At the Community Source reception cosponsored by JA-SIG, Sakai, Kuali it was uplifting to see the number of people participating. CIOs, managers, developers, vendors were all present in abundance. It was also clear from conversation at the reception that open-source in the Higher Ed is breaking into new areas. While there’s no question infrastructure and back-end systems, there’s increasing acknowledgment that open-source might has a role to play in end-user facing systems too. community driven open-source projects are being evaluated right along side best of breed solutions from vendors or ASP providers.

In fact, further than just being considered on par with packaged or commercial products, many, many people have indicated the message of “by Higher Education, for Higher Education” really resonates both within IT as well as with our end users. Ranging from solid support for integration with existing systems in uPortal, to teaching and learning as evidenced by the comment “It seems like EDUCAUSE is all Sakai” show a tremendous amount of attention and consideration being given for education build open-source solutions.

This post is me catching up with my podcasting from the JA-SIG Summer 2007 Conference in Denver. Matt Raible did a rendition of his Java Frameworks talk, discussing his experience with the various Java web frameworks. I’ve attached an (OK) audio transcript of the talk, which Matt also blogged about at: http://raibledesigns.com/rd/entry/ja_sig_comparing_java_web where he also posted a copy of his slides.

 

 Matt Raible Keynote: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

One too many upgrades introduced a little bit of weirdness — so I’ve reinstalled Wordpress and things look great — one click installs make it pretty painless.

Just logged into my GMail account and noticed that IMAP is now supported — configured into Apple mail and seems to be working like a charm — this may be enough to get me to switch to Google Apps for the whole shebang when it makes its way over there.

Mix: AAPL, Canada, Jacuzzi, EMI, Unlock:

The Copyright Board of Canada has approved a new tax on music downloads from iTunes and other online retailers. Retroactive to 1996, the tax means Apple will have to pay 3.1 cents for each music file they sell, or 1.5 cents per track for complete albums, to SOCAN (the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada).

The whole idea of a retro-active tax seems particularly wrong. Not only can the government charge you a tax on things you’re doing, but they can charge you for things you’d done in the past?

I got into the UK and one of the first things I wanted to do was to unlock my AT&T cell phone so that I could use it with a local SIM card. Afterall, being able to take my phone internationally was one of the main benefits of switching to a GSM provider.

Getting the unlock code was relatively painless – especially compared to the pain I incurred with LNP because my current billing address is in a different market from the one I originally got my numbers from (my parent’s address). That particular saga took several weeks, 3 sets of temp numbers, and some account/address shenanigans, but eventually got resolved.

My biggest problem unlocking the N75 was actually figuring out how to enter the unlock code I was provided with — there’s a magic key combination you need to get the “enter unlock code” dialog to pop up, but Google proved to be my friend there. I would post here to share others pain, but unfortunately Google appears to only have liked me on that day…

Upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.3 — I’m particularly interested in seeing how the new Tagging features work out (I’ve just been pasting Technorati tags into my entries), though I’m sure there’s other goodies here and there.

Bottom line: scrub your certificates through Mozilla/Firefox. Keep reading if you want more background.

So I recently experienced an unreasonable amount of pain trying to import a Verisign certificate that was locked into an Oracle Wallet for use in the Tomcat SSL connector. So of course the decent thing to do seems to be to put some notes out here so Google can hopefully spare some others similar pain.

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