Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

A couple of weeks ago, a colleague of mine at UBC and I successfully finished a grant application using Google Doc. It was my first time using a collaborative word processor and the experience was great. We finished the 6 pages proposal within a few days while each of us were in different locations, the only communication needed was a few phone calls. This really got me interested in the collaborative desktop publishing environments. I then did some digging and surprisingly found out there are quite a few products out there (or coming on the horizon) to accommodate the collaborative desktop publishing needs. Google Doc is obviously the first tool in the genre. Microsoft has been chasing the “Microsoft Office Live” idea since 2005, and the beta was launched just two weeks ago.

There seems to be some critical issues with the current collaborative desktop publishing tools:
- Sharing the existing documents directly from the hard drives. How can we securely share the hundreds and thousands documents from the past without uploading, converting and grant permissions?
- Offline publishing. Although internet connections are becoming more standard in our modern life styles, but there are still a huge crowd enjoys writing offline. How would the collaborative desktop publishing tool accommodate that?
- Synchronizing changes by different authors when simultaneous editing occurs is still a little flicky to me. There were several times when I see the message of my colleague is editing the document, I was reluctant to make changes at the same time. This is mainly due to I don’t see the changes he is making at the time. I would be nice to be able to see which section of the documents he is working on in real time.

Recently hyped up in the media, a new desktop publishing tool is in the launching phase. It’s called “Live Documents”, created by Sabeer Bhatia whom sold Hotmail to Microsoft back in 1997. In order to receive a beta testing account of Live Documents, you need to give them your email address and hope to “get invited”, similar to the GMail launching process. There are two reasons that I am looking into this platform:
- It is done using Flash and Flex which means the UI should be well designed and word processing transactions should be seamless.
- It offers solutions to the 3 issues listed above.
- It offers real time communication tools like chat while publishing.

Beside Live Documents, there are a few other collaborative desktop publishing platforms out there:

Zoho, an application based on the Google Gears open source platform, has been launched earlier this year. It offers offline editing. There is rumors that Yahoo is looking at Zoho and possibly looking for opportunities to acquiring this Silicon Valley and India based company.

Another one is Buzzword which is being backed up by Adobe at the moment. It was created by the Boston-based company called Virtual Ubiquity. It is currently in open beta.

There are also few other web based word processors that have the potential to compete in the "web-top applications" race: Glide Write, ajaxWrite and ThinkFree. As stated in the title, the collaborative desktop publishing era is already here, it’s time to find your right tool and give it a try.

Learned this from Julian's blog, "Squeak by Example" is a good book for people who want to learn the open source development environment Squeak. The book is intended for both students and developers. The great part about the book is that it's under the Creative Commons Attribution -ShareAlike 3.0 license, which means you can download the PDF version for free. To show your support, buy the printed version at lulu.com.

I have heard about Crayon Physics a while back. Just recently stumbled upon this video - having fun with Crayon Physics using a Tablet PC. Quite impressive. I am aware of an open source 2D physics engine written in C, with the newest C language compiler in the up-coming Flash 10 technology, maybe someone can move Crayon Physics like project into Flash? Regardless, CP is an creative application that continuously impresses me!

Julian posted this video on his blog over the weekend and it is quite funny to watch. It's a demonstration of the Second Life avatars and social networking behaviors using first life avatars. Make sure you turn on your speak, it makes a bit more sense with the SL sound effects. :)

Julian points out that the virtual communications in the massive multi-user 3D world are some what limited due to the mis-leading avatar figures. This is an interesting point. When we introduce SL to faculty members, we often say, "it's not a game, it's a simulation". But is it really? A simulation suppose to be an imitation of some real thing, but the avatars in SL reminds me too much of the game Sim...

He also points out that the Croquet SDK offers developers an opportunity to change whatever they need about the way people are represented with virtual environments. It looks like people at the University of Minnesota are working on some interesting Croquet Avatar R&D, would love to find out more about their development.

In case you don't know yet:

Any company or organization can now establish a profile on Facebook and solicit support from other users.

