A new beginning...

I have decided to restart this blog. I will need to go through old posts and make sure that the links to my pictures and videos still work. I will eventually post my resume as well as my views on a variety of issues. Updates coming soon.

Wanderer

Upside down, with roots deep into wild nimbuses,
I reach for the neighbour's green grass, to get a hold of myself.
My only anchor is a nomadic heart.

New pictures

Hi everyone! Some new pictures... I tried to embed a slideshow of the pictures on my blog so you wouldn't have to navigate to another site to see them, but it seems something's not working right, so you can click the small picture below to see all of them.


by franklaflamme

A few words about this album... The pictures were taken by Aren, one of the foreign teachers working at our school, on "Project Day" at the end of the winter programme. About ten kids gave presentations on that day (and maybe 15 more the previous week, but I don't have pictures of that yet). Each picture has individual comments so I hope you'll take time to read them because they didn't type themselves by magic. ;-)

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label:BR English, tag:pictures, tag:personal, tag:work

Second try:
label-BR English label-work label-pictures label-personal

Third try: zzzpictures zzzwork zzzpersonal zzzBR English

Subscribing to tags on specific blogs - How?

Hi everyone! Long time no see...

I don't feel like whining about work right now, so let's try to do something potentially more productive. For a long time, I have been unable to find a way of using the tags attached to each of my blog post to customize the RSS or Atom feeds that people can subscribe too. Why does it matter, you say? It matters because some of you might be interested in my pictures only, while others don't care about my pictures but want to read everything I have to say about politics, religion or education, for example. If you subscribe to the general RSS/Atom feed for this blog, you'll get everything. Of course, I could have one blog per topic, but that it not the way to go as it would make managing my entries a complete nightmare. And what if I have a picture of me with George W. Bush and the Dalai Lama? In which blog should I post that entry? In "pictures", "politics", "religion", or in something else?

Tags solve this problem as you can attach several tags to each entry and have only one place for all of your writings. When you come to my blog, you can navigate the tags by using the links in the "Labels" section of the sidebar (on the right). However, if tags (or "labels") could be used in conjunction with RSS technology, then each user could get updates on precisely what they want without having to deal with all the extra stuff that I will be putting here. The absence of such a feature has been the big thing discouraging me from updating very regularly. I think I might have found a workaround though, so I'll give it a shot and see whether it works or not.

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I'm back after some testing... It seems that blogger.com is not quite as sophisticated as I thought (as of now). There seem to be no way of restricting a search using both a specific url (i.e. a website's address) and a specific label. I am sure that the search company won't let such a sad state of affair last too long, but I'll submit the idea to blogger's blog just in case. If anyone knows of a method to do that, I would greatly appreciate if you could let me know.

In the meantime, I think I will add tags at the end of my entries in the following way: "tag:picture", "tag:technology", "tag:Apple", etc. It will allow me to create, for example, a customized RSS feed for all of my blog entries that are related to "Apple, Inc." and to leave out of the feed entries that talk about "apples" (i.e. the fruit, not the company). I'm pretty sure Google will add labels as a search option soon enough, but I'd rather use something that works now. I'm tired of waiting. I'm aching for some action!!!

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Follow-up: It seems the next step will be to determine which tags I want to use.

Moodle again…

In the last few weeks, I’ve slowly started to set up my iBook as a web server to eventually use it to store a Moodle site for all the students at my school. I’ve learnt a few networking tricks, but I still have to figure out a bunch of little things.

One thing I learnt just a few hours ago is that some of the problems I had were related to a utility commonly used on the Mac to decompress downloaded files. In general, StuffIt Expander is great, but for certain .tar.gz packages, I need to use Apple’s BOMArchiveHelper instead. Stuffit decompresses the packages, but as folders rather than as installers, which confused me quite a bit. It was a very un-Mac experience, but I thought that maybe this was due to the cross-platform nature of these web-related tools. I though that, if some components plug into Apache, a web server which is available on Linux, OS X and Windows, and run entirely within, then maybe these components were the same regardless of the OS, which would have explained the unnatural packaging. Fortunately, FreeMacBlog’s “Server Series” made me realize that something was wrong in the decompressing process. At the moment, I can access my iBook locally using Cyberduck - a free ftp client for OS X -, but I am still unsure about my settings for non-local access. From my Mini, my external IP address doesn’t seem to work. I’ll need to test a few more things.

