the Design Experience Weblog Archive

I had a crazy idea browsing the web site for VoodooPad. VoodooPad is a neat little app that basically gives you a desktop Wiki with all the Max OS X coolness built it.

Well, I don't have a Mac, otherwise I'd probably just buy it. Instead I thought it might be fun to build a little desktop app using Kupu as the editor. That way I don't have to write one. It would be an interesting experiment. In addition a neat feature of VoodooPad is an API to edit Wikis on the internet. If your Wiki supports the API, you can edit it remotely with VoodooPad. This would be interesting if you could run Kupu locally as an editor for a remote web site.

Planner mode is a wiki-based todo/calendar/schedule/note taking application that runs in emacs. It can output to HTML. Now it would be really neat if that HTML could be synched to a PDA and then edited and browsed from the PDA, synched back to the desktop, etc.

I guess the other options is an PDA/Phone with internet access such as the Treo 600.

Over at CMSWatch I found and articleWeb Services and Conent Mangement by Travis Wissink. This is a good, pretty detailed description on how web services might be used with a CMS.

He mentions that some CMS packages offer web services, and wonders if it would be cool for a CMS to consume web services. Taking this to a logical conclusion you could build a CMS from a variety of external parts. This is the small pieces, loosely joined or Frankenstein CMS concept.

I think this would be really great for a smaller scale web site, and for back-end operations for building a site. It doesn't really scale for content delivery, but I guess that is not the point.

OpenACS has a "service contract" concept that was originally designed to support WSDL definition of services. It would be interesting to see what sort of parts could be connected together to build an Open Source CMS from various packages.

A good example of a web application API is Flickr. They inlcude an authentication API, so that external services can log a user into a Flickr account and access their contacts and profiles.

This is definitely an intersting space to watch.

Peter Morville discusses the explosion of available information, and the problem of finding the little bit you actually need. He is interested in the way people find and use information to make decisions. This definitely has connections to the future of learning where indiviuals will be able to learn from anyone, anywhere. This reminds me of Croquet, a large-scale, distributed, environment for sharing information.

We still have a long way to go, and the most important skill will be deciding who to believe. This will require teaching people to think deeply and critically. This ties into some of the issues raised in The Disciplined Mind, What All Students Should Understand by Howard Gardner. I just started reading it, so I will have to comment more when I am done.

Blogging as self-education discusses the way writing and organizing your thoughts for a weblog can help learing. I think that learning is more correct than education in this case.

I started this weblog as I began teaching myself to work with OpenACS. In the process I learned to admister a Linux server, install the Oracle database, as well as program reasonably well in Tcl. Along the way I needed to poke into some C code, which I can read reasonably well, but really cannot author original code. I have actually even edited the ACPI code of my laptop's system BIOS and edited a file or two in my Linux kernel.

I put information up on this web site for the two main reasons, so I can find it, and in case it might help someone else somewhere. Using full text indexing on the contents is pretty effective, although as long as you can get Google to visit your web site, you don't really have to worry about that.

http://cdbaby.com/cd/darkwater

http://cdbaby.com/cd/shink

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00025D9X Leo Kottke's web site is broken at the moment...

Thanks again to All Songs Considered, I have heard some new music that I like quite a bit.

Crowsong which I will describe by getting some quotes off their web site, as my skill is not in describing music to others. " The ragged vocals have an endearing quality while the lopping instrumental grooves are cinematic in scope. Crowsong’s music is vibrant and atmospheric, ranging from delicate slide instrumentals to searing electric epics." and " .Clark makes his electric axe sing at the edge of feedback, wields a slide against his acoustic strings with ingenuity close to that of Cooder and Lindley, and generally creates a mysterious exotic vibe in a cobbled-together tradition whose gurus might include John Fahey, Sandy Bull, Harvey Mandel, and Bill Frisell."

Their CD is available at CDBaby which is a really great place the sells music only from independent artists.

So far, client side content management can offer some features and ease of installation that web based systems can't. I have seen Macromedia Contribute, and it has a nice feature where after editing a page, you can send it off to someone to have it reviewed. Now, there isn't any way client side to integrate with some arbitraty CMS on the other end to see who could approve an article.

I am imagining a way to do with with WebDAV. Finding out who can perform actions on a page, and changing who can do that from the client might be a good fit for WebDAV ACL.

Along with other the rest of the WebDAV stardards this could be a great way to build a rich client-side content management interface.

davfs gives filesystem support for WebDAV shares to linux. So far it seems to be working fine.

It would be interesting to save wiki output from planner mode for emacs in a davfs mounted directory. Hook this up to the OpenACS content repository and we have some interesting interactions. Taking it futher, one could interface it with the OpenACS calendar using the tentative CalDAV spec. More on CalDAV and calendaring in general from OSAF.

./configure --disable-readline --with-included-expat --with-included-neon

Notes for later retrieval.

On Solaris

export CC=gcc
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/ccs/bin (because Tcl and tdom builds need /usr/ccs/bin/ar)

If you put Tcl in a non-standard place, or if there is more than one tcl add the Tcl you want to LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Make sure the Tcl you want is listed before the Tcl you don't want.

