The flagging system has been working all along, or so we thought!
Pat and I was doing a few small tests, and found out that the flags didn't work… This hasn't worked apparently for quite some time (since last upgrade we did of the elgg source), so if you've flagged something then, hmmnn, sorry we didn't see it!
It now works after a serious debugging session.
Yesterday Shirley suggested that we ought to add the tweets from twitter.com/redgloo (and the accounts friends) to the frontpage of redgloo. I thought this was a good idea, and I went ahead and implemented it. First naively, but now with a cache which is updated every minute to avoid API logout.
So if you want to have your tweets on the frontpage of redgloo, send a mail to odinlab@reading.ac.uk with you twitter account detail and we'll be-friend you – if you aren't a reckless spammer or relentlessly tweeting about things that we deem being inappropriate…
It has always annoyed me that the icons next to blogs posted on communities have been using the community icon rather than the user icon.
I've now changed it.
Pat mentioned yesterday that JISC had published the report on usage of semantic tools in UK education. I obviously wanted to read this report, and with the help of Pat downloaded it from the JISC repository.
Here I’ll only focus on a few observations I made while reading it. First of all I must say that, as a researcher with interests in this field I can’t say how happy I am that a report like this is being made. It is an area of great importance, and often it seems to be forgotten, because it is a highly technical area, which many people have problems understanding. Additionally I do agree, that there should be a focus and indeed a timeline for getting semantic tools into education, because everybody would benefit from their usage.
Once that is said, I must say that I was reading some of the paragraphs with astonishment, and I just feel that I have to air some of the frustrating aspects of the report.
First of all the report introduces two levels of semantic technologies, soft and hard. Where soft is technologies like topic maps and Web 2.0 applications, and hard ones are technologies based on RDF or similar formats. This is a levelling which I can only object to. RDF does not constitute any hard semantic technologies, for instance it is the core technology behind RSS-feed, which is used for news delivery. RDF can be used almost as badly as XML and XML-schemas without linking to semantic relations, if the user chooses to do so. RDF needs to be utilised using RDFS, OWL, DAML or a similar ontology basis before it constitutes any hard semantics.
Soft semantic technologies on the other hand ought to be meaningless in the scope of the report. The author points out that semantic technologies ought to be machine processable. However I believe they are left in the report to aid the readers with understanding the path the semantic technologies are on. The problem then is that the definition include web2.0 tools, which hardly is a precise definition, as I’ve seen diverse technologies as blogs, wikis, flickr, youtube, google, in such definitions. Web2.0 is all about making content creation and sharing easy for the user, and then there might be semantics coming out of this process (such as tag clouds and FOAF relationships). It would have been much better if the report had explored some of these semantic relationships and how they can become hard semantics later on. This was only briefly touched upon.
The survey of semantic tools is an interesting read, which I enjoyed, as I did find a few tools I had not stumbled upon before, however it also seemed to lack a few. I do appreciate that a survey can’t include all tools, but there isn’t any mention of tools coming from Manchester University and/or Ian Horrocks (now Oxford) who definitely is one of the most active in this area, and have many different tools, which have and are being used in educational settings.
My last issue (at least for this blog post) with the report is the roadmap. As I said earlier, this is something I believe is needed, but I find it a bit naive. How are educational institutions and lecturers going to be encouraged to provide metadata and linked data? Where are the ontologies going to come from, especially in the timeframe mentioned in the report?
Ontology creation can be a long process, especially if they are agreed upon, and if they aren’t then the tools that use idiosyncratic ontologies are harder to make work, especially from a performance perspective. For lecturers to start providing metadata really needs a revolution, especially on the user interfaces of semantic tools, which usually can be perceived as a bit geeky. Here I can only say that I like what I read, however the timeframe is a bit optimistic, and will need a lot of funding, which I obviously will be ready to apply for.
Richard Hussey kindly pointed out, that there was a small bug in the sidebar (the area underneath Profile pictures) when viewing your personal page.
Normally there shouldbe a section called "Forum & Blogs", however this didn't show on personal pages. This has now been resolved. It was a bug in the ELGG code, where a piece of code was inside an ELSE part of an IF statement. I have now moved it outside this block, and it seems to work fine. Yay!
I've had a few complaints coming in, that it can take a long time to authenticate from outside the Uni, especially when using a non-Uni account.
I've made a small change to the authentication code, which hopefully should rectify this. Most users should not feel a difference, but if you do, please notify my.
After a nugde by Phil I was re-ignited to do something about our captcha system. It really doesn't make sense that logged in users have to verify that they can read letters, when they have already shown the ability of writing a valid password.
So I've changed it so that only comments from anonynous users need captcha verification…
In the MeAggregator project I need an Xmpp chat connection from plugins to the central FFS (don't mind if you don't know what an FFS is…) And I have tried using several Javascript libraries (Xmpp4js, JSJaC and Strophe) from within XUL, all of which ended up in hilarious fun and no resulting xmpp connections to the openfire server I'm running.
I've now found that I probably should have used the Firefox add-on search instead of google to find these libraries, as this morning I found Xmpp4moz which is a library dedicated for xmpp connections from within Mozilla extensions (also other than firefox extensions), so I now have a connection through to the openfire server and the real deveolpment can commence…
I've just implemented a notification option for communities. If you are a member of a community, you can now choose to recieve notifications when a new blog has been created.
Just click the option underneath the community picture, and you'll receive notifications. (Remember to turn on general notifications if you have turned them off previously.)
I hope this will be useful for group work within communities!
I'm working on a MeAggregator Server, which has been causing me great problems. The biggest problems have been with getting the roster functionality of xmpp4r to work under rails.
The need for this is to validate and display the actual status of the FFS. This is quite important is this will allow code to start and stop the services of the MeAggregator.
Unfortunately this hasn't been easy. First off I started developing on a Windows box at work. I coded in the roster in each function call. This didn't work as the xmpp4r library only keeps a running status of registered users, thus if the roster was created for each call, the roster would be empty each time used, this resulted in the code showing an offline FFS even though it was online.
This lead me to think that I should create a service running along side rails handling the xmpp connection. I found the rails plugin backgrounDRb which should do exactly this. I installed it, and discovered after a while, that for the same reasons that a abadoned creating a bespoke solution this didn't work! BackgrounDRb apparently doesn't work on Windows machines.
Luckily I'm not tied in to any computer systems (as long as I don't have to use Mac which I would regard a degrading OS for a developer 😀 – not really…) so I decided to set up a development environment on my ubuntu laptop.
This didn't take long. But this was the only thing that didn't take time. I couldn't get backgrounDRb to work on my machine. Nothing worked. I kept getting strange internal exception from backgrounDRb. I found the http://mayurjain.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/no-such-file-to-load-log_wor which claimed that the solution would be to use version 0.1.5 of packet instead of later versions. This was odd, as the documentation claimed that v 0.1.7 or later was neccesary for backgrounDRb to run. And obviously this didn't work… Although the background server did start, which was more than before, it simply didn't work when starting p the actual service.
So I started digging into the mailing list of backgrounDRb, and there I found a poor soul, which had similar problmes on a Mac. The suggestion there was that parts of packet seemed to be outside the path, and thus didn't work.
Now I would have hoped that a gem like packet once installed, and a plugin like background using it, would be able to use it without the need of it to be on the path! But todays work has shown that this simply isn't an assumption which can be made!!?? Because when I did a PATH=$PATH:/var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/packet-0.1.14/bin/ in my terminal where running backgrounDRb it worked!!
I am obviously happy it works, although if this issue had not been the re, I would have had this result probably 4-5 days ago, leaving me with these days to do something productive, rather than debugging like this!
