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”.)

With these colors, entries really need a title...

The rain season has been over for a little more than a week now. It's been --->H.O.T.!!!<--- ever since. Not quite the "Sahara desert certified" kind of hot, but the temperature has been steadily between 32 and 35 every single day since the rain stopped. I'm really looking forward September...

I went to another beach last weekend. Gwangali. I like it much more than Haeundae. I'll post my pictures soon, I promise. I'm just too lazy to do it now and I'm working on other things at the moment.

LAMPs, AMPs and other home essentials…

Do you think I’ll finally get my LAMP working?

If I had another hard drive, I’d set up a dual-boot machine with my extra operating system - or systems - on a hard drive other than the main one of my Mac mini. Ok, so I have *one* external drive at the moment, but it is my media drive. Therefore, if I mess it up, I lose all of my pictures, movies, important documents and software. I’ve used Parallels Desktop to create virtual machines to install additional operating systems, but Ubuntu Server Edition will not complete its reboot after installation. I tried twice and faced the same frustrating result in both cases. I’ve tried Fedora Core 5 and did not get far. Maybe I should buy an English PC keyboard so as to have a keyboard recognized by Fedora. Fedora Core 6 (test 2) is supposed to add support for Intel-based Macs, so hopefully I won’t face the same problems I did with FC 5. FC 6 is still in beta though, so it probably has problems of its own. Oh! Well… I guess it just goes to show that it is not easy to set up a server on your home computer when you’re not an expert in the field. I was really hoping Ubuntu would make it easy for me, but it seems I was wrong.

I expect stuff to just work and LAMP is making me seriously mad. Hasn’t anyone done a basic package that will just f*#king work?!? I’m losing it… I can’t stand defeat on that most important battlefield. I don’t give a damn that I’ll never be a good dancer, but I freaking need a web server that works!!!! I can’t give up now.

Every single one of my pictures... (Videos coming soon.)

Google has released a Picasa uploader and an iPhoto plugin for the Mac. The plugin is really nice and automatically transfers my iPhoto comments to my Picasa page, so I don't have to cut-and-paste the comments for each picture. If you looked at my Photobucket pictures, you'll have already seen a few of the ones I posted to Picasa, but most of them will be new. I posted them all on Picasa so that those of you who haven't looked at my Photobucket pictures yet - which I assume will be most of you - can see all of my pictures in just one place. Just click the link below.

Picasa Web Albums

I still haven't uploaded the rest of my videos to YouTube, but they'll show up on my blog once I have, so keep an eye on it if you want to see more. :-)

As an aside, I might switch my blog to another place at some point in the future. After some tests, I realized that a WordPress blog would make it easier for me to keep all my entries nicely organized. Since you can attach labels to each entry and browse all entries using these labels, I could have links in the sidebar for the various labels, allowing visitors to check all my entries that have "Pictures" or "Video", or that are related to "Computer Stuff" or whatever other category feels relevant. I'm still testing various things though, so the switch won't happen anytime soon. Anyways, I'll let you know through this blog if you need to update your bookmarks. *grin big*

Short Haeundae Beach Video...

Ok, I'm not sure whether it will work, but I'm trying to post one of my videos here. I do not get any preview in Flock's blog editor, so I'm not sure it will display right on my blog, although I do think it will. (I think video's simply not as well integrated in Flock as photos are.)Here is the link, in case the video wasn't embedded as it was supposed to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8w7uDWKUnA

Barbara and I went to Haeundae Beach to check it out. It's the most popular beach in Busan. Barbara asked me if Ii wanted her to take a picture of me, but the camera was on video instead of pictures, hence the silliness of this video.

technorati tags:Haeundae, Busan, South Korea, Beach, Frank, Barbara, Funny

Blogged with Flock

Some pictures with comments... finally!!!

I think this will work. You can click the "slideshow" button with a green triangle to get a slideshow of all the pictures. It's a nice option as it automatically resizes the pictures to a size that will fit all screens. If you prefer, you can click the top left picture to see the first one in full size. Then yyou can click next to see the other ones. Whichever option you choose, you should see my comments above the pictures. You can slowdown or pause the slideshow with buttons in the upper right corner.

