Planet Catalyst

Brenda Wallace: a cat named linux

2010-09-01T02:54:54+00:00

a cat named linux, originally uploaded by Br3nda.

In memory of our old family cat, my sister's old kitty: Linux.
1996 - 31st August 2010.

Vik Olliver: 01-Sep-2010 AM clippings

Suz Olliver — 2010-09-01T00:54:10+00:00

Enjoy:

Burning Man is the test zone for the OpenBTS cellular test site, offering up free GSM access to 50,000 people from a shoebox:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/083010-open-source-voip-cell-phones-at-burning-man.html?hpg1=bn

How the adoption of Open Source and Open Standards in UK local government stands to save UKP51m in Windsor & Maidenhead:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/aug/26/local-government-spending-open-standards-saving

3D Printers start to drop in price and drop onto desktops, but what are they good for?:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/diy/3d-printers-proliferate

NZICT vote in a new chair from Simpl, a company claiming "direct relationships with Microsoft in Redmond, MS UK, Canada, AsiaPac & NZ":
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/new-nzict-chair-elected

Google adds VoIP capabilities to gmail, allowing subscribers to call mobile and landlines in the US and UK. More to come:
http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2010/8/25/google-brings-voice-gmail/

LG Electronics have 19" flexible e-Paper screens, and will make them available in 2011 together with colour e-Paper:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/08/lg-will-mass-produce-19-inch-flexible-e.html

And finally. Some say he'll be named in a new autobiography, others say the case will be heard in private. All we know is, he's The Stig:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11139252

Vik :v) Diamond Age Solutions Ltd. http://diamondage.co.nz

Kristina Hoeppner: Response to the e-portfolio debate

2010-08-31T08:53:20+00:00

As this is a longish comment on “The ePortfolio Debate” by Mike Bogle, I post it on my own blog.

Hello Mike,

Thank you for bringing the Twitter conversation onto your blog. That’s how I realized that there was more going on than just the 2 tweets I had seen earlier.

You are correct when you say that e-portfolio solutions (no matter what they may look like) be available beyond educational institutions to ensure that (former) students continue to use them. In contrast to LMSs, e-portfolios center around the student.

I have not yet met anybody from the efolio provider in Minnesota, but from what I can gather from the web site, Minnesota provides space for all its residents to create an e-portfolio at eFolio Minnesota for free (to a certain data allowance).

For Mahara, there are services around that offer free hosting (again, up to a certain data allowance). I do not know how many there are, as there is not yet a list of them, but I have seen FolioSpaces (hosted in Australia primarily). Ian writes a bit about FolioSpaces outside of their web site here. If anybody knows of others, I’d like to hear from them.

In New Zealand, the MyPortfolio services for schools and tertiary education are hosted Mahara solutions that do not sit on an institution server. Thus it is easy for students to take along their portfolio when they switch schools. On myportfolio.school.nz they only have to be put into a different institution. There is not even the need to export and import a portfolio. If they go on to study at university, they export their Mahara portfolio and have it imported into myportfolio.ac.nz. Later on they can export it again and use on another hosted solution or even a different portfolio system (that follows the LEAP2A portfolio standard).

It will be interesting to see how far we can take “lifelong” in the electronic world. Will it actually be feasible to work with one (dedicated) portfolio software for more than 5 or 10 years or will we have to find other solutions and try to archive a certain phase instead of having to upgrade everything to the current software?

Kristina

Brenda Wallace: easier

2010-08-29T14:28:30+00:00

instead of fencing the baby in, it's much easier to put the heater and the cat in the playpen (and the cat loves it)

Brenda Wallace: today's market haul

2010-08-29T13:21:56+00:00

Brenda Wallace: day 4- a habit that you wish you didn’t have

2010-08-29T03:57:30+00:00

buying way too many perishable foods, because they look pretty at the market, and then not using them up cos i was too tired to cook.

Brenda Wallace: day 3- a picture of you and your friends

2010-08-28T04:37:16+00:00

there's a geek fallacy that your friends are friends with you therefore they'd naturally be friends with each other -- yeah, it's a fallacy.

"Friend" is a changing word - facebook has destroyed it's true meaning. I define friend is someone you'd expect would let you sleep on their couch (and vice versa).

