I needed a fresh look for our college website and called upon Donna from Creative Contingencies to lend a hand. Compared to our old default themed school website, her new theme is a huge improvement. I am particularly delighted how she used Gimp to create a banner with the suspension bridge image from our Balook Camp in Gippsland.

I notice that we are not the only ones using the open source software Drupal to drive our online content, it is also being used by the Australian Prime Minister and the Whitehouse.

A year ago, Peter got our first open source powered website up and running running. Since then, Arran has done a great job with the upgrade to Version 6 and maintaining the engine that powers this website, today finishing an important upgrade. At this sage I need to shuffle the blocks about. do some housekeeping and rethink the entire site architecture.

Early days yet but at least it is looking much better.

The Japanese Spacecraft Kaguya is predicted to impact on the lunar surface at 4:30 am Melbourne time. I will be poking my head outside with a telescope and battle the cold to see if I can spot anything. If you are reading this on Thursday morning, the collision has already happened and you can probably view the pictures (if any).

     http://spaceweather.com for details.

From my copy of the open source software Stellarium, from Melbourne the Moon will be to the NE and about 80 degrees high (just look up .. no need to use the sofware like I just did!) .. albeit probably behind a sea of clouds.

As my wife points out, the last time she looked at space junk was an inbound NASA Skylab space station in Western Australia with no space repellent to keep the debris away. Kaguya here is a massive 2,900 kg and it will hit the Moon at an oblique angle, traveling at 6,000 km/hr and no atmosphere to slow it down. Something is bound to happen.


So I don't expect any debris clouds spiraling back to Earth or blinding flash... just a vague chance of spotting something through binoculars or largish telescope. We lost ours with the Gippsland bush fires that ran through our school camp back in February so I am relying on one that a friend loaned. Fingers crossed ..

If nothing happens, I'll just wave my fist at the moon and get back to dreams of writing reports.

Something about running a Jabber server that Bill and Tony mentioned last week got me distracted and I had a fiddle with Adium, the OSX powered open source instant messaging application that I have been using to chat to contacts online on my MacBook laptop. It is similar to Pidgin, the application I use on my Ubuntu Linux desktop.

To my surprise I was able to find a cute Skype plugin that enabled me to integrate Skype. After a bit of poking about I was also able to get my Facebook account connected. I was also configured it to automatically use my latest Twitter post to create a updated status note.

Now to check out how I can add a Jabber account. :-)

OpenOffice.org open source software is out of Beta with a version 3 for Mac OSX Aqua. Screenshots for the curious here showing of a couple of the different applications that are powered with this software.

The free plugins and addons are better integrated and easier to download, install or unload. The interactive help built in is unobtrusive and easy to navigate. I am getting my head around some of the cute SQL stuff that can be done with the database module.

Following a recommendation by him, my school technician last week set up a new Real Estate Office with iMac computers using this software. The money saved? Went to hiring him of course. :-)

Back on the 18 June 2008, Daniel and I downloaded a copy of Mozilla Firefox version 3. We were part of the community that set a Guinness World Record with with over 8,002,530 people downloading Firefox.

A wonderful accomplishment for a great Internet tool that is now part of our default installation for all the computer desktops and laptops at our college. Go for IT!

Whilst the snow was falling outside, open fire crackling and full of hot pancakes, I decided to dabble with some art. First step was to update Inkscape to version 0.46.

In all, this is a good bit of FLOSS software that I have preloaded onto all the school workstations and staff notebooks.

Here I took one of my old pictures of an incandescent light bulb that I drew by hand and scanned a decade ago.  After converting this to SVG I added two colour layers and experimented with gradient fills. Here is a snap of my efforts including one that I made an hour later with an old mobile phone sketch.

You can view some of my other images with my online gallery at OpenClipArt.
     http://openclipart.org/media/people/rgesthuizen

I will admit my inspiration from the mastery demonstrated by Kattekrab last week. It is worth having a look over her gallery of inkscape artwork. What a wizzard.

The snow has gone, now to duck out and do some shopping for dinner.

The New Zealand Ministry for Justice believes that open source software is a more stable, supportable, and cost-effective choice compared to proprietary solutions.
      http://nzoss.org.nz/system/files/moj_oss_strategy_1.0.pdf

This is a well considered opinion that might interest those that have had problems getting their school to adopt open source software. It would be good if other government departments had this well informed

On the Open Education Disk was a copy of open-source software for video editing called Avidemux. To date I have used the Windows based VirtualDub so I was curious about this software that has been ported across to Windows from Linux. Hard core video coders might be interested to read this detailed Excelcia review that compares both packages. Think of these more as power tools for splicing, trimming and converting videos, not something to edit and mix tracks to make movies.