The first link has pictures taken at Haeundae Beach. They are not the first pictures I took, but they were a small set, so it felt more appropriate for me to test things with. The second one is the same one I posted yesterday, but with the comments this time. They are pictures of my trip to the historical city of Gyeongju, which is about an hour away from Busan.

Haeundae - Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

Gyeongju - Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

I hope you enjoy the (slide)show(s)!!! :D

P.S. I'll try to add French comments as soon as I can, but the space for comments on photobucket is extremely limited, so I can't put both English and French comments there at the same time. My apologies for the inconvenience.

technorati tags:South Korea, Gyeongju, Kyeongju, Haeundae, Pictures, Photobucket

Blogged with Flock

My pictures on the web for you all... finally. First set: my trip to Gyeongju.

Well, it was painful, but I think I more or less have it working now. Working... not quite working the way I think it should work, but working nevertheless... I hope.

The following pictures were taken when I went to Gyeongju with Barbara and Helen. Clicking on the pictures should bring you to my photobucket album where you can watch a slideshow of the pictures. Just click the "Slideshow" button above the top pictures. Then you can pause the slideshow or slow it down with buttons in the top right corner, or quit the slideshow with the "Back to Photobucket Album" button in the top left corner.

I want to have bilingual descriptions, but photobucket does not allow me enough space for descriptions to put the two together. It's also really complicated to change the order of the pictures too, so I will test Flicker soon to see if it works any better. Flicker has a rather low limit on monthly uploads of new pictures which is why I tested photobucket first, but I think I can live with the limit if it works better than photobucket.

I have typed descriptions for all of my pictures in iPhoto today. That was really long. However, now it's done, so I should be able to post most or all of my pictures on the web in the next week or so.

EDIT: It seems the thumbnails only show the pictures in full resolution, so no slideshow for you and the images will be too big to fit most screens. I'll try something else, but you'll have some of my pictures in the meantime anyways.

SECOND EDIT: I rearranged my photobucket albums and it broke the links that were embedded in this post. I deleted the links to avoid wasting space. You'll find an up-to-date link in my next post, i.e. the post above this one on the front page.

Blogged with Flock

Hello world!

[EDIT: This entry was pasted from my WordPress blog. I decided to consolidate my blogs to this single blogger blog, but I wanted to keep my old entries too.]

Well, I just got Flock, a cool browser based on the code of Firefox. It integrates seemlessly with a wide range of blogging sites, so you can easily use the built-in blogging tool to post to all of your blogs. It’s neat to have everything in one place. It also handles RSS/ATOM feeds very well. Since Flock supports WordPress, I thought I’d check it out. My “Blogger” blogs aren’t too bad, but they aren’t all that I wish they could be. Maybe I’ll be more lucky with WordPress. It seems to be more flexible. Time will tell…

Concerning Flock, it still is in the relatively early stages of its development - it is beta software - so it can be rough around the edges sometimes, but if you take some time to configure it the way you want it to work, you’ll be happy you switched.

Frustrations... when failure simply isn't an option.

I'm really frustrated today. No, it doesn't have anything to do with a woman. It's software that's giving me a serious headache. As I've been saying for a long time now, I'd like to set up a website for my students, but I still haven't found a solution that addresses all my requirements... and actually works when I try it. In general, I'd consider myself a relatively sophisticated computer user, so my repeated failures at something so important to me, both personally and professionally, are just really tough to take.

I don't have a computer science degree. Not yet. The things I am trying to do now are practice for the degree that I want to do after my Economics M.A., a "Diplôme d'études supérieures spécialisées en technologies de l'information et environnements d'apprentissage" or "Graduate diploma in information technologies and learning environments", if I translate loosely from the French. I want to be ready when I start that degree so that I'll do great in most of my courses, but my experiences with website server software are telling me that I just can't learn this stuff on my own, no matter how hard I try... because, TRUST ME, I HAVE tried!!!