Anyways, now that my iBook has been updated to Tiger (OS X 10.4), I thought I’d give another shot at setting up Moodle. I went back to Moodle’s website to check whether a new version was out and, yes, finally, there was a universal binary version of my beloved Course Management System. “What’s a universal binary?”, you may ask. A UB is a Mac OS X file with code that enables it to run properly on both PPC and x86 (Intel) Macs. Finally, I could install Moodle on my Mini, which is a much faster machine. (It’s almost five years newer!) Normally, PPC applications run fine on Intel-based Macs, but the PPC version of Moodle was one of the rare exceptions. (I still don’t really understand why.) Furthermore, this new version of Moodle was based on MAMP, which I knew was a well designed Apache-MySQL-PHP solution for Mac OS X. The old version was based on XAMPP, which doesn’t install as “cleanly” as MAMP. (MAMP doesn’t install random files all over your hard drive: it keeps everything in one neat little folder.) I downloaded and installed. Moodle was running and I was going through the configuration of my Moodle site (and not of the AMP components) in a matter of minutes. It “just worked”… Wow! After wrestling with that stuff for years, Moodle’s MAMP package got my server up and running (although only locally at the moment, as far as I know) in less than five minutes.

I can now start designing online quizzes and organizing the various modules that the site will have to make sure that everything fits together nicely and addresses the issues that our school has at the moment with paper files. I don’t expect it to happen anytime soon, but I think it’d be sweet if every teacher had a laptop at his/her desk and could easily look at the same information from a variety of angles. At the moment, with paper files, it is not obvious to keep track of attendence, homework, test results, behaviour problems, learning challenges and everything else all at once. Different documents focus on different things, and it is rather difficult to get the whole picture due to this fragmentation. Also, with online, self-grading quizzes, it will be much easier to get students to work more on the things that they do not understand well right away. I will write more on the advantages of an online system once I have a prototype ready and need to sell the idea to the teachers and management at my school. They seemed to think it was a great idea, but it will have to work significantly better than the actual system to convince the school to give teachers a laptop each to follow the progress of our students. Who knows? Anyways, I’m excited that Moodle is running now. I’ve already started to test quizzes. It’s relatively easy and fast to design new quizzes and it seems to be a rather powerful framework. I mean, it’s used by several universities - in Canada and elsewhere -, so I’m sure it will be more than enough for our school.

I have to come back… I have to come back to South Korea because I won’t be done by the time I go back home for Christmas 2006. I’ll just be getting started! The use of this type of technology in education is at the very core of my strongest beliefs. A small school where I have proven myself as a teacher is the perfect place for me to experiment as I will be given a lot of freedom on how to do things. Of course, at the moment, it’s still an after-class pet project, but I’m confident that five years from now, it will be an important part of how I earn a living and how I contribute to society. And that is why I spend so much time at my computer all the time. I’ll get there. I have to.

iPartition, uPartition, heePartitions…

Wow! It’s been a while since I last updated this blog… As everyone knows, I have been trying for some time to turn one of my computers into a webserver so that I could run Moodle - or a similar course management package - on it. I was endlessly frustrated by the absolute lack of results despite my biggest efforts, but things are moving forward now, so I’m in a better mood.

I recently bought iPartition, which is a neat little Mac programme that allows for non-destructive repartitioning of hard drives. I used it to partition my iBook’s hard drive, so that I could restore the OS X 10.4 install DVD on one partition and reboot from that one to install OS X on the other. (Then I wiped out the install DVD partition and expanded the other one to take the whole drive.) Since the Intel and PPC Mac use different partition schemes, I could not install OS X over FireWire from my Mini - or, at least, I didn’t know of any way to do so. With iPartition though, it was really easy. I’ve been partitioning everything happily ever since!!! One of the programme’s suggested use is to keep your system files and your personal files and data on separate partitions so that you can do a clean install of your OS without wiping all of your music, videos, documents and settings from your drive. It seems like a great idea. I’ll try that sometime soon. Another obvious use of the programme is that it will allow me to install and run Ubuntu natively rather than in a virtual machine. Whether or not I manage to get Moodle running under OS X, I’ll also need to get it running under Ubuntu so that I can have a truly free solution. Moodle did not work in a virtualized Ubuntu. I guess Parallels networking isn’t quite up to that task yet, although it might simply be my lack of Linux skills.

It seems that my RSS feed reading is not a complete waste of time after all. About two weeks ago, I discovered a cool tutorial for using Macs as servers on freemacblog.com. It starts with the very basics and is intended for the average Joe who doesn’t have a computer science degree. It shows you step-by-step everything you need to know. As of now, I can serve a webpage from my iBook to my Mini or vice versa, but I need to set up port forwarding on my router before I can share the websites on my computers with the rest of the world. Sadly, my router’s software seems to be Korean only, so I’ll probably need to ask a teacher at the school to help me with that. I’ll run a few tests using a direct connection (without the router), but I still need to figure out port forwarding to make course management software truly usable and useful in the settings I have in mind.