I first learned about Face Book’s new “company” feature in the beginning of this week. It was simply massively spread across the Flash designers’ blog community which I follow on a daily basis. There were quite a few “Adobe Product Profiles” set up already: “Adobe Air”, “Adobe Flex”, “Adobe Flash”, and “Adobe Photoshop”. Pretty much the entire Adobe CS3 product line is now in Facebook! Then of courses there is “Microsoft Silverlight”, “Microsoft Education” blah blah blah… I have to admit this is an extremely smart way of “advertising”. Instead of blast random ad banners to the members, and wait for their clicks, have them form “brand” groups and show “support” to their favorite products! Voila, there is your new sales team! What a great idea! This is almost like handing everyone in the world a free T-shirt and asks them to print any product logos on it and walk around and try rubbing your logos to your friends’ T-shirt! 

What really bothers me is how much more surveillance do we need in the online social lives. I already feel that Google knows me way better than my mom does. But Facebook is giving me an X ray every time I log on!

My co-worker Joel sent me a link to a great CBC article on this new Facebook move, read it and don’t sell our soul!

The long anticipated FPS game Crysis is coming out in only one week of time! (November 15, 2007 in Canada) I tried out the demo yesterday at my friend's place using his XPS 720 and the 30" LCD. I have to say, this got to be the best graphic game available this year! The outdoor Jungle settings are much more enjoyable than the traditional warehouse scenes. For those whom have played Farcry and Counter Strike 2, you would know what I am talking about! This game is comparable to Halo 3 in every prospect, the PC platform will provide players more rooms for upgrades and gaming enhancement than game consoles thats for sure. It certainly pushes the best personal computer today to it's limit. On top of the fantastic graphics, the game has got great sound effects, amazing physics and complex yet smartly designed weapon controls just make FPS fans like me drool. Well, I better stop the "sales pitch", here is comparison between real-world photos and the in-game graphic. You make your own judgment!

Crysis uses the CryENGINE™ 2 which is one of the most advanced 3D engine out there. It's known for the superb effects in lighting and collision detection. According to the officials,

the CryENGINE™ 2 comes complete with all of its internal tools and also includes the CryENGINE™ 2 Sandbox world editing system. Licensees receive full source code and documentation for the engine and tools. Support is provided directly from the R & D Team that continuously develops the engine and can arrange teaching workshops for your team to increase the learning process. On the 17th of September, 2007, Ringling College of Art & Design became the first higher education institution in the world to license CryENGINE2 for educational purposes.

Here is a quick description of the 3D Graphic Engine from Crysis' official site:

Polybump™ 2 can be used as either as a standalone utility, or fully integrated with other tools such as 3DS Max™. This tool creates a high quality surface description that allows quick extraction of surface features like normal maps (tangent-space or object-space), displacement maps, un-occluded area direction, accessibility and other properties. The extracted information can be used to render Low poly models with surface detail almost making them look like the high-poly models but it will render much faster. The data is stored in a intermediate file format so it can be exported in different ways without doing the computation again. Very high polygon counts (e.g. 10 million triangles) are processed quite quickly.

Some worth-mentioning features of the 3D engine:
- Real Time Lighting and Dynamic Soft Shadows;
- Volumetric, Layer and View Distance Fogging;
- Terrain 2.5D Ambient Occlusion Maps;
- Normal Maps and Parallax Occlusion Maps;
- Real Time Ambient Maps;
- Subsurface Scattering;
- Eye Adaptation & High Dynamic Range (HDR) Lighting;
- Motion Blur & Depth of Field;
- Light Beams & Shafts;
- High Quality 3D Ocean Technology;
- Advanced Shader Technology;
- Terrain LOD Management Feature.

It looks like I am going to lose a lots of weekends over this one in the coming months!

