Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

According to xinhua network, the most recent world computer software piracy investigation indicates that the software piracy in mainland China has lowered 4% in the year 2005 compare to the year 2004. This is a big drop compare to other offenders on the list. This study was revealed in Hong Kong on May 23rd. It was initiated by the Business Software Alliance and conducted by IDC.

However, China remains in the worst offenders list:
Vietnam - 90% software is pirated
Zimbabwe - 90%
Indonesia - 87%
China - 86%

The study also indicates that in the year 2005, there were 35% personal computers in the world had pirate software on them which caused over 34 billion US dollars loss in the software market, a 5% increases versus the year 2004.

Macromedia today announced Flex 2, at a reasonable price. Flex 2 includes Flash Player 8.5, Flex Framework 2, Flex Builder 2, and Flex Enterprise Services 2. The alpha version of Flex 2 will be released this month and the final product will be released in the beginning of next year.

Microsoft announced the "new weapon" in dot net based application creation - Sparkle. It is a Microsoft product for building Avalon user interfaces. It is aimed towards non-programmers using this tool to design media rich web or OS (Microsoft Windows series of course) based applications. Or looking at it from another angle, it can be used by "geeky" programmers to easily create applications with "cool" interfaces. Although this philosophy was first introduced by Macromedia products - Director and Flash, Sparkle still has many unique strength to compete (if they will compete) with the existing products. After watching the hourly long video on Sparkle, my first impression is it is still too early to compare Sparkle to Flash. However, what's worth to mention about Sparkle is it's easy data-binding and round trip XAML makes the final product more "searchable" by standard search engine. Flash contents not being indexable is the long known "fatal" problem and Sparkle may have a solution to this. However, in the short run (2-3) years, good luck to the Sparkle team to market this product. I simple can't see those hard core Flash developers will easily convert to this new application and not to mention, many of them are hard core Mac users too!

Using the hotel's business center or a public computer without the IM application and you have no right to install it? Sign in the a web interface and keep chatting with your buddies! Check out MEEBO.com and e-messenger.net, quite interesting web applications.

You can download the 30 days trial version at Macromedia's Flash product site. It is stated as: "Macromedia's biggest Flash release to date." Once again, the flash designers need to push the even more powerful tool into it's new edge!

From the product selection process to the actual launch of this multi-user blog system at the University of Calgary took less than 2 weeks! Amazing work. D'Arcy and his colleagues screened through over a dozen of multi-user blog/cms type of social software and decided to go with Drupal, a well built open source CMS in PHP and mySQL. Here is D'Arcy's reason on choosing Drupal over others:

"Why use this rather than something like Blogger, or Typepad, or something else? The biggest benefit (at least initially) is the ability to create ad-hoc organic groups, where content that is published by group members is displayed on a "group page" - an easy way to collaborate with a research group, a breakout group that's part of a class, or a department."

I have been looking at some of these social software lately for our learningtools web site, and I would have gone for Plone if we have enough Python expertise in our team. It seems that Drupal is not a bad choice either...

Everyone is sick at work, including myself. A mixed flu and spring allergy (since Vancouver is having some warm weather recently).

Had some interesting challenges while experimenting with Flash mix with video / audio data. This is related to an international project (Pachyderm) me and my co-worker is involved in. The project requires the flash interface to be able to load and control different types of media files on the fly. The media files vary from swf to mpeg video data, mp3 to wav and aiff sound files. Due to the nature of Flash has different ways of loading different file types: loadMovie() and loadSound(), importing video files and “squeeze” them in Sorenson compression or linking to them externally, video objects and audio objects etc… The trick lies in there must be a “Player Selector” component to be in place to first identify the file type based on the XML attributes and then determine the right loading functions and control components. Anyway, it was a good day in Flash development, looking forward to test some new features in Flash 8.