The Sakai Frameless Portal is *Alive*

For me, one of my personal holy grails has been the elimination of all frames – another step has been taken in that direction and is now in the trunk of Sakai for you to use and play with. Over the past few weeks I have been working on changing the Sakai PDA portal to eliminate the *last* frame and blend the navigation of Sakai with the tool.
Here is a picture of frameless Sakai running on the PSP and some pictures of the portal running on my Treo.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/images/2007/04/DSC01054.JPG
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/images/2007/04/DSC00039.JPG
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/images/2007/04/DSC00041.JPG
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/images/2007/04/DSC00043.JPG
I got a PSP for my son Brent yesterday for his birthday and he was quite unhappy as I immediately took it from him for several hours as I tested it out on the new Sakai frameless PDA portal. He will be even less happy if I tell him I need to take his brand-new PSP to the IMS Learning Impact meeting all next week so I can do demos. :)

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Sometimes it is the Simplest Thing…

We depend too much on automatic things like maven and ant sometimes and forget how to to the simple things. For example – how do you compile a java program on the command line and use a jar like jdom-1.0.jar and then run that with the java command finding the dependencies in the jar.
rm *.class
javac -extdirs . HelloWorld.java
java -cp .:jdom-1.0.jar HelloWorld

Sometimes it is the Simplest Thing…

We depend too much on automatic things like maven and ant sometimes and forget how to to the simple things. For example – how do you compile a java program on the command line and use a jar like jdom-1.0.jar and then run that with the java command finding the dependencies in the jar.
rm *.class
javac -extdirs . HelloWorld.java
java -cp .:jdom-1.0.jar HelloWorld

How to Copy a File in Apple’s Finder

This may seem obvious but it needs to be documented so I can refer back to it later.
The way you copy a file from folder to another folder on Apple Mac OS/X in the finder is to hold down the option key while dragging the file.
It is hard to find documentation on something this simple – so I am providing this blog entry as a public service and as a personal reminder to save me a minute or so re-deriving it.
Funny how this is so much simpler in the Terminal program where you type “cp ” and then drag the file into the terminal window then type ” .” and enter. :)

Defragmenting my MacBook Pro with iDefrag

I just defragmented my MacBook pro with iDefrag – and the simple answer is that I should have gotten this a long time ago. I do a lot of video and a lot of development and my drive runs between 75% – 85% full all the time.
I used the variant of iDefrag that makes a boot ROM and then can totally defrag my disk. It was horribly fragmented – particularly the free space.
My main issue was that I could not keep up with capture (on a dual 2GHz Intel!) and lost frames.
Once iDefrag came up it was clear – there was no real clear free space so it was seeking like crazy and not able to keep up with frames – reminds me of the old days with a PC :)
iDefrag of my 90GB out of 120GB took about 5 hours with a cool picture all the time so you don’t get nervous. On reboot all is well. I will likely defrag after every large media project from this point forward.
I really need to get a 200GB drive to do all this video :)

How to Integrate an External Tool In Sakai

The Question:
The trickiest one is tool integration: how do you integrate non-Sakai tools into the framework? I know this is complex (probably why I put it off for so long). Are there recognised steps required to integrate a non Sakai tool. I know this also depends on the type of tool and what integration really means, lets assume for now that the tool needs to know enough about Sakai to behave like a native tool.
Of course, Plan B in all of this would be to write a portlet wrapper around the tool and just plug it in to 2. 4. Would this approach introduce any limitations on what could be integrated and the level of integration?

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iFrames are gone in the PDA Portal

It took less than 24 hours :)
I have code that I will check into trunk soon that eliminates the last iframe in the Sakai PDA view.
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2007/04/index.php?img=05-04-07_143454_01.jpg
Thanks to David and Stephen for testing the PDA portal and making sure I kept thinking about this :)
Presense is still in an iframe – but it can be suppressed as it is optional and browsers that ignore iframes.

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Dreaming of a frameless portal…

I woke up this morning and while laying in bed at the Cupertino Inn – it dawned on me that there might be a way to remove the tool frame from the PDA portal. I am giving myself the next 24 hours to get it done.
I apologize if I seem distracted in meetings today…