Graham Attwell :: Blog

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008031414

I've waxed on about fabbers and the like for some time on this blog and elsewhere, so I was suitably impressed by this presentation on open source hardware by Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone. It sets out the various aspects that make up the "source" of an object, from bill of materials to circuit design, and the standards for exchanging them.

Of course this is at the rather more technical end of the fabject continuum. At the other there is the amazing Ponoko site, which enables users to create their designs from regular EPS files, pick the materials, and then have them laser-cut to order. Designers can choose to sell the cut and/or assembled product, or to sell or give away the design as EPS files.

Currently the custom fabjects are a little pricey compared to their mass-produced compatriots, and the processes limited in terms of materials and processes. But add in cheaper 3D printing and other fabbing technologies, and simple programmable wireless platforms like SPOT and Bug, and we'll soon be churning out spimes on demand.

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008031410

Its interesting how we've gone beyond the backend aspects of OpenID and the focus is now on honing the user experience. Clickpass aims to streamline the login process by prefilling the user's OpenID URL within a single login button.

Its a nice idea and seems to work pretty well, but I think that CardSpace is probably a better bet in the medium term. Clickpass gets over the "remember the URL" problem, but doesn't have anything to say on the anti-Phishing issue, whereas CardSpace could in principle tackle both at the same time. Still, in the short term this could be a really good way to increase adoption.

A more pragmatic solution was presented by David Recordon of SixApart in a speech at EduServ last year, which is to ask users not for their OpenID URL, but for things like their AOL Screen name and other easily-remembered identifiers which can be used by a service to easily construct the OpenID URL based on the patterns that providers like AOL use to create OpenIDs.

Finally, there is also the option to have this kind of functionality built into the browser itself - put your OpenID URL into the browser preferences, and have it populate the login button rather than have Clickpass as an intermediary.

Via OLDAily

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008031410

Drop.io is a service that lets you create your own dropboxes for people to send you files. They can use email, a web widget, or even their phone to pop stuff into your dropbox. An RSS feed lets you know when you have new stuff. Why is this interesting? Well, when you start to move away from using a monolithic LMS, one of the first features you miss, and which doesn't have an obvious replacement, is a way of handling assignment submissions.

Drop.io lets you create any number of drop boxes, so it would be fairly simple to create them for particular lecturers, departments, or even specific essays. You can put the "drop it here" widget on the teacher's blog, the department website, or wherever you like. However, right now it is missing one major function, which is enabling "write only" functionality. Currently if you know the drop URL (or guess it correctly), you can get everything anyone else has dropped, which is an argument for using the supplied hashcodes as Drop names rather than using guessable names.

Darren Draper is keen to see educational uses of this, and so am I!

If you fancy sending me a file, here's my drop:

Via OLDaily

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008070401

I'm not sure what I'd use this for, but its certainly cool and very cybernetic. Pachube is a service for tagging objects that share data from their sensors.

Services like Pachube could be useful for some kinds of very high-level business intelligence, particularly analyses that cross organisational or national boundaries.

At the moment, however, it does have the feel of a webcams site with graphs and XML, but as more objects, places and devices get wired (or wireless) then something like Pachube becomes an inevitable evolution.

Perhaps someone will find some interesting way of using some of these sensors in one of the many mashup competitions making the rounds currently.

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008060512

I've been talking about oAuth a lot to colleagues recently; I'd had it vaguely on my radar for a while, but a conversation with David Recordon from SixApart at EduServ last year convinced me to take a more serious interest in the specification. oAuth is essentially a user-centric authorization mechanism for enabling services to talk to each other.

Currently some services enable interoperability by getting the user to delegate authority to the service to interact with another, essentially by enabling it to impersonate the user. For example, you give Flickr your LiveJournal account details so it can cross-post your photos.

With oAuth, the same functionality is enabled without the security, trust and privacy compromises: the user talks to both services and explicitly grants permission for the services to talk, but without revealing any account details.

There are a great many service-to-service contracts that could benefit from this user-centric approach: employers and universities, for example. Or between employers and applicant's portfolio services.

But is oAuth actually being adopted? Well, the evidence suggests it is, with Google announcing adoption, and discussing integration with its OpenSocial and Google Gadgets technology. For Google this replaces its proprietary AuthSub mechanism with one that can be shared across providers.

For eLearning, the oAuth spec is an important building block in developing distributed as well as federated elearning architecture. With oAuth, users can choose to connect together services that have no existing relationships using a common authorization method.

Even better, oAuth is completely agnostic with regard to identity and authentication protocols and models - it doesn't need single sign-on or any kind of shared identity or authentication model between service providers.

The bottom line - if you are developing an application that needs to talk to an external service API on behalf of the user, then you may need to start looking into oAuth.

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008021222

It's been a wild ride...but XML is 10 years old.