In absence of any photograph of me with a giant group of friends, here are photos of friends. If i've missed you out, it's mostly likely becasue there's no photo!

Brenda Wallace: day 2- the meaning behind your blog name

2010-08-27T04:17:55+00:00

i like coffee -- alot. I like fairtrade (or similar) and i like rich choclatey beans. No sugar.

New Zealand has a .geek 2nd level domain names. I think is this awesome.

hence i have coffee.geek.nz

Kristina Hoeppner: Kiwi-ism and not Internet slang

2010-08-26T09:47:10+00:00

My learning of Kiwi English continues. And it is an interesting journey.

Almost from Day 1 did I encounter “Ta” in emails from colleagues. As we work in an IT company, my first thought was: check an internet slang dictionary. I found “thanks again” for “ta” in Netlingo. Thus, I didn’t wonder about it anymore.

However, recently, I’ve also been hearing people say “Ta” and not just write it.That got me thinking again. When I asked them what “Ta” actually meant, they said it’s a short form for “thanks” that is very frequently used in Kiwiland. According to the Urban Dictionary, “Ta” already has a long history on the British Isles. As I did not spend much time there, I wouldn’t know how extensive the use is there nowadays.

“Ta” is always used by itself. You wouldn’t say (or at least I’ve never heard anyone say it) “Ta again” or “Ta for your help”. It’s just “Ta”.

So: No mysterious Internet slang. Just a very common Kiwi English word.

OK. I mosey along now.

Kristina Hoeppner: Moodle and Mahara at ASHS

2010-08-26T08:54:09+00:00

Mark Osborne, Deputy Principal at Albany Senior High School (ASHS) spoke at Aotea College today about how his high school uses Moodle and Mahara. Albany Senior High (near Auckland) is New Zealand’s first open source school that promotes using open source software but also engages in open education beyond the software aspects.

Since my arrival in New Zealand two months ago, I have been hearing about Mark’s promotion of open source and reading posts by him, particularly on the MLE Reference Group, and finally had the pleasure to meet him and learn more about how his school uses the learning management system Moodle and the e-portfolio system Mahara.

ASHS tries to place as many software tools as possible online so that differing operating systems can still access them without problems and students can also work with their own laptops connecting online through Wifi.

It is up to the teachers to use Moodle with their classes or teach without it. Thus, the knowledge about Moodle can be situated on a continuum. Mahara, however, they have to use for their appraisal process. At ASHS professional development is called professional inquiry because it is an exploration and reflection. Thus, teachers get acquainted with it even if their students happen to not be using it yet.

From next year on, all student portfolios will be e-portfolios. Currently, they can have a paper-based portfolio alternatively.

Mark showed us some of his favorite modules in Moodle, informed us how he uses them in his classes, and how easy it is to set them up. He uses a number of Moodle activities to get feedback from his students on his teacher which he then can also use for his appraisal documentation. For example, students fill in questionnaires about his classes. He also looks at the statistics of activities, e.g. Hot Potatoes quizzes, to find out where students may need some more time because they did not answer certain questions correctly or it took them a very long time to get the answers right.

In just two hours he gave a small group of interested teachers from the Porirua region a good overview of what can be done in Moodle and how Mahara can be used as e-portfolio by both students and teachers and answered questions.

I am looking forward to his talk at KohaCon on October 26, 2010, when he will present on his school’s use of Koha, the open source integrated library system.

Brenda Wallace: plans

2010-08-26T08:44:45+00:00

Brenda Wallace: Blog Prompts: day 1- recent pictures of you and 15 interesting facts about yourself

2010-08-25T22:55:27+00:00

Yes, it's a meme.

15 things.. FIFTEEN.... this will be difficult.

1. I'm from Whakamaru, which is a small village in the South Waikato - the locals who cannot pronounce maori call it "wockamarro". (near Mangakino and Tokoroa)
2. I contribute to many open source projects, as and when i have time - usually when i find a bug i'll fix it.
3. I went back to work 5 weeks after having a baby. My husband has taken a year off to look after her.
4. I don't drive.
5. I play flute, cello, piano, and a bunch of wind instruments (in that order)
6. I read many social justice and human rights blogs regularly.
7. I like Fairs and Markets.
8. I take LOTS of photos - see my flickr http://flickr.com/photos/taniwha
9. I spend my Saturday at One Laptop per Child test fest.
10. I also write most of the tweets on the @OLPC twitter account.
11. I was once a finalist for a NZ Open Source Award.
12. I am missing a big chunk out of one of my fingers.
13. I garden - mostly veges. Plants should serve a purpose.
14. I have been married for 12 years.
15. I like malty beers and scotch.