I don't know what to do... I honestly don't have a clue. I need to learn how to use Apache, MySQL (or some other database software), and PHP (or an equivalent), and I need to learn some HTML as well, and maybe the basics of a few other programming languages as well... F%$#!!! I'm really frustrated... I think I'll write to a "learning environments" teacher and ask for some advice. I don't like to look incompetent - especially not to those I am supposed to impress to get into the programme I'm interested in -, but I need help with that stuff...

EDIT: Some may ask: "But isn't stuff supposed to be easier on a Mac?" In general, I'd say yes. Using iWeb, it's pretty easy to get a decent-looking website without any particular computer skills and very little work. You can create a photo gallery, audio and/or video podcasts with RSS feeds, and tons of other things really easily. However, I am trying to create a website with auto-grading quizzes, and that is more of a niche market. It requires more specialized tools and those tools, sadly, tend to require skills I don't have yet.

SECOND EDIT: After wasting a lot of time trying to find the information I needed, I thought about BitTorrent. I googled "computer ebooks torrent" and, a few hours later, I had in my possession 150 ebooks on everything computer-related. I can now advance in my quest. It will be a lot of work - but an interesting journey as well!!! :D

The joys of AMP...

For the last few years, I've been interested in learning more about web development. However, I am looking for relatively simple-to-use solutions, so that I can recommend whatever I used to other people (who may not be tech wizards either). In particular, at the moment, I am trying to set up a simple website for English quizzes so that my students can practice certain elements of the English language on their own more easily.

In my research on the various possible solutions, I came across Moodle, which seems to be pretty much what I need. However, Moodle requires AMP - Apache, MySQL and PHP -, and that is where the going gets tough. I first tried the Moodle OS X package, which includes all of these components, but even after configuring my firewall to allow traffic on the relevant ports, Moodle cannot run Apache properly. I then trashed everything and tried to install the AMP components separately before re-installing Moodle, thinking that the Moodle install would look for AMP and only install the missing stuff (if any). OS X comes with Apache built in, so I thought that part was more or less taken care of. I then installed MySQL and PHP, and then Moodle again. Still no luck. I also looked into the Moodle install for Windows since I have XP on my Mac too, but I gave up quickly when I realized that it wasn't any easier than the OS X install. (I was hoping the Windows install might be more user-friendly simply due to the fact that so many more people use it, so I assumed it might have been a bit more polished.)

All of this is really tough for someone like me who has no computing background whatsoever. I do not have any programming skills beyond the most basic stuff, and those skills are related to outdated programmes. I have never taken any course in webserver administration or databases, yet most of the documentation that I can find online is targeted to a much more computer-literate audience, i.e. people with some kind of computer-related degree.

The situation is extremely frustrating as I can usually learn new tricks relatively easily if given proper directions. I do take the time to read the manuals whenever there are some, but I need directions that do not assume an in-depth knowledge of computer science to start with. And that is where my biggest problem is. I thought that, over the years - and I've been looking into this stuff for a few years already -, AMP would become more user-friendly and more accessible to people like me who do not have a computer science degree but can nevertheless get by with computer stuff in general. It probably did get somewhat easier. However, there sure as hell still is a long way to go.

EDIT: Wikis and Readme files can be adequate when you only have a question or two, but they aren't when you need to learn everything from a to z. The latter requires an actual manual with all the information the target audience will need. I'm a beginner, so I need beginner's guides. After losing most of my sanity, I searched for an "Apache for Dummies" and found a few. However, paper books aren't convenient when you travel a lot, and technical manuals go out of date pretty quickly, so I'd rather give the trees a break. Also, if the book doesn't really suit your needs, you've wasted a lot of time and money for nothing. With ebooks, it's easier to sample a few and find the one that suits your needs best. I therefore looked for ebooks on the subject. I googled "computer ebooks torrent" and my problem was solved: 150 ebooks on everything computer-related. I won't read all of those, of course, but there are more than a few that interest me. I can now start upgrading my status from "amateur geek" to "professional geek". I can't wait to test my soon-to-be-acquired superpowers. ;-)

Long time no see...

