Ironic Senior League Hockey Story – Prelude

For the past 15 years, I have played Hockey in the grownup league in Lansing, MI. Until this year I always signed up with Dr. Richard Enbody of the Michigan State Computer Science Department. Rich is my Phd. Thesis advisor and a good friend. He is a much better hockey player than me – he played Club Hockey in college and plays center – I play right wing. After 15 years we play pretty well together – primarily because I do dumb things like pass the puck without looking first – but he is the only person on the ice who knows where the puck is going and he gets there – he turns my mistakes into brilliant plays because no one on the ice is expecting it.
This past year, I was travelling for Sakai during August and a bit distracted as the signup deadline approached – Rich signed up on time – but I did not. I got a lucky spot after the deadline – but on a team other than Rich’s. So this season we played on different teams for the first time in 10 years.
We played against one another only once during the regular season – primarily due to a combination of his travel schedule and my travel schedule – his team won the game handily and I just was lousy.
So my team finishes the season in 7th place and his team finishes the season in 8th place. But the playoffs is a different story in this league – the intensity upps quite a bit and the more balanced and defensive teams tend to win in the playoffs.
Almost as if it were a Disney script, both teams have made the finals – today at 7:20 PM at the Suburban Ice Arena. So I am playing against Rich for the championship.
We have not even been in the finals for about 8 years – we lost that game 3-2 – I distinctly remember a goal we gave up that turned out to to be the winning goal. We were facing off in the defensive zone against the other team’s weaker line and a much weaker center than Rich. We have had a play that we have done for years in this kind of situation – we don’t even need to look at each other to call the play. We both push forward and try to make a very high speed breakout, catching the defense on flat footed. It works wonderfully when it works.
On this particular face off (8 years ago) we both broke away – but we lost the puck and the other center (a relatively weak player) shot it right in the net – we lost the game. The further irony is that the team we lost to back then was led by an outstanding player named Scott Crilley – and Scott is on my team this year in the finals.
So this is pretty intense and layered with irony. The funny thing is that we cannot both win the championship – one will win and the other will lose – and in future years – we will again play togther – so we will have a good time but likely never get to another championship game – ever.
So this game is likely to be bragging rights for the next 20 years.
Just to make it more fun – last week in the semifinal game I broke my left index finger.
Click here for the X-ray image.
But I will not miss this game for the world – so it is all taped up and off we go. I am sure it will hurt some – but heck – that is hockey and this is bragging rights for a long time – even if I lose – I want to be on the ice.
In 12 hours – one will win and one will lose and history will be made – for a long time. Either way – it is a cool story.
P.S. Happy Mother’s day

Abstract: The Coming Functionality Mashup

This is my abstract for my faculty visit presentation next Thursday at the UM School of Information.
We have been hearing for sometime about Web 2.0 and how Web 2.0 allows to create new functionality by remixing and reusing existing content to produce new derived content. However, we can only go so far when the only thing that we can “mash up” is the content – we need to begin to have the ability to mash up functionality as well. The Sakai (CTools) software is successful as increasingly more capabilities are integrated into the software. This leads software that continuously increases in size and complexity simply to be successful (kind of like dinosaurs that kept evolving to be larger and larger – until a comet hit to wipe them out). This leads to efforts like Microsoft, Apple, and Google where slowly but surely they need to reinvent, rewrite, acquire, etc enough functionality to cover their entire scope of their domain in their own proprietary manner. At the same time we are seeing increasingly rich and powerful focused point solutions such as YouTube or Skype that would be a nice addition to any application – but are used in isolation. There is an intense need to build interoperable capabilities that can be mashed up to make new meta-systems. But this is difficult to do in a clean manner because of issues like identity, authorization, storage. This is particularly acute in the teaching and learning area where there in nearly an infinite variation of approaches to teaching which are desirable. Almost by definition, no single piece of software will ever cover the scope of teaching and learning. Customization, innovation, and extension must happen at the level of an individual user and yet these systems must be as robust as any other enterprise wide application with 100% availability and extremely scalable performance. The goal is to architect applications which meet the seemingly conflicting goals of enterprise scalability and reliability with individual extension and customization. Teaching, Learning and Collaboration systems such as Sakai (CTools) are in an ideal position to make a breakthrough innovation in functionality mash up because the need is so great. I will give a vision of the next few years of evolution of systems like Sakai to make those systems to address both important dimensions of the next generation of enterprise applications. The vision will outline the needs and goals of these next generation system as well as the challenges that must be faced to achieve those goals.
Dr. Charles Severance
http://www.dr-chuck.com/
http://www.dr-chuck.com/dr-chuck/resume/index.htm