Recent pictures - these are what Apture finds of me:

Brenda Wallace: yoghurt

2010-08-25T10:55:20+00:00

attempting to make yoghurt in the rice cooker's keep warm mode.

Pass the Source: Cloudy Horizons

2010-08-25T05:32:20+00:00

I was asked to write this article for an IT publication a month ago but missed the publishing deadline. Due to the wonders of modern technology the world is still able to share and acclaim my wise words:

Photo Google Schwag (CC) Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Some rights reserved

The Cloud application of the moment is Facebook. Facebook represents the web within the web. It is a privately owned world that is more populated than most countries. It allows individuals and businesses to create their own identities, manage their contacts, find new contacts, conduct business and develop applications specific to Facebook’s technologies.

It seems everyone is “on” Facebook, whether you are a government department, Telecommunications business or simply someone with funny cat photos to share.

But there is a cloud on the horizon. The Bloomburg Business Week is reporting that Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, may have signed a contract which if upheld, would see the company transfer ownership (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-07-20/facebook-lawyer-unsure-zuckerberg-signed-contract.html). In addition to its ownership uncertainty, Facebook has a nasty habit of making unilateral changes to the usage policies, effectively the contract it has with each Facebook user. This is a risky proposition for businesses relying on Facebook for their future, and for individuals putting significant parts of their life on one platform.

While I was in the UK recently I heard about a musical instrument supplier. They have sold their goods through Amazon for many years, with Amazon taking about a 7 percent commission. That week Amazon announced that it was getting into the musical instrument vending business itself. Co-incidentally Amazon was also unilaterally doubling the commission they were charging to third party music instrument vendors.

So what do these anecdotes mean for people who have invested everything in “the cloud”. The people who rely on Facebook, or Google apps, or Amazon, to be the “internet of everything”, for their livelihood?

How do you shift from one vendor to another? If their infrastructure is cutting out, or the terms of service becoming more and more unfavourable, or your ISP is favouring a competitor’s traffic, or your clients are moving from one application to another (Bebo anyone?) how do you move? How do you get your data and applications transferred? Is the data you created even yours in the first place?

The success of “the cloud” is also its massive failing – scale. The scale of the cloud has pushed down costs and increased convenience significantly. But, as Google’s Vint Cerf points out, there are no accepted standards or protocols for cloud services and systems to store and exchange information and systems.

With the huge scale that the internet has enabled comes an equally huge imbalance in the nature of the relationship between cloud service vendors and users. The magnitude of the lock-in that users of cloud applications find themselves committed to far outweighs anything that has preceded the current phenomenon.

So, what do we do? If the convenience of cloud services is impossible to ignore then the pitfalls and potential for “all of business” disasters are should be evaluated and mitigated.

To start with, your data should be available to you on a device of your choosing at any time and in an open format that can be easily recognised by different software systems. This means that you should be able to backup and download your data easily and at regular intervals.

Secondly, you should easily be able to transfer from one platform to another. The best way of achieving this is to ensure that whatever cloud service you are using is based on software that is free and open source. This is easier than you might imagine. For every Google app, Twitter, Amazon Web Service, there is an open source alternative. Most, if not all, of these also run as cloud services. Examples include Wordpress, Status.net, Teambox, RedMine, FengOffice and WikiMedia. Using open source cloud services ensures that transferring from one provider to another is not just possible, but straightforward. It also guarantees that your data can be processed if you decide you have to make the shift.

To conclude, the advantages of cloud services have been well sold, I would say oversold. They represent a privatisation of what we used to call “The Internet”. The pitfalls are less well expressed but they exist.

The trick for businesses and government in particular is to ensure that they avoid becoming enslaved on a scale that has never previously been possible. Fortunately free and open source software proves, yet again, to be an effective way of getting the best of all worlds – access to high quality technology and services without the proprietary capture and other business risks that are a feature of many cloud services.