Anyways, reading a previous blog entry, I recalled that the latest official version of Moodle is supposed to work on PPC Macs with OS X 10.4, so now that my iBook has been updated, I’ll need to run more tests. I have looked for other course management packages, but I still feel like Moodle will be the best - if I can get it to work properly.

Moodle is running... but not working properly

Ok, it seems I still have a long way to go before getting a Course Management System (CMS) online and working the way it should. Moodle does not work on Intel Macs as of now - which really should have been mentioned on the main download page!!! - and there is only a beta version that will work on OS X 10.3. I haven’t been able to update my iBook to 10.4 due to my broken CD/DVD drive, so I only have a 10.4 Intel Mac and a 10.3 PPC Mac, neither of which will run Moodle properly. I’ll try to find a CMS that works well on Intel Macs. Moodle just lost my vote… for now, at least.

In other news, I got Synergy running. I can use my Mini’s mouse and keyboard to control both my Mini and my iBook. My iBook’s trackpad and keyboard still work normally, and I have a keyboard shortcut to turn the feature on and off, so I can detach and re-attach the Mini’s keyboard and mouse from and to the iBook with a simple press of *apple-f1*. I had to write a short script to configure Synergy the way I wanted it to work and I’m rather proud of myself on that one. I still haven’t succeeded in using the iBook’s keyboard and mouse to control the Mini, but that’s much less useful to me, so I don’t think I’ll waste a lot of time on that. (The Mini’s keyboard and mouse are just so much better.) I haven’t managed to make Synergy start automatically when I reboot, but I’ll look into that when I have a bit more time. It’s such a cool little app! I wish I had twenty computers with 80 screens to test it with!!! By the way, it works fine with Linux, OS X and Windows computers and you can hook up computers with different operating systems easily. I guess it’s not that big a deal, but I find it even more mind-blowing than Google Earth. If you have old computers around, Synergy’s an easy way to turn them into something useful again.

I’m not happy with the way I manage my bookmarks. I want to tag them, share them among computers, share them with whoever’s interested in them, and have an easy way of finding the right ones when I’m looking for one. Yahoo’s del.icio.us probably isn’t too bad, but I’m still not entirely convinced. If anyone has suggestions for that - or for any other cool tech toy -, leave a comment and let me know.

Moodle is running...

FINALLY!!! I got Moodle running. I stii haven’t tested anything and I expect it will take some time before I’m able to do anything really interesting, but at least it is running, which means Apache, MySQL and PHP are configured properly. I’m pretty happy about that!!! (Understatement of the year…) Now the real work can begin.

I’ve freed some space on my Mini’s hard drive and I was looking into partioning it to install Windows Server 2003 and/or Ubuntu Server natively instead of running them in a virtual machine using Parallels. I haven’t tried Windows Server in a virtual machine, but Ubuntu Server simply stalled during the reboot after the installation. I have no clue what the problem is. Windows XP and the desktop version of Ubuntu both work fine, although I couldn’t get Moodle running in those either, nor in Mac OS X on my Mini. Anyways, after reading a lot in Moodle’s forums, I learnt that Moodle doesn’t run on Intel Macs yet. What?!? The website never mentioned anything about Moodle not running on Intel Macs. It just said: “Best used on Mac OS X 10.4.2 or later.” My software’s up-to-date and, usually, running PPC software isn’t a problem on my Intel Mini. It just works. There are, however, a few specialized applications which do not work well - or at all - in Rosetta (Mac OS X’s PPC-to-x86 translation tool). It would have saved me soooooooo much time if I had known from the start that Moodle was one of them!!! But hey! Moodle is free… so I’m just happy it’s working now.

Since I’ll be using my old iBook to do all my Moodle-related stuff and my Mac Mini for pretty much everything else, I’ll try to install Synergy and set up a software keyboard-and-mouse switch. If it works well, I’ll be able to drag my mouse from my Mini’s screen to my iBook’s and cut-and-paste from one computer to the other easily.

In other news, there is a RSS feed for new blog entries, but there is also a RSS feed for new comments. You might want to suscribe to that feed as well as I’ll use it every now and then to post updates to certain entries. (If you click on the title of any of my blog entries, it will show that entry and its related comments on their own. The RSS feed for comments is right above “Leave a comment”.)