Software (mostly Sakai), Education (mostly ePortfolio), Complaints (mostly unreasonable), Thoughts (mostly unintelligible)

So, I’m doing some development against Oracle with PHP and really wanted Express Edition on a local machine to be able to hack without a lot of messing around (my other Oracle instances are behind VPNs, etc.)  I’ve also been thinking about hooking my desktop back up for one of those environment changes that results in a productivity boost.  A third factor is that I want to do this development in Aptana because, well, it’s just plain sweet.  Easily said…

Continue reading →

Hypothesis confirmed: with logging on, Adium gets to be very heavy.

I was seeing somewhere between 30 seconds and a minute to get to the keychain login, and another 30 seconds to bring up a contact list. Clean out the logs, relaunch — about 4 seconds for each.

The logs live in ~/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Users/Default. Remove or archive them and watch it fly. -NB

So, amidst an interesting fight with CakePHP, I was fortunate enough to spot a quirk in json_encode when passing arrays. If you have a typical ordinal array, life is good. If you have a typical associative array, life is good. The quirk is in how PHP decides what you have.

We define “life is good” here as: you pass something without meaningful keys, you get an array; you pass something with meaningful keys, you get an object.

When you have a regular old array of values (or rows of a result set, in my case) and you filter it with, e.g., array_filter, you can end up with holes in the ordinal numbering.  This delights json_encode, which displays its exceptional, “just works” intelligence, giving you an object full of numeric indexes pointing at what you thought would be unnamed items in an array.  In some cases, this makes no difference but, in some, it can be a big problem.

Fortunately, I’m generally in tune enough with the stylings of PHP that I went straight to trying array_values — and now, all is right with the world. Just wrap any array_filter calls with array_values if you plan to turn the goods into JSON. -NB

So I’m debugging a chain of Sakai helpers and I ask myself…

“Self, is there an easy way to use the Eclipse debugger to fake some runtime/dynamic tracing?”

And the answer is a resounding “yes!”

If you set up conditional breakpoints at the places where you want those debug statements and inject some great println justice, magic is made. Eclipse is also nice enough to allow blocks of code or expressions. This means you can use just the println like an expression if you don’t care about the breaks, or make a println and a return if you do. See the screenshot for a somewhat nonsensical example.

All of this can be yours with a single startup of Tomcat and a tail -f. If you’re lucky enough to be hacking something in *-tool, life is even better. Save, mvn install sakai:deploy, relaunch your debug scenario, and keep an eye on that terminal. Somebody who knows what they’re doing with Eclipse could probably tell you how to even target an IDE view — catalina.out is fine for me, though.

…And for quick reference, you can right click on a breakpoint in the left-hand trough and select Breakpoint properties or use the Breakpoints view. On a Mac, Cmd-Shift-B toggles a breakpoint on a line, but getting to the properties with the keyboard is a pain (Opt-Shift-Q, B). In there, a natural-feeling sequence of arrows and Opt-Enter or a right click opens the dialog. Getting back to the editor is easier: F12.

Happy hacking! -NB

OK. So I thought I wasn’t crazy. I reviewed my code. I tested Dojo versions. I isolated conditions. I followed dead-ends in desperation.

And then the problem goes away. I can’t get SharedObject storage to break anywhere (and I’m still not sure why it was broken, then magically fixed — I suspect an update to the remote machine I was using, since the cluster is monitored/managed).

And then, today, we replicate it in the one place in the world we really care about, and scrape the Flash version: 9.0.16.0.

So I check if Adobe is benevolent enough to lend a hand (installable old version) to poor developers who are getting hosed. They give a nice package, so I was thrilled.

Then I fight with the installers/uninstallers for 6 versions until I find a golden nugget: uninstall_flash_player.exe /clean takes care of the registry entry that was stopping anything but the latest version (as it had already been installed) from running, though they install with “no problems”.

And, with undue buildup, the point of this post:

Flash 9.0.16.0 does NOT work with Dojo Storage 1.1, period.

The good news is that all newer versions do, and 9.16 is coming up on two full years old with 3 major updates since. Time to beg for this lab to be updated and get on with better problems — like IE’s eternal lifetimes of objects created in iframes and its derivative memory leaks. -NB

Nathan Pearson, Sakai’s lead for the UX Initiative just forwarded a post from the 37signals blog. It’s referencing a video interview with Ira Glass, where he talks about being a fierce editor and moderator, cutting more tape than you roll. The post extends the interview’s mention of entropy as the disorganizing, enemy force to software.

In principle, I agree: entropy tends to bloat, delay, and complicate software. But the read-only experience of listener/viewer in storytelling is a bit different from daily use software. The post reveals some of the company’s “less is more all” philosophy.

Continue reading →

Those of you who attended the Sakai conference in Atlanta might recognize that quote. It’s attributable to Eben Moglen (SFLC), uttered during the “lunch discussion” with Matthew Small (Blackboard). “These are the data,” is a quote I’ve used countless times in the past 16 months. I’ll explain in a moment.

