In summary, our ambition is not merely an incremental improvement of Sakai nor is it to
copy Google. Our goal is not simply to create a better and cheaper version of Blackboard. It
is time to arrive at a clearer understanding of the capabilities that represent needs unique
to education and for the Sakai community to focus its development effort on providing
these capabilities while taking advantage of established open‐source efforts to provide
more generic capabilities. We should, in short, strive to create a different type of academic
collaboration system. Institutions that choose Sakai 3 will be choosing to run a qualitatively
different type of system. This is the kind choice we should provide to the educational
community. Not just a choice between open source and proprietary.
(Link: Sakai 3 Proposal – the ambitions for a next generation sakai collaboration and learning environment)
Sakai 3 Proposal – the ambitions for a next generation sakai collaboration and learning environment
August 28, 2009
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Apache Shindig is an OpenSocial container
August 28, 2009
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Apache Shindig is an OpenSocial container and helps you to start hosting OpenSocial apps quickly by providing the code to render gadgets, proxy requests, and handle REST and RPC requests.
Apache Shindig’s goal is to allow new sites to start hosting social apps in under an hour’s worth of work.
(Link: Apache Shindig is an OpenSocial container)
Malcolm Gladwell on What Stanley H. Kaplan taught us about the SAT
August 28, 2009
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What Stanley H. Kaplan taught us about the SAT
(Link: Malcolm Gladwell on What Stanley H. Kaplan taught us about the SAT)
The Wired Campus – At Distance-Learning College, Flash Drive Replaces Course-Management System – The Chronicle of Higher Education
August 28, 2009
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Instead, the college piloted the flash drives this spring in 15 “FlashTrack” courses, which include the “Science of Nutrition,” “Social Gerontology,” and “Principles of Finance.” Each flash drive contained Open Office versions of word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs; media players; and folders containing course material. At the end of the class, students took a high-stakes test — as they would in any other online course — to complete the course, Mr. Cooper said.
(Link: The Wired Campus – At Distance-Learning College, Flash Drive Replaces Course-Management System – The Chronicle of Higher Education)
Amazon Web Services Blog: FlightCaster – AWS-Powered Flight Delay Prediction
August 28, 2009
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According to a short article in SD Times, the site and the applications were built in just four months on a budget of less than a million dollars. The developers used a number of advanced technologies including Hadoop, Clojure, and Cascading. Clojure is a dynamic scripting language with a LISP-like syntax, running on top of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Cascading is a very high-level workflow language. It runs on top of Hadoop. They used this technology to build a system which can do predictive AI, literally forecasting the future.
(Link: Amazon Web Services Blog: FlightCaster – AWS-Powered Flight Delay Prediction)
OpSource launches virtual private cloud, says it’s better than Amazon’s | VentureBeat
August 28, 2009
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Ryan says OpSource’s architecture allows for a number of features that aren’t offered by Amazon, but which enterprise IT departments are looking for, such as the ability to support traditional multi-tier applications (where things like the application display and data management are run as separate processes), as well as lower latency time between systems. Ryan adds that athough the OpSource cloud is being pitched as “the first true enterprise cloud,” it could be useful to anyone, including the small web application developers.
(Link: OpSource launches virtual private cloud, says it’s better than Amazon’s | VentureBeat)
Microsoft Opens Popfly Source Code
August 28, 2009
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Although the project has been officially shut down, Popfly developers say there are a number of different directions to go with the code:
* Example code for a simple, general purpose Silverlight game engine
* Create a Silverlight 3 scene / actor / behavior editor for the data format and make new games
* Porting the engine to run your games on other platforms, like XBox 360 or Zune via XNA Game Studio or client PC via WPF
* Building a copy of the game engine to use with your game data to post on your website.
* Fix multi-actor collision resolution and make Lots O’ Peas go faster!
* Add new features like grid-based terrain, dialog trees, etc
(Link: Microsoft Opens Popfly Source Code)
PHP URL shortener script that can shorten over 4 billion URLs
August 28, 2009
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* Can shorten over 4 billion unique URLs in 8 or less characters (4,294,967,295 URLs to be exact)
* Super duper fast—uses very little server resources
* Includes an API so you can create your own short URLs on the fly
* Option to turn clickthru tracking on and off
* Option to limit usage to 1 IP address for personal use and to prevent spamming from others
* Only uses alphanumeric characters so all browsers can interpret the URL
* Secure—several data filters in place to prevent SQL injection hacks
* Uses 301 redirects for SEO and analytics yumminess (thanks Nicolas)
(Link: PHP URL shortener script that can shorten over 4 billion URLs)
Ruby Version Manager – rvm
August 28, 2009
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You want to try out all of the different ruby interpreters and versions including different patchlevels, but you don’t want to break what’s working for you now. No time to waste?
(Link: Ruby Version Manager – rvm)
Mac OS X Automation
August 28, 2009
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Sooner or later every individual, business, or organization is challenged to perform repetitive or complex procedures on their computers. Whether the task is renaming numerous files, batch processing images, or building documents using data from multiple sources, the need for powerful automation tools is shared by all computer users. Mac OS X is designed, from the ground up, for automation and offers a variety of integrated tools and technologies to solve your automation challenges.
(Link: Mac OS X Automation)