I read The Bear in the Moon to my kids last night. It is a legend from a polar bear's perspective about the phases of the moon. An important part of the story is the Northern Lights. It inspired a bunch of questions about the moon, sun, planets and stars. The legend says the moon is made of ice and snow (what else would a polar bear think?) This required an explanation that the moon is really a big rock (or something like that). The next question was "how does a big rock stay in the sky?" This implies a lecture on gravity and astrophysics. I really am not sure I understand it all myself, so I had to discuss how "the sky" is just the atmosphere of the earth, and how everything, stars, sun, moon, earth itself, are all in space together.

I am not sure I did the best job ever, but I sure have kids interested in astronomy. Now I need a telescope. I definitely will be vistiing the astronomy picture of the day and exploring more resources on the web.

Aurora Borealis links and other astronomy goodness:

http://www.geo.mtu.edu/weather/aurora/
http://www.northern-lights.no/
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/Curtis/aurora/aurora.html
http://www.thursdaysclassroom.com/index_18may00.htm
http://uvisun.msfc.nasa.gov/UVI/current_image.html
http://spacescience.com/headlines/y2000/ast14aug_1.htm
http://vathena.arc.nasa.gov/curric/space/aurora/
http://www.space.com/spacewatch/leonids_fireball_021122.html

Eric Eldred was threatened with arrest by the police at the Walden Pond Reservation while distributing free books from the Internet Bookmobile. He vistied the park on the 150th anniversary of H. D. Thoreau's book "Walden."

The park supervisor said he could not give away free books because it would compete with the concession that sold the same book.

This is, of course, crazy. It is perfectly legal for him to give away these books. What is great about the Internet Bookmobile is that not only does it give away free books, but it gives people the opportunity to make their own books. It shows an alternative future for publishing with print-on-demand for very small jobs.

The press release also states that Eldred has had trobule getting invitations to visit schools and libraries. I can't believe it. It seems that people just can't understand that once a copyright has expired the words belong to the public and can be used freely. The Internet Bookmobile is a wonderful experiment and a great way to teach people about the great cost of perpetually extending copyright.

It seems Eldred is from New Hampshire, and that is not too far from where I live. I will have to look into having the bookmobile visit a school or public library around here. It looks like you can request a visit by posting in the Internet Bookmobile forums.

Planner mode for Emacs sounds very interesting. It integrates with wiki, calendar, and remember mode. The maintainer of planner.el has a wiki produced with planner.el.

http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/wiki/PlannerMode.php#note42 is a good explanation of how planner.el and remember.el, along with various other emacs modes, can be integrated. It works best if one uses emacs for everything. It probably would integrate nicely with remembrance-agent mode as well.

I haven't gotten that far yet.

Exploring the Mnemonic user interface(pdf) looks into the future of computer user interfaces.

I am working on adding support for content in multiple languages for OpenACS. Well, I am working on the design. Development of the first prootype is by Jun Yamog. The key is support of one content item in multiple langauges and the negotiation of which langauge to display to a user as well as linking to the same content in the other languages that are available.

OpenACS already supports i18n and l10n of the user interface.

Here are some links to similar concepts on other web platforms:

A proposal for WordPress http://wordpress.org/support/4/4920
Some W3C stuff http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-i18n-html-tech-lang-20040509/
Archetypes (Zope/Plone) http://cvs.sf.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/archetypes/I18NArchetypes/docs/i18n-howto.rst?content-type=text%2Fplain&rev=1.1

Many of the links for searching on google http://www.google.com/search?q=content+i18n&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=0&sa=N shows a few of the OpenACS discussion pages on this subject, and not alot else in the first couple of pages.

Open Source Alternatives for Blackboard & WebCT asks about just that. I will mention .LRN as another alternative. It is in use at several institutions around the world. Current development efforts include IMS standards support and a learning object repository. .LRN already has very good i18n support.

The author of that post asks if it is a polished and easy to install as the commerical options. Well, I haven't installed the commercial ones, but this is an area .LRN needs to improve on, and it has greatly improved in the last year.

The post also says that administrators might wonder if the open source alternatives are well supported. It seems to me that the commercial offerings are licensed per seat, and I suspect that the university is captive to the vendor for support contingent on renewel of a license. Once the university is committed to a commercial solution, prices and support can change. .LRN is supported by the strong development community around it, and the schools that use it. I am sure this is the case with other Open Source learning platforms as well.

From Weblogg-Ed I found Wikis in K-6 education. In addition to that I discovered along the way TechKid.org which links and great resources for K-6, and OpenIdeas.org, Open Source Ideas for K-6 Education which includes a handy RSS feed.

Ingredients: Summer in upstate New York, Dusk, 2 boys (6) and (11)

Summer here in our rural-suburban location is very nice. Right now, going outside as it starts to get dark, one is greeted by a wonderful display of lights. Fireflies are quite abundant around here. Throw in a couple of kids, and you have instant fun. It helps to have a jar with some holes poked into the lid.

I didn't get any pictures, but it was still quite a lot of fun. We spent almost two hours catching fireflies. We did not catch enough to make a night light, and we let them all go at bed time.

Looking for a couple of interesting links for this entry, I found A campaign to bring fireflies back to Houston. That site includes firefly siting reports from many states.