Francois Marier: Combining multiple commits into one using git rebase

François — 2010-08-24T19:47:50+00:00

git rebase provides a simple way of combining multiple commits into a single one. However using rebase to squash an entire branch down to a single commit is not completely straightforward.

Squashing normal commits

Using the following repository:

$ git log --oneline
c172641 Fix second file
24f5ad2 Another file
97c9d7d Add first file

we can combine the last two commits (c172641 and 24f5ad2) by rebasing up to the first commit:

$ git rebase -i 97c9d7d

and specify the following commands in the interactive rebase screen:

pick 24f5ad2 Another file
squash c172641 Fix second file

which will rewrite the history into this:

$ git log --oneline
1a9d5e4 Another file
97c9d7d Add first file

Rebasing the initial commit

Trying to include the initial commit in the interactive rebase screen will return this error:

$ git rebase -i 97c9d7d^
fatal: Needed a single revision
Invalid base

and squashing the top commit in the interactive rebase screen:

$ git rebase -i 97c9d7d

squash 24f5ad2 Another file
squash c172641 Fix second file

will return this error:

Cannot 'squash' without a previous commit

So we need to use a different approach to deal with the initial commit.

Amending the initial commit

Here is an alternative to rebase which will work on commits that don't have a parent.

Taking the previously rebased branch:

$ git log --oneline
1a9d5e4 Another file
97c9d7d Add first file

we can rewind the branch to the initial commit:

$ git reset 97c9d7d
$ git log --oneline
97c9d7d Add first file

without losing any of the changes introduced in 1a9d5e4 (shown here as uncommitted changes):

$ git status
# On branch master
# Changed but not updated:
# (use "git add ..." to update what will be committed)
# (use "git checkout -- ..." to discard changes in working directory)
#
# modified: file1
#
# Untracked files:
# (use "git add ..." to include in what will be committed)
#
# file2
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

Then we can reopen commit 97c9d7d and add the changes present in the working directory:

$ git add .
$ gitc -a --amend -m "Initial version"

which will finally give us a fully squashed branch:

$ git log --oneline
fcb85fb Initial version

$ git status
# On branch master
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

Vik Olliver: 24-Aug-2010 AM clippings

Suz Olliver — 2010-08-24T08:44:11+00:00

Enjoy:

Some time this month, the 5 billionth device will plug into the internet:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/081610-5billion-devices-internet.html

The New Zealand Open Source Awards panel has been chosen and you can now nominate your favourite piece of Kiwi Open Source goodness:
http://nzoss.org.nz/news/2010/new-zealand-open-source-awards-judges-announced

Following a complete lack of - well, anything from Oracle really - the OpenSolairs Governing Board dissolves itself:
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2010-August/008012.html

Tohoku University uses a cantilever tip to achieve a magnetic data density of 4 trillion bits/sq inch. Seagate think they can do 50:
http://www.physorg.com/news201250166.html

And finally. A direct plea to the Russian president may save the Pavlovsk seed bank that scientists starved to death in to preserve:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/16/russia-president-pavolvsk-twitter

Vik :v) Diamond Age Solutions Ltd. http://diamondage.co.nz

Brenda Wallace: Open Labour this Saturday

2010-08-22T22:53:40+00:00

Something different - NZ's Labour party doing their policy forming in the open, this coming saturday, at an event where all comers are welcome. (instead of back room dealing, that happens all over the show.. at least i hope it's "instead of", not "as well as")...

if you're in Wellington consider coming and checking them out, whatever your political opinions are.

http://blog.labour.org.nz/index.php/2010/08/23/doing-things-differently-...

Dan Marsden: Awards Time?

2010-08-22T22:18:49+00:00

With nominations soon closing for the NZ Open Source Awards I’ve just heard about Packt Publishing’s Open Source Awards – It looks like Moodle and Mahara aren’t eligible, but if you’re aware of any open source products that you think should be recognised make sure you nominate them! – Packt are offering cash prizes to the winners and runners-up.

The NZ Open Source Awards are a bit more flexible and a wider range of projects will be eligible but nominations are closing very soon!