It only took me a few min to download and install this onto Windows XP from SourceForge. Of course Ubuntu Linux users have an easier approach by just automatically installing this from available repositories. From what I can see, it comes jam packed with all the codecs you will probably ever need. 

I was able to quickly use it to open an MOV file, recode, crop and trim it into crisp smaller MP4 video version that I could send by eMail or upload to Moodle for my students to play on their portable players or iPods. In another couple of minutes, I was also able to create a SWF or FLV version.

Cross-platform applications that run on Linux, OSX and Windows are a preferred option for us so we will probably make the switch to using this powerful FLOSS tool on our school network, adding it to the next base computer images for Windows and Ubuntu.

Somebody mentioned something about voting by touching an Interactive White Board (IWB) so I tossed my departing senior class a traditional set of white-board markers and asked them to scribble a 'vote' on the board as they left the room. (typical XY plot that ranks boring <----> interesting, vs learned heaps <----> nothing). I then photographed the result to reflect and perhaps later discuss.

I enjoy using low tech touches like this, blue tooth devices, sticky pads and hand puppets. They had fun and I got all my coloured markers back.

Did make me think as they giggled over the new feedback option that any IWB solution needs to get over the initial positive gain that is observed from the Hawthorne effect. Measuring a 'real' improvement is going to be hard after spending all that money, is anybody going to be brave enough to claim only an incremental benefit?
   
Cameron raised on the lists an important point about the issue about IWB vendor lock-in with the hardware, software and the precious lessons and intellectual capital that we might record. Not only is this bad , in some counties it can be quite illegal. It has been noted that the best solution to this problem is FLOSS combined with free, public standards.

Last year there was a campaign to promote FLOSS or free software in Polish schools. In this report, I could relate to the part that described why some schools did not show an initial interest in the FLOSS campaign because of a reluctance by IT teachers to learn new things, a fear of losing authority to another group or admitting that nobody had any idea what was being talked about and what was on offer.

I laughed when I read that the most interesting way of saying “no” was “the school already has such thing”.

Now, who is in control?

Here is a cool OpenSource, cross platform application mentioned on the eChalk list by a University of Washington mathematician to replace the Maths software used in education and research with a free, open-source version. Around than 100 mathematicians around the world are collaborating to develop the tool.

"SAGE for studying a huge range of mathematics, including algebra, calculus, elementary to very advanced number theory, cryptography, numerical computation, commutative algebra, group theory, combinatorics, graph theory, and exact linear algebra."

http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articleID=38459
http://www.sagemath.org/

From what I can see the home page slideshow, students can write Python scripted programs with SAGE that combine serious mathematics with anything else and view the output with a Firefox web browser. We have Python and Firefox on our computer image deployed at school, I must check out the value of SAGE for our maths staff.

Reminds me of learning Fortran as a biochemist. Fun days with real science, huge computers and lots of punched cards. :-)

Graham proudly showed me his Apple notebook computer following his upgrade to Leopard. Although nervous about losing any of his files, he was quite pleased with some of the new effects when browsing for files and all up, felt that the upgrade he purchased was good value for money.

Oddly enough, I had also upgraded my computer but it didn't cost me a cent. Following this prompt from the upgrade manager on my Ubuntu desktop, I started the upgrade on my computer operating system to Gutsy Gibbon.

After all the necessary bits were automatically downloaded, the installation went quite well. The kids helped out by pressing the enter key to move onto the next step.

It is now running Ubuntu version 7.10 and I am really curious to see what has changed :-)

I read an interesting report about the failure of a proprietary software developer to open the source code to the graphics package Xara Xtreme. A quick glance at the website home page revels no new new announcements and a stagnant set of download updates. Ultimately we can expect code rot to eat away at the health of this once promising project.

The article lists two important lessons for open source developers:

1. You can't boss around volunteers
   at best you will drive them away, and at worst you will drive them toward the competition.
2. Collaborating with a community means willingness to adapt and change.
   The community may move in directions that you did not anticipate before you began; if you refuse to listen to it or refuse to make adjustments, you are likely going to kill it. (Willis 2007)
   

For now, the well supported FLOSS graphics software packages GIMP and Inkscape should provide the art and graphics features required by most users.

Here is a screenshot of the graphics software Gimp version 2.4 This is a powerful software package with many cool features including new icon theme, scalable brushes, revised selection tools, new color menu, full-screen editing, new crop tool, improved printing, red eye removal, perspective clone and lens distortion tools.