"Ten years ago, on 10 February 1998, W3C published Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation. W3C is marking the ten-year anniversary of XML by celebrating "XML10" and extending thanks to the dedicated communities -- including people who have participated in W3C's XML groups and mailing lists, the SGML community, and xml-dev -- whose efforts have created a successful family of technologies based on the solid XML 1.0 foundation. The success of XML is a strong indicator of how dedicated individuals, working within the W3C Process, can engage with a larger community to produce industry-changing results. "Today we celebrate the success of open standards in preserving Web data from proprietary ownership," said Jon Bosak, who led the W3C Working Group that produced XML 1.0. Read the press release and testimonials. Send W3C a greeting and learn more about XML at W3C. "

via W3C

With the Olympics in full swing it seemed obvious to turn my attention to China this time round for the podcast. Yaodong Chen, an English teacher at Guangxi University in Liuzhou and one of his students Justina, currently working as an intern, gave me an insider view of how the Chinese felt about the games when I asked them about whether they would be watching the games or not. As expected they saw the games as a tremendous opportunity for the world to learn more about China. Rightly or wrongly the Chinese feel misunderstood.

So what are the intercultural aspects of the Olympic Games? The list is long and could begin with the opening ceremony which was a lesson in world geography with the majority of the world’s countries represented, even those currently in conflict such as Afghanistan and Georgia as well as many small nations such as Andorra and Cape Verde.  Be honest, how many flags did you recognize? I was also struck by the number of parading athletes using their mobile phones mostly to take pictures but also in conversation. The formality of the occasion has obviously been very much reduced. I can feel a theme for a future show coming on! More inter-cultural aspects of the Olympic Games? Well how about, is it about individuals and teams or about countries? I know many people are simply looking at the medal tally for each country but in the Olympic Charter it does explicitly say, and I quote:

‘The Olympic Games are competitions between athletes in individual or team events and not between countries.’

A recurring theme seems to be homework in China (children were too busy doing homework to spend time on sport). This reminded me of an interesting initiative happening in the USA at the moment called 2 million minutes.  That is the amount of time available to the typical teenager to qualify themselves for university in high school. The project is making a series of films documenting how teenagers in India, China and the USA are spending their time during this critical period and it will be no surprise to learn that the Chinese students spend a great deal of time doing homework compared to the Americans. Although you need to buy the main film there are many short clips available for free on the project website and on You Tube. One of them features Bob Compton, the executive producer, giving his answer to a typical question about how students in China feel when they get low marks. Rather than feeling that this means they are no good at the subject, the reaction is instead that they need to work harder in order to succeed.

I also talked at length with Ken Carroll, an Irish man who has been living in Shanghai for over 14 years. Ken was a contact because he is in charge of a growing number of language podcast sites including Chinese Pod, French pod, Spanish Pod, Italian Pod and soon also Arabic Pod. Under the banner of Praxis language the Pod approach is to produce short podcasts of the language being used in context so that Ken reckons that it shouldn't be difficult to pick a smattering of Chinese in this way. There is a lot more behind the Pod language sites and we will return to this topic in a later podcast.

The show, inevitably, is just an impressionistic view of one of the most international events in existence.

Tags: absolutelyintercultural, podcast, China, Beijing, Olympics, Praxis Language, two million minutes,

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008072517

I think this one has been brewing for quite some time - the Open Web Foundation is pulling together a number of specifications under the umbrella of a single foundation.

The Open Web Foundation was announced by David Recordon of SixApart at OSCON yesterday.

The new foundation is to "create a home for community-driven specifications" such as oAuth and OpenID as well -if the slides are anything to go by - as the currently very proprietary Google Gadgets.

On the one hand I think this is certainly a step in the right direction for getting these specifications onto a stable footing. On the other hand, what about IETF? What about W3C? What about ISO? What about UN/CEFACT? I'd like to see a good rationale for why none of these existing organisations are unsuitable for the kind of work being discussed. Do they take too long? Are they full of your competitors? Are they too undemocratic? Too democratic? This is a very serious issue, especially as in the Google case, W3C have been working on non-proprietary open specifications in the same areas.

One argument is that the new body should purely focus on IPR management. This is certainly one area of concern with community specifications, and tackling it would be very useful. However, this would then require a very hands-off approach by the organisation, which is maintained without the urge to control the direction of the specifications themselves. Already discussions are taking place about what criteria the organisation would set up as to what projects it would accept, and what processes it will have to develop.

For example, would the OWF incubate a competitor to oAuth? If not, why not, and how would it make that decision?

If the OWF really can pull off a lightweight approach to IPR management for specifications then this could be a useful initiative, but the relationship with, in particular, the W3C and IETF needs to be explained much more clearly, and the role corporate interests are playing (Google, Yahoo!) in its development made explicit, before we know if the OWF is a good place to work on interoperability issues.

If Atom (or Pie as it used to be called) was being developed now, would it now join OWF, or would it still offer its spec to IETF to become an open standard? What would be the difference?

More coverage over at TechCrunch

We would like to get some idea of what users of this community would like to see happen to EduSpaces? If you are using the service, please let us know. Thanks.

Anybody have a clue why I get this:

 

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_NEW in /h****/j*****/public_html/mu*****/engine/start.php on line 85

 

after I upload Elgg 1.0 and try to go to index.php or install.php on my site ?

 Any help would be appreciated ...I sure would like to use this stuff....:)