Some people have commented on updates to Facebook & Linked in, so thought I’d author a quick post detailing what I’m up to these days. For anyone who’s wondering, as of January of this year, I am no longer at CampusEAI – I’ve chosen to join ContextWeb, an advertising network/exchange vendor based in NYC, as a Sr. Java Developer. While I was very proud of some of the work that we were able to accomplish in the development group at CampusEAI, and will greatly miss both the team and many of the community members (and hope that we keep in touch), it was time for me to move on to doing something different (and possibly spending some time with my family, and especially my kids).

So far, ContextWeb is a pretty neat place – a strong technical team focused on Agile(Scrum) and trying to do the right thing. One of the interesting challenges is the company is currently in the process of moving much of the infrastructure from an ASP.Net/SQL Server backend to a cloud-friendly, Java, OpenSource, and Hadoop backed system. While the shift has been going on for a while, it’s accelerated recently due to a number of upcoming product offerings and business requirements (in fact, see previous posts, ContextWeb is hiring Java devs). So it’s exciting in a lot of ways, both being able to go back to doing real coding and hands on development (apparently I do mostly remember what all those buttons in Eclipse do…) as well as working with a pretty good group of guys (though, some of those C# conventions drive me batty).

If anyone noticed that I finally gave in and really added banner ads to my blog, well I do now work for an online advertising exchange… (It’s definitely not because this site is making me lots of money)

I will still definitely be following what happens with Jasig, Sakai, and Kuali, and am optimistic that it’s an exciting time for those projects and communities – and will eagerly read anything Google flags for me to look at.

Official Google Blog: Introducing Google Buzz: “We’ve relied on other services’ openness in order to build Buzz (you can connect Flickr and Twitter from Buzz in Gmail), and Buzz itself is not designed to be a closed system. Our goal is to make Buzz a fully open and distributed platform for conversations. We’re building on a suite of open protocols to create a complete read/write developer API, and we invite developers to join us on Google Code to see what is available today and to learn more about how to participate. “

(Via Google Blog.)

While this looks a lot like twitter/brightkite/facebook activities, I do wonder if the real game-changer is integrating with Email – e.g. making Lifestream activities mainstream (though Facebook has become pretty mainstream) – or mainstream for people who haven’t necessarily sought out social networks.

I also wonder how this fits in with Wave? Is wave a technology platform under/in parallel to this? Slightly different? Just 2 teams at Google doing slightly different things “let a thousand flowers bloom and all that”?

For the last few months, have moved most of my work programming from the Mac to Ubuntu (first convenience via VMs, recently because I switched jobs and at the new employer it was that or Windows) which has mostly gone will, though there were some issues around Eclipse UI gotchas, notably:

• Sometimes buttons wouldn’t let you click them (though keyboard focus mostly worked find)
• Sometimes windows wouldn’t paint properly – contents, toolbars, etc.

At first I thought it might have been Virtualbox’s mouse driver, but it looks like it’s a generic Eclipse/GTK issue, with some notes at http://blogs.gurulabs.com/dax/2009/10/what-gdk-native.html on the root cause, and how to fix it. For the time being I’ve created scripts to launch Eclipse (and STS) and before I fire off Eclipse, do a:

This seems to resolve the painting issues, though it feels a bit less smooth/fast (UBUNTU+GNOME+COMPIZ) – still usable, though admittedly have tried this on a pretty fast machine (recent 2xQuad-Core w/lots of RAM)

Crucible 2.1 also supports the new pre-commit review creation functionality recently added to the Atlassian IDE Connector for Eclipse. This plugin from Tasktop, the makers of Mylyn, is a must have for Eclipse users who use Crucible (or Bamboo, or JIRA, or FishEye).

http://blogs.atlassian.com/devtools/2009/11/crucible21released.htmlлегла

This looks pretty nice – pre-commit workflow is a nice addition – makes it so much easier to do code reviews and enforce “don’t break the build” in the same group…

I was using mvn:release (release:prepare, release:perform) to release a number of modules today (for several hours – so much for speeding up through automation) but kept getting errors to the effect of:

[INFO] Error deploying artifact: Authentication failed: Cannot connect. Reason: Auth fail

This may be old news to others, but I finally have my copy of the new “Sakai Courseware Management” book (courtesy of the folks over at Packt) and more surprisingly have even been able to carve out time to read the contents. For people who may not have been aware, this is the book that Alan Berg & Michael Korkuska have spent the last many months of their lives churning out.