I wanted to blog about these two buildings for sometime now. The Beijing National Stadium will be the primary architecture for the 2008 Olympic in China. It will held all of the track & field competitions plus the opening and closing ceremonies. The stadium is also known as the "Bird's Nest" due to it's amazing design. The architects of the "Bird Nest" are Pritzker Prize-winners Herzog & de Meuron plus several other super talented architects. The stadium seats 100 thousands audiences during the Olympics. The entire "Bird Nest" is constructed using over 45 thousands tons of steel and cost over 450 million USD. Here are some beautiful pictures of this amazing architecture:

The other amazing architecture built for the Olympic 2008 is the Beijing National Aquatics Centre, also known as the "Water Cube". It's built alongside Beijing National Stadium. It is constructed using ETFE clad structure so the outlook of the building is like a water cube. It will host all of the aquatic competitions during the 2008 Summer Olympics. Here are some shots of the "Water Cube":

Here is a all-together shot:

Google has simplified their Chinese domain name to g.cn in order to compete with the Chinese Search Engine Giant - baidu.com. It's hard for us English speaking users to imagine how hard is it to spell "google"? But many Chinese users often mis-spell the name. I suppose it is pretty hard for a non-English speaker to remember 2 "O" and 1 "L"... Google first introduced "guge.com" which reflects to a Chinese word, but not seems to be so effective. Recently, they launched "g.cn" and hoping to burn it to the Chinese internet users' mind. However, I am quite skeptical with the effectiveness of Google's domain name strategy. One must see that Baidu does have some unique services such as the mp3 search engine. It is highly controversial (often violates copy rights issues), but it simply works for the millions of teenagers...

We have updated the user interface of the Pachyderm to VUE conversion tool. Now it is much simpler to get started. You don't need to choose the Pachyderm server, nor pick out the presentation KEY, just copy and paste the entire Pachyderm Presentation URL and the tool will do the rest. It should work on all Pachyderm servers out there. Enjoy the tool!

This post is not related to elearning nor technology, but relevant to the local community. A recent study conducted by "worldjournal", a Chinese media company in Canada indicates among the top ten surnames in the Greater Vancouver community, the top three of them are common Chinese surnames. Although the first one "LEE" is shared among various of ethnic groups (British, Chinese and Korean). The second and third most popular surnames are: "Wong" and "Chan".

According to the report, "Smith" was top surname in the Greater Vancouver area before 1991 but slipped to number 4 this year. However it is still the number one surname in Canada.

The other six most popular surnames in Vancouver are: "Kim", "Chen", "Gill", "Li", "Brown" and "Johnson".

Note that there are two types of Chinese today - Simplified and Traditional. Their spellings in English (pinyin) are slightly different due to pronunciation alterations. For example, "Wong" and "Wang" is the same surname; "Lee" and "Li" is the same surname. Normally people from Hong Kong and Taiwan are using the first set - "Wong" or "Lee", people from mainland China are using the second set - "Wang" or "Li" etc.

Therefore, this blog can also be called "Tim Wong's eLearning Blog". :)

In a recent post on Julian's blog, Doug asked:
"I know Croquet is an SDK, not an application, but I don't see how to connect to other people outside the local area network."

Here's how, the most straight forward way is use the SimpleDemo(Master) as a starter, you will notice there is a menu bar on top for this template. Choose Tools -> Connect to Another World.

A new panel appears, if you drop down the "nearby world", you would see your own world's name (Simple Demo World (your ip address)).

Then somewhere in the bottom of the panel, you see "Postcard as XML", with some xml code in the box:

Copy and send it to your friend whom you want to connect. You can do it via email, im or whatever. They can be as remote as on the other side of the globe. What they need to do then is to do the same as you did, open up SimpleDemo(Master), choose Tools -> Connect to Another World. Then copy and paste the information from you into the fields, the critical ones (must fill ones) are:

Router Address (get it from routerAddress tag), Router Port(from routerAddress tag), Session (Island ID) (from routerId tag), Name (from routerName tag) and Viewpoint Name (from vpn tag).

You can skip the manual input if you can setup Jabber. Anyway, we have used this method to connect to groups in Washington DC a few weeks ago and the connection was quite smooth and we managed to show case our Arts Metaverse project over Croquet platform. You do want to apply the newest patch first though. Give it a try.

