This is a screenshot of the software called jUploader that I am using to upload some photographs to a Flickr account. jUploader is free open source software written in Java and like all good software, it happily runs on Linux, Windows and Macintosh computers.

Cool FLOSS that I am also currently evaluating for installation on my Ubuntu computer.

I finally caught up and nearly finished preparing one of the VITTA sample examinations for VCE ITA. Well it is 90% done and I can take a breath for a week for a break.

The template I was given wasn't all that original so I doctored it up using open office, ODT and a set of custom style conventions. It might drive the others nuts but it is the way that I work best and makes as much sense as using CSS for web pages. Can easily be stripped out if needed.

Not one of my best efforts and it took a while to get beyond the first blank page. I finally had some fun getting into the swing of thinking good questions by starting with some issues and favourite topics. I know it wasn't very original but I did better to look at the text book and other examination questions for structure, ideas and inspiration.

This is a screenshot of the Nautilus file browser used with Ubuntu 6.10 that I used for a sample question and can be freely downloaded as FLOSS. Shown here are some files on the cdrom. From memory I wanted something generic and was asking a question about file types and sizes. I made this as I thought that it would be good to give the students something that steps slightly outside their familiar file browser comfort zone.

I have figured out that it better to call free, libre open source free software FLOSS instead of FOSS so that the emphasis is on Libre or freedom instead of the ambiguous word free. Nice FLOSS page on WIkipedia that explains this in more detail.

The book / CDROM set Point & Click OpenOffice.org! looks interesting. I notice that users can even freely download and try out some Open Office tutorial videos.

I am sourcing an Australian supplier through our librarian and hope to try some of this out on my students in my VCE IT classroom. Interested in your thoughts.

Although our ASISTM cluster has been using GameMaker, I have kept an eye out for other game programming options.

Over the January break, one of my students attended a summer school at NSW University. She was really motivated by the use of Python and with her team, built an Internet search engine. Python has had a splendid writeup and great future in our classrooms. To date I have found..

• A Python programming competition on the Internet.
• A physics-based puzzle game written in Python for PyWeek 2. Features over 15 levels, a "free-play" mode and an integrated level editor.
• A research paper that compares eleven programming languages which are currently used in introductory courses. The comparison suggests that Python is one of the most suitable languages to be considered for use in the classroom.
• A game programming exercise and challenge, this chap created a role playing game from scratch in 40 hours using python and a suite of free software.

Those that might find Python a bit too hard, there is always Gambas.

I occasionally need to explain the economic model that underpins FOSS. Enterprise Networking Planet has a nice article that explains some of the success behind Red Hat and other companies that produce free software. I particularly liked the last quote.

"If you don't trust your customers and have to treat them like criminals and have to continually tighten the screws, if you have to keep everything a big secret, if your product line is so unattractive you have to force people to purchase anything and lock them in to have even a chance of keeping them, perhaps the problem is not them derned defective customers, but your approach to running a business." reference

Somebody on a mailing list mentioned that their school IT manager had questioned the security credentials of Moodle. I havn't had a security problem with Moodle, neither does EdNA, Open University or probably the thousands of other sites that correctly deploy and update it. As even famous, commercial packages that come in shrink-wrap have security issues, this is probably one of those fluffy excuses to distract well meaning educators who start poking around beyond their cutting edge. (sigh)

Whilst working outside the box with disruptive Web2.0 technologies can horrify some IT managers and school technicians, it can also open up for schools many new and exciting opportunities to engage, connect and rethink their current practices. Last weekend the VITTA team and I were really engaged with this splendid multimedia video "The Machine is Us/ing Us", created by Digital Ethnography students at Kansas State University. Increasingly, the collaborative aspects of Moodle such as tagging, forums, wikis and galleries make good sense and use in my classes.

Saving money with FOSS then putting it back into a school sounds like a great outcome and win for all. The OpenSource mailing list members have organised a meeting on 21 March - the Equinox and Harmony Day. Hope to see some of you there :-)

I found and installed a BOINC manger for my Ubuntu OS powered computer, a free Linux distribution. Now I can use up those spare CPU cycles to continue my participation in some distributed computing projects such as SETI@Home and Climate Predicting.