So, fast-forward, and we see posts from Michael Feldstein on the initial invalidation of all 44 claims and Blackboard’s response. The latter post (and Bb’s statement) is specifically about the percentages of patents that are upheld, invalidated, or altered under reexamination. This is the exact context of Dr. Moglen’s original quote. He presented some hard figures and summed up with those ringing words.

I’m not going to beat up on Blackboard — they’re looking at the rules and playing the game. I completely disagree with software patents, but they’re still allowed in the rulebook, so I can’t blame them for filing before someone else did. Indeed, the applications were filed in 1999 and 2000. It was a different frontier with respect to the Internet, Free Software, and software patents then (see LZW, Unisys, SCO).

Personally, I thought it was pretty bad karma to file a press release of a patent and lawsuit on the same day, turning the red lights in people’s minds into white hot light on the detailed claims. But then again, I’m not on their strategy team. It’s just too bad that we’re tying up all the energy, time, and tax dollars, bickering over how we play in the same edusandbox and who gets how big a slice.

Anyway, there are 44 patent claims. Of the 10 issues set forth in the reexamination request, the rejections of 6 were adopted with modification, those of one without modification, and those of 3 were not adopted. The union of all adopted rejections deems that all of the claims set forth in United States Patent 6,988,138 are unpatentable. These are the data. -NB

You can download the audio of the lunch session from the Sakai Confluence page. There is also a transcript from Jim Farmer.

Every so often, something goes your way, ya know? So, last Thursday, I posted to sakai-dev asking whether I should use dojox.storage or borrow some stuff from rWiki:

http://www.nabble.com/Flash-storage—-dojo.storage-or-homebrew–td16033853.html

It also just so happens that the main guy behind dojox.storage, Brad Neuberg, apparently felt like being a kind soul, did a ton of refactoring work, and bundled up the smallest, most practical package possible for my immediate need and posted it, not three hours later:

http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2008/03/easy-download-of-dojo-storage-for.html

So far, it’s really easy to use (about 15 total lines, and tastes like HashMap) and moves between browsers very well. I’m only having one issue on IE. It’s choking on line 52 of some unnamed file that a little Googling hints is related to the Flash plugin. (For the curious, it’s an Object Required error in __flash__removeCallback()…)

I guess this can happen with different ways of including SWF files — the confusing bit is that one thread says use the HTML embedding, rather than JavaScript, and another says to use JavaScript rather than HTML. The tricky part is that both seemed to fix it.

So, I’m going to test on a machine that doesn’t have script debugging turned on and hope for the best. If it doesn’t grumble too badly, I’ll poke around for a fix in my spare time.

Either way — Cheers, Brad! You really made my day. -NB

How long should personal artifacts submitted in some official capacity be viewable (by learner or official) in their original state? How we can let learners really own their materials?

We’ve approached this problem to date by ignoring it. We make an explicit step: at some point, we force to student to say “I’m done with this thing and it’s yours forever”, and lock it. Or we just let it be malleable forever.

This is directly analogous to how, in logic, math, and computer science, we sometimes restrict input to maintain a lower conceptual threshold. Persistence and security of artifacts is a really hard problem, so we make sure it can’t destabilize the easier ones we’re solving, by distilling a complex grey gradient into blacks and whites.

It’s a perfectly valid way to get a foundation, but it’s time to move into our version of second-order logic — versioned, purpose-stamped, multi-threaded artifacts — to address our complex realities. We can’t lie to ourselves and believe that hard-locking a student’s file forever is practical in a personal learning experience.

The specific thought that triggered this post was that the notion of estimated secure lifetime in cryptography is relevant to visible/storage lifetime in ePortfolios. However, this post also includes thoughts on the concepts of fluid artifacts being copied and made concrete at submission time, and how this relates to our existing web/email usage patterns.

Lots more below the break.

Continue reading →

Sakai/OSP development is expensive, so it’s hard to find funding prioritized for the “soft” benefits of personal ownership and development that might not jive with the “hard” outcomes understood as necessary for accountability.

I believe these “soft” outcomes can communicate accountability just as well, and even better, but it’s a much more intensive project that needs smart, creative, dedicated people over time. The consumable accountability data needs to be assembled as a secondary product, as opposed to the primary, “automatic” data products of rigid accountability measures. (…which feel a bit like TPS reports to student, faculty, and implementors, in my experience.)

This is one area where the “lower bar” open source systems have an apparent upper hand in development. Good portions of the development happens by motivated folks who have some time to give to personalization. It’s easy enough to “get in” that essentially unfunded effort bolsters those aspects.

I believe that, in today’s higher education climate, any system that doesn’t address accountability in a systematic fashion will fall out of favor very quickly at any institution where the words “ePortfolio” and “assessment” have been uttered in the same sentence. It’s really hard to build a realistic accountability system in your spare time, out of the context of a real accountability project.

This is where Sakai/OSP is uniquely positioned. We’re admittedly a bit behind on personalization, but that is changing quickly. At the same time, we have a depth of reach into the “regular” learning system activities and assessment capacities that’s unparalleled. It’s also a primary goal for a number of us to make raw development much easier. I really believe the 2.6 release has the potential to change the game. -NB