After looking through “Sakai Courseware Management”, I’d say if you’re a technical staff member working with Sakai it’d be invaluable. Finally, much of the community knowledge and resources have been distilled into a single volume, greatly shortening the learning curve — and with enough topics that even old-Sakai hands will likely see some new bits, courtesy of the deep knowledge of Alan & Michael.

To get a feel for what’s in the book, check out: http://www.packtpub.com/article/sakai-courseware-management-the-official-guide-table-of-contents. Chapters 1-14 are a pretty straightforward introduction to the Sakai CLE. Chapters 15-19 are a bit off the beaten track, encapsulating a bunch of items that might be considered – “meta-Sakai” – things like community, teaching, and people that differentiate Sakai from some of the more traditional corporate LMS offerings.

Some nuggets you might not get a feel from the ToC, but that are items of note, the book is full of:

• non-official “Contrib” or extended tools and how they can be integrated with Sakai (e.g. embedding JFlash to let Sakai support online Flashcards for instance)
• pointers to product wikis, email lists, and docs — in many ways the entire book could be seen as a ToC for the broader SakaiWeb/Community
• references to people and institutions — providing a connection to the key players in the space

Overall, the text is written in a pretty clear, narrative fashion (with lots of sidebars detailing history, or inspirations for various pieces of Sakai. Packt has posted Chapter 11: Web Services: Connecting to the Enterprise at http://www.packtpub.com/files/Sakai-Courseware-Management-sample-chapter-11-Web-Services.pdf which is a good representative of the style of the book.

Though brief, chapter 11 gives you a quick overview of web services (some background reading might be requred) then drops you into some examples in Sakai. It’s unfortunately a bit light from an example perspective (e.g. what are items the authors believe you can/should use these services to do, but it gives the reader a good set of tools to poke around and explore the environment.

Arguably the publication of a book is one of the signs that a project has “made it” and for Sakai I think this is certainly the case as well. Especially for open-source projects with tight-knit core communities, the experience for a new-comer can be daunting, no matter how congenial the atmosphere as you try to synthesize a product, community, and culture all at the same time (often while, errr… trying to get something done in the first place) In that regard, “Sakai Courseware Management” makes my life much easier, since now when people have questions about Sakai, instead of trying to enumerate the variety of community resources, articles, email lists, and code — I can drop a 485 pg. volume on their desk — not only producing a resounding “thwackt” but giving them a great post-conference read on the plane resource.

Having said that, this is clearly an introductory, technical book. It’s great for looking at setting up Sakai, poking around the various resources, and finding out what the tools do. I think if I were say a faculty member interested in effective e-Learning using Sakai, or interested more from a teaching/pedagogical side I might be a bit disappointed (though for that audience, there are some great case-studies from the Sakai Teaching Excellence awards on page 341). So, while I don’t want to take away from what this book is, and the great void it fills; I suppose we’ll have to eagerly anticipate some follow-on volumes targeted at other audiences/topics, like “Teaching with Sakai”, “Building Sakai Tools”, or “Deploying Sakai as an Enterprise CLE”.