Not only are there flavours of Gimp that run on just about any computer operating system, because the software is FLOSS it can be freely downloaded and used by my  students and colleagues. There is even a  variant called GIMP Portable that can run on a USB drive or another called Gimpshop that changes the interface to something resembling Adobe Photoshop,

Gimp has attracted some criticism (perhaps unfairly) because of its user interface. As Donna once pointed out to me, the right mouse button is your friend in the default Gimp interface and will bring up many of the functions needed.

Once users get become familiar with the interface of one software package they are often reluctant to adapt or master the interface of another. When the general concepts of layers, filters and functions are so similar, it is sad to see them stuck on this learning curve. None of the major graphics software packages really work 'out of the box' without some external help with lessons or tutorials. In the context of a secondary school, arguments about 'industrial software standards' are phony and undignified. It all comes down to your personal taste, needs, funding and experience.

As a lite user, it does exactly what I need from a software graphics package with the basic functions just a click away. Money saved is money in my pocket.

In the Melbourne Science Museum there is an analogue computer that plays the game naughts and crosses. I have fond memories of playing this as a child when it was located in the Melbourne Museum when it was located in the middle of the city of Melbourne, next to the state library. Back then, a visit to the city with my friends always included a quick detour and excursion to play with this computer.

We were not really trying play this game to beat the computer. Most kids figure out that nobody can win at playing naughts and crosses if they they make the right first moves. Even the computer WOPR quickly figured this out in the 1983 film War Games.

Instead, whilst watching the flash of lights and clicking of circuit breakers, I was trying to figure out how a panel of circuits could compute a response and make a decision then display it on this crude interface.

Here you can see an analogue computer slideshow that I assembled after a recent visit. Kind of ironic that it was relocated to the kids science area, close to where my children now play.

With the literal explosion of virtual worlds that we now take for granted, it is easy to forget how far we have come with computers and their interface today. Kolabora explores this further in his blog, asking what we would do if we could have built these features into the operating systems of 20 years ago, drawing attention to then FLOSS operating system Croquet.

I rather like the following quote that he includes in this blog entry:

"Existing operating systems are like the castles that were owned by their respective Lords in the Middle Ages. They were the centers of power, a way to control the population and threaten the competition. Sometimes, a particular Lord would become overpowering, and he would declare himself as King. This was great for the King. And not too bad for the rest of the nobles, but in the end -- technology progressed and people started blowing holes in the sides of the castles. The castles were eventually abandoned" -David A. Smith

As WOPR said in War Games "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

Over the past few weeks, I have been doing my homework learning the basics of programming with Python on my laptop over the last few weeks on my long service leave (when everybody was asleep in the caravan). It is a very nice language and I can now see why it is great for teaching students programming.

Today I downloaded DrPython and some cute little python scripts and plugins. It was written in Python with teaching in mind using a clean and simple interface.

DrPython is much friendlier to use this python IDE than constantly jumping in and out of a text editor but hey, what can beat the handy rubber band that holds a stack of programming cards, ready to be loaded into the main frame or accidentally dropped on a staircase. :-)

Today I helped a family friend get their business online. For a while I struggled to enable a wireless network connection on his trusty Toshiba A100. This was until I figured out that a small wireless switch, hidden on the left hand side needed to be turned on! In less than an hour we were able to create a blog account and even post a few pages.

You may ask "why a blog?" instead of creating a traditional and generally static website cut with a HTML web editing client then uploaded the pages by FTP. Well the online tools used to create and maintain a blog are easy to understand and use. Not only can photographs be easily uploaded and embedded into new blog posts, a swag of different functions and attractive themes can be applied. There are many free sites that host blogs to start with.

Whilst a large organisation would be better to consider exploiting the content management system and community plumbing provided by Drupal, a FLOSS content management system, a small businesses should consider using a web2 blog option. Supported by a mailing list, the social networking functions of a blog solution fit nicely into the business model for a small business that is looking to promote their services online and network with existing clients.

• Greenway Drafing

I was able to get Squeak to work within my browser on Ubuntu.

The problem that I had with the Firefox browser plugin was registering the client application to the browser. I managed to find the details on how to do this with a quick Google search on this e-mail post.

Now that I can get some of the eToys working on the SqueakLand website, I can explore some of the work by other students.

Nice way to spend Software Freedom Day. :-)

Bill forwarded me a fascinating discussion he had with Alan Kay about programming and pedagogy. I have enjoyed rereading some of the fascinating new ideas raised by both of them.

He included this fascinating link to an 18 min video about Squeak. Whilst over a year old, I am impressed how Extremadura is using this programming language in their classrooms. They have certainly come a long way.

It would be nice if we could model something like that here..