This is a fascinating way to solve complex problems. Large problems are divided into many small problems which are distributed to many computers. Later, these small results are reassembled into a larger solution.

Wikipedia notes that on September 2006, the BOINC platorm has over 475,000 active host computers with an processing capacity averaging over 615 terraFLOPS. The fastest supercomputer today performance peaks out at one petaFLOP and a basic hand calculator grinds along at a few FLOP (FLoating point Operations Per Second).

It is exciting to be part of this worldwide "quasi-supercomputing" solution and work to help solve some real-world problems.

An report that I submitted to WineHQ describing my tests on an old CDROM software application that I successfully tested with my Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft Linux distribution has been accepted. It is now part of the Wine HQ application database that lists what . Cool. :-)

I had some fun playing about with Wine to install some simple Windows apps, it was time to tackle mounting and installing some more challenging software. Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix (I now see that it is not an emulator). When I rummaged deep into my shoebox of old CDROMs, some worked although it was disappointing to find that some required old versions of free commercial software that were no longer supported or generally available.

I had give up after too many problems with a kids game CDROM that was continually checking that I had correctly installed Apple Quicktime Version 2.0 that refused to install.  Imagine being locked out of your old car because you were not wearing the free branded slippers that they gave away at the launch.

Our college has two sister schools in Cambodia (Sisowath High School and Beng Trabek High School, Phnom Penh) and we are one of the few schools in Australia that teaches Khmer as a LOTE subject to our secondary students.

I continue to be impressed with the continued team work by the Khmer Software Initiative that has enabled us to make a stable version of Cambodian available to our students for the first time. Already they have translated Kubuntu (KDE version) into Khmer and have yet to start on Ubuntu (Gnome version) Rosetta project. I have contacted somebody to see how we can help.

We are keen to set up a computer(s) with an Ubuntu operating system at our sister schools and organise Internet access. I hope that this group is able to help us out with the configuration, deployment over the next few months.

Some of my friends still have a problem understanding the logic behind Free Open Source Software FOSS or how anybody could make money from practically giving away the source code to their software.

I rather like the cake analogy used by the author in this FSM journal article "Beginners guide to understanding free software".

What do you want to bake today?

I made a mistake downloading the Kubuntu installation instead of the Xubuntu ISO file that I was really looking for. Anyway, I had a go at installing this Ubuntu EdgyEft sibling to try it out. Installed nicely into a VMWare virtual machine.

The interface has been built using the Debian KDE desktop system. For a Linux newbie like me, it was intuitive enough to navigate myself around, create this desktop screengrab image, fire up a Konqueror web browser then upload it to Flickr.

All in an idle evening playing about with Ubuntu. :-)

It was encouraging to read this blog post Yo Mamma likes Ubuntu. A mother who liked Ubuntu on her laptop so much that it was installed on all the other home computers. No slowdowns. No viruses. No spyware. (sigh) Yet another reason why Ubuntu is the Linux Poster Child.

We are required to use a project management tool for our IT senior students. Our options have ranged from elaborate spreadsheets to a clumbersome MS Project that can only be used at school. GanttProject started a flurry of interest amongst Victorian IT teachers. It is easy to use FOSS that is free for students to take home to play around with.

Last night I created my first ever DEB package for GanttProject from an RPM software package and successfully installed then tested it on a Linux system running Ubuntu  6.10 - Edgy Eft. It was very easy to make the conversion from the RPM package hosted on Merlinux using Alien that I installed from the normal Debian repositories.

An advantage of distributing a software package this way is that it can be included in the Debian Synaptic Package managerthat comes built into the Ubuntu distribution. Non-technical users can then easily find, read about, install, automatically upgrade and cleanly remove the software with just a click of the mouse.

I hope that the authors take up my suggestion that they add a DEB version of their software package to the synaptic management repositories, joining other software packages such as Thunderbird, Firefox, Moodle, OpenOffice etc.