I love my Mac Mini... I really do! I've installed Parallels Desktop, Windows XP, Ubuntu (Linux) and Virtue Desktop, and now I can run Windows, Linux and OS X on my beautiful Mini all at once, and the speed ain't too bad. :D See my Tech Blog for all the gory details (and feel free to send comments and questions). I've also downloaded a bunch of high resolution desktop backgrounds and told OS X to put a new one every 30 minutes. Pretty cool! :D

Our school has a new teacher. Her name is Tamar. She's from L.A., California. I think she's pretty cool. Her friend Pooya - not sure if I get the spelling right - works at the Haeunday branch in another part of town. It's about a twenty minutes subway ride, so it's not too bad. They both just got MacBooks so I'll teach them a few neat Mac tricks. ;-)

I'm still worried about Barbara's health. She doesn't eat. But she's been avoiding me for the last month or so. We exchange greetings at the school, but that's about it. If I drop by her place, she's just never there, so I haven't had a decent conversation with her in a loooooong time. Oh! Well... If she really doesn't want to talk to me, that's her choice. She's old enough to make her own decisions.

Some kids give me a hard time. I'll have to be tougher on them. When the kids don't listen, we waste a lot of time and we cannot finish the lesson. In general, I don't like dealing with discipline. I'd rather get kids to enjoy English and to work hard because they enjoy it, but it's not always possible. I'm a decent teacher, but I need to kick myself in the a** to keep improving. Decent is just not good enough.

Feel free to e-mail me or to write comments here. I'll start updating more frequently.

Virtual Desktops and Virtualized Operating Systems

I've been playing with my new computer for some time now and I got a few things working properly. Last week I got Parallels Desktop, a virtualization programme that allows me to run different operating systems in "virtual machines" on my Mac. I've installed Windows XP Pro and Ubuntu (which is a Linux distribution). Windows works at my screen's full resolution (1920x1200), but I haven't managed to get Ubuntu to work at anything better than 1024x768. Hopefully, Parallels will soon provide an easy way of getting all the drivers working properly as they did for Windows. Anyways, it's cool to have a computer that can run Ubuntu, OS X and Windows all at once at a pretty reasonable speed. Parallels assigns a different IP address to each virtual machine so I can use the internet normally on all three machines simultaneously. Sharing files between operating systems works well too. Between OS X and Windows, Parallels makes it extremely easy to set up shared folders which are exactly that - shared folders. You can just drag and drop files and folders to and from the shared folders as you would for any other folder in OS X or Windows XP. Ubuntu recognizes my USB hard drive automatically and the external hard drive can be accessed easily from OS X and Ubuntu simultaneously, so sharing files is, once again, really easy. I haven't tried sharing files directly between Ubuntu and OSX, but as a work-around, I could simply drag a file to my USB hard drive and then to the shared OSX-Windows folder. I am pretty sure it is possible to set up a network connection between the Windows XP and Ubuntu using the IP addresses, but I am not a networking expert so I'll just use the work-around for now.

Using Virtue Desktop, I have set up virtual desktops on OS X. With Parallels, this allows me to run Windows XP in full screen and switch in and out of XP with the mouse or a keyboard shortcut. The same is true of Ubuntu (although it does not run at 1920x1200) or any video I am watching. For example, I do not need to leave full-screen viewing to take a look at my torrent downloads. I can just pause the video and use the keyboard shortcut to take a quick look at my main desktop. Any programme that can use a lot of screen space can be given its own virtual desktop if you want, so you can keep each desktop uncluttered.

Virtual worlds and trying to keep up-to-date with the "real" one...

When I think about the future of education, I think about things like these:


Are virtual worlds the future of the classroom?

By Stefanie Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: June 12, 2006 4:00 AM PDT

Of course, such virtual worlds are only a small part of the story, but this type of tools has a fantastic potential that needs to be harnessed. The technology is here already - or could be here shortly if we devoted the right amount of resources to such project.

Hmmm... I'm annoyed at my lack of technical knowledge in the area. Hopefully, I'll be able to meaningfully address this sad state of affairs over the next few years. I wish I had studied computer science more seriously at some point in my life, but I guess it's never too late.