Recovering Real Media Files

In preparation for my faculty visit to the UM School of Information, I found I needed to recover some old media that I only had in Real Media – I had lost all the copies of the final video.
Several things did not work which I describe below. What did work is
Real7ime Converter (R7C) is a converter of any RealPlayer(tm) streaming medias (video and sound) to AVI/WAV/MP3 format. It is a realtime converter because it does not manage Real Time Streaming Protocol(tm) (RTSP) directly so the needed time to convert a media will be greater or equal to the time of the media.
This can be downloaded from http://r7cproj.euro.ru/indexe.htm
I also installed a copy of real Player 8 from my own archival copies – It worked with this Real Player – I don’t know what other versions it works with – thankfully in the mid-90’s as Real got weirder and weirder – I had the forthought to keep copies of all of the Real distributions :)
This worked swell – I got an uncompressed 320×240 AVI that I turned into Flash Video and MP4. Here is the result:
Understanding the Posix Open System Reference Model
Pretty cool – since I was dead in the water otherwise.

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Hierarchy in Charon

Those of you watching my photo blog have seen some photos of new hierarchy support in Charon. I have now checked in the code.
Add a UI to display sites in a hierarchy. This all centers around
a new per-site property (sakai:parent-id). This allows the construction
of a hierarchy by having child sites point to parent sites.
This is a latent feature with zero UI impact unless it is truned on
by the addition of a property.
For more info see
https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn//reference/trunk/docs/architecture/sakai_pseudo_hierarchy.doc
See the above document for some next steps.
SAK-7907 SAK-249 SAK-8052
Thanks to the staff at Charles Sturt for the design brainstorming session…
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2007/04/index.php?img=25-04-07_232453_01.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2007/04/index.php?img=25-04-07_233028_01.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2007/04/index.php?img=26-04-07_055638_01.jpg
This was mostly coded in airports and on UAL flights 870 and 72.
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2007/05/index.php?img=03-05-07_180531_01.jpg

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Notes From Developer Workshop At Melbourne

These were my speaking notes. The better stuff is in the powerpoint.
PowerPoint.
Local Customizations
– Get into trunk – ahead of the game
Building a Tool
http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/BOOT/Home
JSF
RSF
JSR-168
IMS Tool Interoperability
Installing Sakai
Provider Source
Skin Documentation
Boot Camp
Sample Portlets in Sakai
Writing a Portlet in Sakai
IMS Tool Interop Portlet Source
IMS Tool Interop Test Site
Rutgers Link Tool (Using)

Adding a new Portlet to Pluto 1.1

~/dev/apache-tomcat-5.5.20/conf csev$ vi tomcat-users.xml
<?xml version=’1.0′ encoding=’utf-8′?>
<tomcat-users>
<role rolename=”pluto”/>
<role rolename=”tomcat”/>
<role rolename=”role1″/>
<user username=”tomcat” password=”tomcat” roles=”tomcat,pluto”/>
<user username=”role1″ password=”tomcat” roles=”role1″/>
<user username=”both” password=”tomcat” roles=”tomcat,role1″/>
</tomcat-users>
~/dev/apache-tomcat-5.5.20/webapps/pluto/WEB-INF csev$ vi pluto-portal-driver-config.xml
<page name=”IFrame” uri=”/WEB-INF/themes/pluto-default-theme.jsp”>
<portlet context=”/iframe-portlet” name=”SakaiIFrame”/>
</page>
~/dev/apache-tomcat-5.5.20/conf/Catalina/localhost csev$ vi iframe-portlet.xml
<Context path=”iframe-portlet” docBase=”iframe-portlet.war”
crossContext=”true” Manager=””></Context>

Great – Now I am in Hawaii

The plane coming back from Australia had a bit of vibration and trouble so we diverted to Hawaii. We arrived at 5AM – I got a boarding pass at 10AM – 5 hours of line to rebook one plane load of folks. And the nice folks at UAL gave me a $7.50 meal voucher. I still don’t know if If i wll make my connector in San Francisco.
Hawaii is way too humid – I expected it would be nice like San Diego – but so far I am not pleased witht he weather. Ah well – I am likely in a bad mood for having my flight interrupted anyways.
Hopefully it will go better now that I have a boarding pass, have free wireless, ar conditioning and checked in some code from the WorldClub and have my laptop getting charged.

I made Melete 2.3 work on 2.4

I got things working well enough for my demo by making a simple change to the project.xml
:~/dev/sakai/melete-2.3.m2/melete-app csev$ vi project.xml
<!– 2.4 Patch –>
<dependency>
<groupId>xerces</groupId>
<artifactId>xercesImpl</artifactId>
<version>2.6.2</version>
<properties>
<war.bundle>true</war.bundle>
</properties>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>xerces</groupId>
<artifactId>xmlParserAPIs</artifactId>
<version>2.6.2</version>
<properties>
<war.bundle>true</war.bundle>
</properties>
</dependency>