Julian wrote a post today to give his view on the comparison between Open Croquet and Second Life. He describes it as a comparison between apples and oranges. I support Julian's points. Using my layman's term, this is how I see it: if Second Life is acting as a social network platform such as Wikipedia, then Croquet is like a web hosting platform (say Apache + PHP + MySQL). You may publish any contents in various of media format in Wikipedia, but you are still limited to the fundamental rules of Wikipedia. But the hosting platform may allow you to be much more creative and set up different content management systems or web applications. I don't know if this make sense... Just my 2 cents...

Yep, I am on Facebook now... I have tried to resist it all that time but I registered today. The reason made me to do this is there have been increasing number of faculty members here at UBC are mentioning Facebook to me and ask me why not tag along. They were mainly driven to the platform by their students or their own kids. But the amazing thing is most of them are enjoying the experience. I was just curious to see if there are opportunities to build educational applications out of the Facebook API.

Anyway, I am quite amazed how many people can Facebook dig up based on my hotmail address book. From high school to University friends that have gone missing for ages. Every few hours I log in, there are some new friends waiting for me! It is a really impressive experience. But I am still quite skeptical in regard to the privacy issues behind the accounts. With my co-worker Sung's help, I was able to tighten up the privacy settings. Of course Sung has been telling me that I am paranoid. Oh well, I will see where does this rabbit hole take me...

UPDATE: It's 2:00AM and I am still POKING around on Facebook... Not a good sign...

Opening Ceremony 200-5000 yuan ($27-$667), August 8 20:00-23:59
Closing Ceremony 150-3000 yuan ($20-$400), August 24 20:00-23:59
Archery 50-100 yuan ($7-$13), August 9 to August 15
Athletics 50-800 yuan ($7-$107) August 15 to August 24
Badminton 50-500 yuan ($7-$67) August 9 to August 17
Baseball 30-150 yuan ($4-$20) August 13 to August 23
Basketball 50-1000 yuan ($7-$133) August 9 to August 24
Beach Volleyball 50-400 yuan ($7-$53) August 9 to August 22
Boxing 30-400 yuan ($4-$53) August 9 to August 24
Canoe 30-80 yuan ($4-$11) August 18 to August 23
Kayak 30-100 yuan ($4-$13) August 11 to August 14
Mountain Bike 30 yuan ($4) August 22 to August 23
Cycling Road Free ($0) August 9 to August 10 and August 13
Cycling Track 50-100 yuan ($7-$13) August 15 to August 19
Diving 60-500 yuan ($8-$67) August 10 to August 23
Equestrian 40-400 yuan ($5-$53) August 9 to August 20
Fencing 50-100 yuan ($7-$13) August 9 to August 17
Football/Soccer 40-800 yuan ($5-$106) August 6 to August 23
Gymnastics (Artistic) 50-300 yuan ($7-$40) August 9 to August 19
Gymnastics (Rhythmic) 100-400 yuan ($13-$53) August 21 to August 24
Trampoline 50-100 yuan ($7-$13) August 16 to August 19
Handball 30-300 yuan ($4-$40) August 9 to August 24
Hockey 30-150 yuan ($4-$20) August 10 to August 23
Judo 50-200 yuan ($7-$27) August 9 to August 15
Modern Pentathlon 30-200 yuan ($4-$27) August 21 to August 22
Rowing 30-80 yuan ($4-$11) August 9 to August 17
Sailing 120-600 yuan ($16-$80) August 9 to August 21
Shooting 30-50 yuan ($4-$7) August 9 to August 17
Softball 30-120 yuan ($4-$16) August 12 August 21
Swimming 30-800 yuan ($4-107) August 9 to August 21
Synchronized Swimming 60-500 yuan ($8-$67) August 18 to August 23
Table Tennis 50-800 yuan ($7-$107) August 13 to August 23
Taekwondo 50-200 yuan ($7-$27) August 20 to August 23
Tennis 100-600 yuan ($13-$80) August 10 to August 17
Triathlon 50 yuan ($7) August 18 to August 19
Volleyball 50-800 yuan ($7-$107) August 9 to August 24
Water Polo 30-400 yuan ($4-$53) August 10 to August 24
Weightlifting 30-200 yuan ($4-$27) August 9 to August 19
Wrestling 50-200 yuan ($7-$27) August 12 to August 21