Dashboard Portlet (JSR-168)

I just finished writing a simple Sakai Dashboard JSR-168 portlet. The portlet logs into a Sakai server on behalf of a user and retrieves and RSS feed of the sites and their announcements for the user. Then the feed is displayed in the portlet – all of the links are target=_new so there are ZERO iframes in the portlet and portal.
I need to write documentation for it (of course) – but the code is here:
https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/portlets/trunk/
This directory now can be checked out and compiles *outside* of a Sakai source tree – it only needs the Sakai maven plugin.
maven plugin:download -DgroupId=sakaiproject -DartifactId=sakai -Dversion=2.2
This portlet configures and operates much like the Launch Portlet that we have had for a while now. It uses SakaiPortalLogin.jws like the other portlets. The Dashboard portlet can be configured via Admin-specified preferences in addition to the portlet.xml -this should make it easier to install and configure.
I use Rome to retrieve and parse the feed – all the markup is in Velocity. I have code in place to retrieve the raw feed in case someone wants to apply some XSLT to it to make it prettier.
Yes, I know the portlet is ugly – that is why all the markup is in Velocity so folks can fix it for me – or just switch to XSLT. I am going to run through some deployment scenarios in uPortal and Pluto and write some basic documentation about how to set things up.
I took the opportunity to go through the portlets and do some general cleanup and improve some patterns as I have gained more experience in writing portlets and portlet support code.
Thanks to Alves Phillipe from Pierre-Marie Curie Institute who worked with me at JA-Sig on the idea to get me started.
Comments, patches, etc needed and welcomed. I use a new mechanism to retrieve remote user, etc – so I need a parch to my lookupPortalType method in PortletHelper.java for Gridsphere and Oracle.

To Sakai or Not to Sakai on the WebSite

We are switching the web site to use Sakai – Nate Angel asked the following question:
Second: on the decision to move the Sakai website into Sakai. Can we discuss a bit before we make this move? I spend a bit of time on websites in my day job and I don’t really find Sakai to be the right tool for a public-facing website at this stage. While I love my own dogfood, I’m also a fan of the right tool for the right job.

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Making Pluto 1.1.3 Work

Just more notes – I had a problem with the build putting the pluto-portal-driver-config.xml file in the wrong directory.

cd dev
csh new-apache.csh
cd ~/dev/pluto-1.1/
svn checkout https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/portals/pluto/tags/pluto-1.1.3 pluto-1.1.3
cd pluto-1.1.3/
rm -r ~/.m2/repository/org/apache/pluto/
mvn install
mvn -DinstallDir="/Users/csev/dev/apache-tomcat-5.5.20/" pluto:install
cd webapps/pluto/WEB-INF
mv ../pluto-portal-driver-config.xml .