On a vaguely related topic, I've been reading "The Google Story" lately. The book relates the story of the world-famous search engine. It's a great read for anyone interested in information and communication technologies. Google's founders have really big dreams - and they're doing a great job at turning them into something concrete!!! It's a truly inspiring story. I think I have not dreamt big enough lately: I'll try to fix that too. ;-) Who knows? Maybe five years from now, I'll be doing truly interesting things...

Google, Stanford, M.I.T., Harvard... I used to snob a lot of what was going on in the American "ivy-league" universities - to a certain extent, I still do -, but some of these universities have truly exciting projects as well. Five years from now, I want to be pushing the boundaries of educational technology along with the most important leaders and shapers of the field. I probably won't be satisfied with myself five years from now, but the day that I am, I'll have become old and lazy. Anyways, as long as I give my best shot, I know I'll be able to live with myself...


I haven't updated this blog in a while, so let me add a thing or two about what I'm up to these days. A while ago, my dear cousin Yan asked me what I thought about the whole "Web 2.0" thing. At the time, I didn't really know anything about it, so I didn't have much of an opinion on it, but I've read a bit about it in the last few weeks.

For those without a clue, I'll just say that it refers to a new layer of virtual bonds between web users. With the "old" web, information was mostly one way: from the website publisher to the person consulting the website. With the "new" web, users can, for example, chat with strangers who happen to be surfing the same website as they are at the same time and exchange views about the website - or anything else; they can rate the websites that they visit so that other people in the community can find the best websites more easily; they can share their bookmarks with friends and with perfect strangers who have similar interests, and they can look for the bookmarks of someone considered an authority in their field of interest. These, obviously, are just a few simple examples of a new emerging paradigm for the web: it is by no means a complete list!

What have I discovered? The two biggest things - i.e. the most useful to me - are:

1-) www.digg.com
2-) del.icio.us

The first one has a system where comments are rated by readers. The comments not worth reading are "down-voted" by users and then hidden from view automatically - unless you choose to expose the hidden comments. It is not a perfect system, but it addresses a real problem, as anyone who's reading forums regularly will be painfully aware. By filtering out the crap, you can find the insightful comments more quickly. My limited experience with the system left me pretty impressed.

The second site is a website that stores your bookmarks, allows you to tag them and then search through them using the tags you attached, the title of the page or other criteria. I haven't used it much yet, but it looks promising. If you are a casual browser who only visits a handful of websites - and always the same few -, then del.icio.us might not be really useful to you. However, if you try to keep an archive of all the interesting pages you will be visiting over the rest of your life, then a tag-and-search system makes much more sense. Lately, I have tried to organize the bookmarks I collected over the last few years. I deleted a few, I created tons of folders - categories and sub-categories -, and then I still didn't know what to do with certain links that didn't fit well with my system of classification. I'm sure it will take me some time to start using tags smartly and productively, but it obviously is a much more powerful system. With del.icio.us, you can also search the shared bookmarks of other users, but I haven't used that much yet so I do not know how useful it is at the moment. (I assume the technology will grow more mature as time passes - and then be attacked by evil spambots trying to sell you life insurance and penile enlargers!!!)

To keep up with world news, I looked for a better RSS feed reader. There are many on Windows, Linux and OS X, and I don't know the Linux or Windows ones yet, but I'll try to recommend one within a month or two. On the Mac, I think Vienna does a great job. It allows you to create smart folders (like smart playlists in iTunes) or folders within folders. It's the feed reader I have settled on for now. Also on the Mac, Shrook looked promising as it pushes the smart folders even farter by trying to learn from what you read in order to suggest you other articles which you might like. I have not tested that function yet though as the Shrook synchronization tool (to keep your news feed synched on different computers) seems to have some unsolved issues that bugged me beyond forgiveness. As of now, I have about 70 news feeds that deal with everything from world news to tech news to healthy recipe ideas, and it is relatively manageable, but it still takes me a bit too long to browse through all of the articles every day. As I find more and better news feeds, I will probably make more use of the smart folders to keep 100% up-to-date with the few topics I am most interested in, at the risk of letting a few gems "slip through the cracks" by not reading through all of the article's titles.


