I have been approached by several friends in China asking me about smalltalk and Squeak. Due to my limited knowledge in the language, I pointed them to the Squeak Chinese community site on Google Code. There are a couple of well-translated learning materials to assist the beginners to learn about Squeak. Many thanks to the volunteers who initiated the page.
Microsoft launched the WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) and OGA (Office Genuine Advantage) tools this month to examine the legitimacy of the MS Windows and MS Office software on all PCs in China. Those who failed the tests would see a black desktop on their Windows background or a permanent warning message of pirated Office software. This is yet the most harsh action taken by the software giant against software piracy in China.
Although the company repeated it would not collect personal information with the tools, which would not affect computer use, controversy over the move has escalated. Many Chinese users have questioned the legality of Microsoft's move. A question on many Chinese consumers' mind: Does Microsoft have the right to penalize pirated systems by intruding the system without permission of the computer owner? There have been several law suits filed against Microsoft based on their WGA and OGA movement in China since October 20th. I personally do think the act has breached the basic ethics of software manufacturers with the unsolicited remote control of computers. I don't believe any software companies would dare to this kind of "certification based penalization" here in Canada or US. In the meanwhile, I do support software developers to take legitimate legal actions against piracy.
Today at 4:00 PM EST, over 60 avatars gathered on the Sun's island in Secondlife, cuing up to get a "ticket" for the first experimentation of the Wonderland Project by Sun's Microsystems. The event was organized by the MediaGrid which is a computational grid platform that promotes 3D virtual learning environment. The event had a slow start, mainly due to the registration process. However, many of the crowds managed to download the newest edition of Wonderland and got onto the platform. The system seems to be stable and here are some screen shots from the event:
Everyone cued up in Second Life, getting ready for Wonderland...
Picture taken from The Princess of Yaximixche's Blog...
From Brent's Blog, eXe version 0.10 is released today. This release is a remarkable milestone of the project. The current version uses TinyMCE as a rich text editor which has some great WYSIWYG features. eXe 0.10 comes with multiple language interfaces such as English, German, Chinese, Greek and Spanish. There is also an experimental Cloze iDevice as well as the External Web Site idevice. There is yet more exciting improvements coming in the following months.
Here is a wiki on iDevice.
Sun Microsystems Inc donated its StarOffice code to the open source development community five years ago and that's when OpenOffice.org project was initiated. There have been over 50 million downloads since the project started. The development team just announced the release of version 2.0 which has been considered as a "significant milestone for the productivity software market".
There is an increasing intention of using open source products in government and educational facilities. The State of Massachusetts has chosen to move to the OpenDocument format as the standard for all office documents by January 2007. Government of India has released over 7 million OpenOffice source CDs in different native languages. Local government of Auvegne, France has passed 64 thousands of OpenOffice CDs to the students of the region.
Here at art Faculty of Arts, UBC, we have installed Open Office (Star Office) on all lab terminals (over 120 computers) for several years. Download a copy today to compare it against Microsoft Office Suite yourself, if the result is satisfying, why pay hundreds of dollars to type your daily document?
You can also use BitTorrent to download or order a CD from the website.
OOPS stands for "Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System". This is a huge "Course Translation" project. Open Courseware is not a strange term for Chinese. The China Open Resources for Education (CORE) who has been looking into MIT's Open Courseware for a while. Recently, a large consortium funded by a Taiwanese creative foundation (fantacy.org.tw) has initiated a project which will translate many foreign open coursewares such as MIT's Open Courseware and courses from public health department of Johns Hopkins University into Chinese. This will allow many Chinese academics to be exposed to the first class learning content around the world. This organization now has over 1500 Chinese volunteers to do the translation, publication and web development. This will be the world largest course translation project. There are currently 55 courses completed translation, 305 courses partially online, 920 courses in progress. Over 6000-8000 learners browse the web site each day which sums up to over 120 thousands visitors per month.
Simplified Chinese version (mainland Chinese, Singapore):
www.cocw.net</code>
Traditional Chinese Version (Taiwan region and HK): www.twocw.net</code> I wanted to write about BitFlux several months ago. I first heard this tool from a New Zealand friend - Brent Simpson. BitFlux is a browser (currently mozilla only) based WYSIWYG XML Editor. I know I know, there are lots of WYSIWYG editors out there. But what's worth to mention about BitFlux is that it allows editors to instantly edit any web pages at its EXACT look and feel. It is the really "What You See Is What You Get" editor. Here is how it works: you goto a website using a FireFox, and press "F7" to invoke BitFlux editor, then you will see all of the texts, links and images being outlined by dashed boxes. You can simply click on the boxes and change edit the components (type new text, change images, edit the links etc...).
The application is written in JavaScript and uses XML, XSLT, and CSS for rendering. It is usable with any XML document and features tables, lists, images, special chars, clipboard, undo/redo, and easy customization. I strongly recommend you try it out yourself and I guarantee you will be amazed of its functionality!
BitFlux Screen Capture
Did you know you can get $500 US dollars for every bug you find on Firefox?! The Mozilla Foundation is committed to this promise so seriously that they made a public offer to a German bug hunter $2,500 US dollars for the five vulnerabilities he discovered. This once again reflect the bright future of the open source community. In contrast, the software giant-Microsoft only relies on a team of beta-testers who tests the programs without being rewarded at all other than a price reduction or bonuses for the program they are testing.
I truly believe the current product oriented business model will soon be replaced by service oriented business model in the software industry. This may also help the software providers to fight against the increasing piracy issues.
Google launched an open source development community - code.google six months ago. Chris DiBona, director of the Google open source iniatives mentioned recently that Google is going to increase the exposure of this community and use it as a two-way portal connecting the community and the open source developers. Many developers in Google are coming from an open source development background, and Google needs to keep a healthy relationship with the open source community in order to compete with the giant corperates like Microsoft and Yahoo. Here are some descriptions of the community from Google:
What is code.google.com?
Code.google.com is our site for external developers interested in Google-related development. It’s where we’ll publish free source code and lists of our API services.Who are the people behind code.google.com?
A lot of people worked together to both prepare source code for release and prepare code.google.com for launch and ongoing maintenance. We really care about free and open source software (F/OSS) at Google, and this site is one aspect of that affection.
According to a new source-code analysis from Coverity, MySQL has very little bugs according to the software bug standards. There were total of 97 bugs found over hundreds and thousands lines of codes. According to Coverity, normally you find one bug per 1000 lines of source code. For MySQL, there was an average of one bug per 4000 lines of source code, which is four times better than is typical with commercial software. According to Zack Urlocker, vice president of marketing for MySQL, open source developers seems to produce cleaner and better structured codes than commercial software developments. This is simply because the codes will be seen by other programmers.
At free of cost, a stable open source database seems to be the best solution in the e-Learning industry. At Arts ISIT, we use MySQL and PHP for many instructional developments such as the learning tools and mixed-mode course developments. We are happy about the stability of these open source server technologies.
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