Other Posts about “Sakai Courseware Management”

• http://sakaiblog.korcuska.net/2009/05/28/sakai-book-announced/
• http://sakaiblog.korcuska.net/2009/06/12/sakai-book-now-shipping/
• http://steve-on-sakai.blogspot.com/2009/07/sakai-book-sample-chapter-on-web.html

Google releases Wave protocol implementation source code – Ars Technica: “At the Google I/O conference earlier this year, the search giant revealed an intriguing new communication service called Wave that aims to deliver concurrent messaging and collaborative editing in a single cohesive environment. The underlying Wave Federation Protocol is designed to make it possible for third parties to host their own interoperable Wave instances. Google intends to open the source code of its own implementation in order to encourage widespread adoption of the protocol. The company took its first major steps in that direction on Friday by releasing the source code of its Operational Transform (OT) code and a simple client/server reference implementation that is built on top of the protocol. This code, which is available under the open source Apache Software License, will give developers a way to start experimenting with the protocol and potentially even building their own Wave-compatible services.”

(Via http://arstechnica.com.)

I hate to hop on the bandwagon, but I have to admit – Wave looks like the most revolutionary item I’ve seen in a while – in a full-on game changer sense. Not so much just because of the cool widgetry that Google’s built, but because it’s a protocol – with the flexibility and potential that implies.

Building on some of the interactions we’ve seen with IM, Blogging/Trackbacks, Twitter, and other messaging, Wave looks to standardize, federate, and embed real-time, multiparty communications to the point where it will become part of the fabric of the web. If Web 2.0 = comments and trackback conversations – this feels a lot more like Web 2.5 – the implementation we really wanted when we first tried to take the web from a document-based publishing platform to a conversation-enabled collaborative medium.

And… Open-Source production-quality reference implementation – what could be better. I have to say, not an small number of my off-work hours are going to be spent looking at embedding Wave into… everything… Particularly given that Federation (though still a little nebulous) is a first-class citizen in the platform.

» [Safari 4] PubSubAgent wants access to KeyChain Tim’s Weblog: “”

A bunch of support forum posts seem to confirm it too – that Safari 4 (possibly 4beta -> 4.0 upgrade) breaks the Keychain linkage — hopefully there’ll be a fix soon.

According to Safari 4 this blog is back on the Google malware list, though the Google Website Owner tools (which look neat) don’t appear to flag any warnings, and it’s not clear why that would be the case. The report sounds pretty innocuous, though oddly it shows up as being for: 74.222.134.0, which nslookup doesn’t report as the IP for http://jay.shao.org

What is the current listing status for jay.shao.org?

This site is not currently listed as suspicious.

What happened when Google visited this site?

Of the 2 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 0 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2009-06-05, and suspicious content was never found on this site within the past 90 days.This site was hosted on 1 network(s) including AS26347 (DREAMHOST).

Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?

Over the past 90 days, jay.shao.org did not appear to function as an intermediary for the infection of any sites.

Has this site hosted malware?

No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.

Next steps:

• Return to the previous page.
• If you are the owner of this web site, you can request a review of your site using Google Webmaster Tools. More information about the review process is available in Google’s Webmaster Help Center.

Some interesting sakai-ux discussion tied in with thoughts I’ve been having recently related to native vs. integrated services and content in portal-type environments… where do the lines get drawn, and how do you handle horizontal services?

From a functionality/architecture point of view, the idea of loosly coupled integrations with external services like wikis, or Google Apps, or other tools seems very attractive.

however

There are significant horizontal capability components that while not impossible to resolve may complicate that scenario. Initial thoughts:

• TOS – ensuring users understand external, but integrated tools may have separate terms of service, SLAs, data ownership/retention policies, etc.
• import/export I think the ability to “package” and port a course/site/project or archive it is something that lots of people want. Again possible (treat external resources as links? Embed their content? Cry?) but I think it has some strong implications in user experience and architecture
• Search – this one might actually be a bit more straightforward

I will make the observation/parallel from the portal world – CampusEAI is currently heavily involved in building out a social portal, that combines the integration of enterprise services & applications with natively managed content like blogs, wikis, discussions, profile, etc. As we continue to get further down this road, some interesting intersections between user expectations and boundaries between external and internal content continue to present themselves up.

So far the balance we’ve come up with is largely – some stuff is in, some stuff is out, but there’s continual tension on the boarders of that distinction, and I’m not confident that that particular firewall will hold or be appropriate in the long run.

Not sure I have good answers for you Just a brain-dump of my internal thought processes these days.