Hmmm... As I wrote these lines, I truly wondered whether I should put this long "web 2.0" and "news feeds readers" ramblings here in my personal blog, or in my tech blog. I chose to put it here as I am hoping that some of you will jump on the RSS boat in the near future. It's a truly simple, yet powerful tool.

Ouch! It's... late!!! Time for me to go to bed.

Somalian Warlords

"The Anti-Terrorism Alliance includes eight warlords, four of whom are ministers in the current government." - BBC Africa [Article]

"Warlords"... As if Africa and the Middle East were a big game of "Magic: The Gathering". You must acknowledge that something is insanely wrong when your country has Warlords. Of course, the U.S. is backing up the - Thank God! - secular warlords. (Is your sarcasm radar beeping? It should be.)

Most of Africa is such a big mess at the moment... There's only so much one can do and the situation there is truly disheartening at times, but it's too easy to just give up hope. There are things that can be done to help and I'll always try to do everything I can. Once I know more about free educational technologies, in a few years, I'd like to go there and help Africa enter the new economy more seriously. As I already said, there's only so much one can do, but if I have a positive impact on the life of just ten people, isn't it already something great?

Next week, I'll get my Mac Mini. I'll need to get a screen here, though, as it seems that shipping my Dell 2405FPW here would be prohibitively expensive. I'm really looking forward to playing with my new toy.

They were all hiding at the beach...

Our new school is pretty nice, I think. It will take a couple of weeks before everything is set up the way it should be, but I think it will be great once it's done. It seems that we'll be getting two new teachers around mid-June: a new Korean teacher who studied in New Zealand (or is it Australia?) and her American boyfriend.

Pressure... :P

Bart has a Korean fiancée. That American guy has a Korean girlfriend. And I saw about ten different foreigners with Korean girlfriends/boyfriends when Barbara and I went to Haeunday Beach today. Barbara doesn't have a Korean boyfriend, but then again, at the moment, I'm the only guy at the school unless you count the bus drivers who truly don't speak much English (and they don't really need to either).

I'm not here to find a wife though. And I'm not all that interested in anything else, to be honest. Been there, done that. It would help me learn Korean much faster, of course, but I try to keep myself above such base utilitarianism. I - instead - rely on a much higher, much more Christmas-party-centered form of utilitarianism. But then again, Busan doesn't really know anything about white Christmases, so it'd be easy to win the argument. :P No, I'm not ready to settle yet, so until I find a woman who's ready to travel with me, I guess I'll be single. And that's probably the way it should be.

When moving is in your karma...

Tomorrow, our school is moving to a new building. The classrooms will be smaller, but we'll have more, which should fit better with our needs... most of the time. The teachers' room is supposed to be somewhat bigger, so it should be easier for us to move around and organize our materials without always stepping on someone else's toes. Overall, I think the move will be a great thing as we truly need more classrooms.

However, the new building is now quite ready yet, so although the teachers' room will be nice once it's ready, in the meantime, we'll have to make do with using a classroom with no desk. We'll probably be fully settled around June 10th, I was told. Hmmm... Oh! Well... The ride is not always smooth, but I'm still glad that I came here. (Isn't it funny how much you learn about what a good school is when your own is lacking in a few respects? :P)

It's dumb, I know, but as I told my cousin Patrick about an hour ago, I was whistling Christmas songs at work today, so as you can tell, I'm really looking forward to receiving my new computer. Sadly, it will probably take another two weeks if all goes well. I can't wait to triple boot in Linux, OS X and Windows! I can't wait to start testing educational software packages! I can't wait to start "evil" experiments in educational technology with my students as guinea pigs! (Their sacrifice will serve the greater good, I assure you.)

Concision is a great virtue - which I sorely lack -, so I'll stop here for today.

First Post

Hi everyone,

I've had a few different blogs over the years. I haven't shared them with all that many people. I guess some things just felt too personal for me to share with people I had to live with on a daily basis. I mean: there are questions and thoughts you should keep to yourself. This blog will be for all those other thoughts that I feel comfortable sharing with the rest of the world, which is much more than it was a few years ago. I guess that's growing up: I've figured some things out, and I am now much more self-confident that I used to be.