Today I made my first mpeg4 video file of my desktop using Xvidcap on my home computer running X11 on Ubuntu. Sadly, the computer hardware I was using had no microphone and practically no processing grunt so it was only able to capture a few frames per second with no audio.

Rather than automatically installing the the Xvidcap software using the very friendly Synaptic Package Manager that comes with Ubuntu, I installed this software package directly from Source Forge. It was my first proud use of a Debian installation package on a computer desktop (similar to a Microsoft installer or MSI package).

This seems to be a usable FOSS solution for educators wishing to create video tutorials on the X11 display although it is the only one that I have tried out so far on my home computer system. Wikipedia has a good list of other Screencast software options.

I noticed that the Wikipedia entry for Xvidcap need updating so I spent an hour crafting a suitable page then uploaded a sample desktop image. My minor contribution to the global pool of knowledge before turning in for the night.

There are many kits about to help users build their own games, some are commercial, some free, some open source.Here is a link to a detailed list of game programming options (albeit Dutch language). The kids and I found this cool link to Helix Games where we found a great collection of games made with GameMaker. (l love the hand drawn look of the website)

This afternoon I might run some experiments to see if I can get GameMaker (unregistered free download) working with Wine on an Ubuntu (Edgy) system. Some of you might have already guessed that I have been heading in this direction since I have been tinkering with Ubuntu.

I have greatly valued some of the suggestions and advice by Donna and Peter from CC who must grow weary from my continual banter of questions about bug fixes or directions to head in. It is good to know that there are some friendly navigators who are sailing ahead of my little boat.

It seems from a detailed testing report posted to Wine HQ Application Database that it can be successfully installed although there were some problems getting it running. I also found this GameMaker forum post that steps users through an installation for version 5. Another GameMaker forum post hints at the problems with version 6 because it uses DirectX instead of OpenGL.

My guess is that if I stick with the unregistered version 5 then it should work (or use version 6 but avoid any fancy graphics function calls that exploit DirectX). I have a suspicion that clicking on the compile run button in GameMaker might not work. Instead I may need to first save a compiled version of any games made then launch them from outside GameMaker.

Wish me luck..

I did a bit-torrent download of the current Ubuntu version 6.10 Edgy Eft and was able to install it on my computer system. I decided that it wasn't worth messing about with the upgrade script, so I just backed up all my home directory files and did a clean install. As you can see it worked a treat!

I then had a go at installing the PDA sync option and using the gnome-pilot application. Took a few minor tweaks that I dug up on the Ubuntu forums until it was able to find my Palm Pilot and sync the data. Pictures here.

Very wise for Ubuntu to have a professional and stable distribution like Dapper for enterprises and cutting edge flavours like Edgy for geeks like me to tinker and customise to my needs.

Free to play, freedom to learn. :-)

I stumbled across this page, quite by accident. There is an official book about Ubuntu with lots of good advice for new users like me.

From the sample chapter that was published online, I learned how to download and install some missing fonts and some good steps to backup important parts of this Ubuntu system.

I might get our librarian or get a copy for our school, better make that a couple. :-)

• The Official Ubuntu Book

I suppose that I am stuck with too many braincells in the old school but I was curious how to include icons for “My Computer”, “My Documents” and “Trash” on my Ubuntu desktop. From what I have read, they dont come as default with the gnome menu but they can be easily installed. I managed to dig up a link to the following instructions. A small but handy tweak.

How to install icons on Ubuntu desktop

A different challenge this evening was to get the VMWare session on my computer to run a Widescreen Ubuntu virtual machine. Working with a 800 x 600 size VMWare sized workspace wasnt making good use of my full monitor size.

I first took the long route to read some notes on Google, posts to some forums and some help documentation. I then finally decided to just run the automatic command to reconfig xorg.conf file. I recall using this when I created the original virtual machine on my laptop. This commandline powered utility did the trick, detecting all the suitable monitor resolutions that I could add. After restarting the xserver session, I was able to select the new monitor resolutions and work at a significantly larger setting of 1920 x 1200.

Looking at Ubuntu this way does justice to the full working space on the 24" Dell widescreen monitor.