I am not entirely sure how I will divide my blogging activities. It seems I would need a personal blog to post random personal ramblings, pictures and videos - which is the purpose of the blog you are reading now. I would also need one for technology-oriented discussions, so as to keep the two separate for those people who care about me but don't give a damn about network attached storage and triple booting, or vice versa. Finally, a third blog would be used to provide my ESL students with various tools to help them learn and practice English. I might also add a fourth at some point in the future to discuss art in all of its forms (but mostly anime, movies and books, I guess).

Hmmm... It is probably not an ideal division, but it should go a long way in helping people keep in touch with the part of my ramblings they care about - and only that. I'd also like to open the last three to contributions and I think the division will make it easier to manage blog permissions.

On a related matter, it seems I will have to use Mozilla or Firefox to format my blog posts with italics, bolds and such. Safari is a fantastic browser for many things, but it also lacks support in certain areas. I might use an external application instead. I used MacJournal with my livejournal account and it served me well. When I have tested a few things, I'll post links to the ATOM/RSS feeds for each of my blogs, so that those who want can subscribe to each blog individually and use an ATOM/RSS feed aggregator to look for new posts easily. (For those who have no clue what an ATOM/RSS feed reader is, I'll explain the basics in my techno blog sometime soon.)

I'm off to test a few things.
I will write more soon. :-)

Another Blog, More Ramblings...

[EDIT (February 28, 2007): I have now decided to consolidate all of my writing on one blog: http://franklaflamme.blogspot.com/ This is a post that used to be on "Frank's Tech Ramblings" but was moved here once I became a bit savvier with mixing search and RSS feeds.]

This will be my tech blog. I will use it mostly to discuss stuff that is of relatively direct interest to me, so it might not appeal to everyone. Hopefully, however, some of you will discover a few cool things every now and then on this blog, and I will get some feedback from you on those questions where I am absolutely clueless.

I installed Firefox and a bunch of extensions tonight. I can't say that it feels particularly fast, but then again, I probably slowed it down a bit with all the extras I installed. I'll probably uninstall about half of them after I've played with them a bit. In general, I must say I am impressed (except for speed, as I already mentioned). Extensions can be easily uninstalled, and the search field in the top right can use an incredibly long list of search engines. I'll probably try to make a customized search engine to use as default when I have tried them a bit more and know which ones really work well for me.

As an ESL teacher here, in Busan, South Korea, I've been trying to provide students with as much cool English content as possible. I already have tons of anime with English voices, so I will use that as educational material. I also have a lot of English music as well. However, I would like to use more proper ESL tools as well to give my students the grammar and vocabulary explanations that they need. Anime and songs will be more fun, but they'll also be more challenging as they are not intended for lower-level ESL students.

I therefore took a look at the iTunes Music Store's podcast section. It has a decent selection of educational podcast - many of them ESL podcasts! - so I will encourage my students to take a look at the selection and to try a few to see if they like them or not. However, as I do not want to discourage them from using podcasts before they even really start using them, I'll listen to some myself and try to suggest them a short list of podcasts that they are likely to enjoy. With my most advanced class, I might even try to get them to create a podcast, but that sure won't happen until I'm much more comfortable with all aspects of the technology.

Earlier today, I emailed many people to ask them to register for a free account at box.net. The service offers 1 GB of online storage for free. They offer account upgrades for free whenever you refer 5 people. If you want to help me, please e-mail me and ask me for a registration link. I'd to get a few upgraded accounts to use as shared storage spaces for a variety of projects. By registering through the link that I send you, you'll help me upgrade the accounts that need it. Thank you in advance for your support.

EDIT: After using Firefox for a few hours, my whole system started slowing down to a beachball-happy crawl (Mac OS Xtm). Looking into the various extensions, I realized that the weather extension was a bit too zealous in its job of telling me that it rains and that it's 22°C out there. After uninstalling that particular extension, Firefox's performance was much much much much much better. I'll try to find some utility to test the various extensions' use of my computer's resources so that I can better judge which ones are worth keeping.