Kenneth Newquist :: Blog

http://knewquist.edublogs.org/2008/12/02/custom-scales-displaying-as-

By default, individual course scales should not be accessible to other users on the site unless they’ve been designated a site-wide “standard” scale, which is something only admins can do.

However, we’ve discovered that if you create a Grade Item (via Grades > Choose an Action > Categories & Items > Add Grade Item) and click on the “Scale” drop down menu, you see all the custom scales available on the site.

• Tracker: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-16431

Update 12/2/2008

It turns this is a duplicate of an existing bug, which will be fixed in Moodle 1.9.4:

• Tracker: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-15926

Authored by Kenneth Newquist. Hosted by Edublogs.
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http://knewquist.edublogs.org/2008/12/01/itunes-u-and-open-university

Open University has deployed iTunes U, Apple’s free education version of its popular iTunes Store. This post talks about the OU’s adoption of the service as well as some of its early experiences with it.

I’ll be curious to see what impact this has on iTunes U/Moodle integration. OU is a huge Moodle school, and I have to think that they would want seamless integration between the two services.

Authored by Kenneth Newquist. Hosted by Edublogs.
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http://knewquist.edublogs.org/2008/11/24/bannerluminis-message-broker

This Moodle plugin uses a heavily modified version of the IMS Enterprise plugin to integrate Moodle with Banner. I haven’t tried it yet, but one of my goals for the spring semester is to get exactly this sort of integration up and running so I plan on trying it soon.

• Banner/Luminis Message Broker Plugin for Moodle

Authored by Kenneth Newquist. Hosted by Edublogs.
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http://knewquist.edublogs.org/2008/11/18/mdl-17237-cant-edit-a-wiki-w

This bug drove me (and the instructional technologists I work with) more than a little crazy.

If you create a page in the Moodle wiki that includes a pound (#) sign, and then edit that page, Moodle truncates the page name, forking it and creating a new page.

The original page continues to display, but when you go to edit it, the new page appears. If you then save changes and return to the initial wiki page, the changes do not appear (because they were made to the truncated page, not the original one).

Add groups into the mix, and it gets even more fun. We spent a good amount of time chasing our tails before we realized what the problem was.

This bug is already documented in tracker by Dean Thayer:

• MDL-17237: Can’t edit a wiki with a # (hash, number sign, pound sign) in it’s name

Our exact case was a little more involved than this. We had people creating new pages that some how got the original text into the new page, which isn’t behavior I saw in my tests. Yet if I look at the initial page for these wiki pages, I can see that they started with the same text as the initial page, and I don’t think the students or instructor copied text over into the new page.

It’s very odd, but I think it all comes back to that blasted # sign.

Authored by Kenneth Newquist. Hosted by Edublogs.
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http://knewquist.edublogs.org/2008/11/13/slickr-and-wordpress-mu/

One of my design goals for WordPress Mu is to be able to easily support faculty and student photo galleries. One way of doing that is to go with an externally hosted solution like Flickr, and then use a plug-in to pull said photos into WordPress posts.

Slickr is a AJAX-based plug-in for WordPress that does exactly that. It looks good — check out the demo here — but there are some practical problems with it. The biggest is that it bases its galleries on Flickr albums rather than tags. This is fine, except that non-pro, free Flickr accounts are limited to three albums, while you can have an unlimited number of tags.

It’s a useful tool, especially for those who want to have a social networking tie-in to their photo galleries, but unless I pay for pro accounts for my industrial-strength users, it’s not the right solution. Instead, I’m looking at NextGen Gallery, a locally-hosted solution that simple photo galleries, slide shows, and the uploading of zipped files.

Authored by Kenneth Newquist. Hosted by Edublogs.
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http://knewquist.edublogs.org/2008/11/06/using-nagios-to-monitor-mysq

The other day I had a problem with MySQL running out of available connections, which in turn caused a large number of errors for Moodle as PHP tried to reach the database and failed. I’ve since upped the number of connections, but my colleagues and are looking at the longer-term improvement of monitoring the number active connections to MySQL using Nagios.

To that end, the college’s Linux admin found this cool article which includes a short perl script to accomplish exactly that.

• Monitor number of active connections to MySQL using Nagios

Authored by Kenneth Newquist. Hosted by Edublogs.
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http://knewquist.edublogs.org/2008/11/05/mac-firefox-3-wont-copypaste

As I alluded to yesterday, Firefox 3 on the Mac won’t accepted formatted text from other applications (most notably word). While this does mean that users don’t have to deal with the Word<->Firefox 3  extraneous code problem, also means that every document that gets cut and pasted into Firefox 3 is going to come in without any sort of formatting. This is a pain for folks who were used to this functionality in Firefox 2, and I expect that we’ll see more and more complaints about this as Firefox 3 achieves deeper penetration on campus.

There’s a report on this bug in Bugzilla; please vote for it. 

• Clipboard and drag-and-drop don’t interoperate with formatted text (e.g. HTML) on OS X

There’s also a good conversation about the issue, including possible workarounds, at MacRumors.com:

• Copy and Paste removes formatting - why?

Note that Safari on the Mac does not have this problem, but I’ve found Safari support in TinyMCE and CKEditor flaky at best (e.g. when cutting and pasting from Word into Safari using TinyMCE 2.x in Drupal, the resulting text will have random spaces removed from between words).

 

Authored by Kenneth Newquist. Hosted by Edublogs.
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http://knewquist.edublogs.org/2008/11/04/problems-with-copypaste-betw

Firefox 3 for Windows has changed the way it handles copy and pasting text from other applications, such as Word, which in turn is causing extra code to show up in posts to a variety of web apps, including Moodle, Drupal, and WordPress. Firefox 3 for Mac has its own issues (namely it won’t copy/paste rich text from Word at all).

This Moodle Tracker report offers one scenario where the problem pops up. I encountered it earlier in the semester as well, and unfortunately the best workaround I had at the time was to tell folks to use IE to do cutting and pasting if they wanted to preserve their formatting (or copy/pasting into Notepad before pasting into Firefox 3 if they didn’t.

The extra code is style data that Firefox 2 omitted, but Firefox 3 includes:

<!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal

{mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt;

mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New

Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} span.EmailStyle15

{mso-style-type:personal; mso-style-noshow:yes;

mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Arial;

mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial;

mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; color:windowtext;} @page Section1

{size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in;

mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;}

div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –> 

Digging around on the web, I found a post (”Pasting from Word in Firefox 3 Doesn’t Remove Meta/Style Tags”) that explains the problem:

The problem is due to that Firefox 3.0 is presenting itself to MS Word as a XML client and the content pasted in the editor has new format different to this one pasted in Firefox 2.0. That is why the regular expressions used by the editor’s Paste From Word filters are not stripping the new MS Word XML formatting. 

I can’t find anything in Bugzilla that speaks to this (my guess is that it would be viewed as a feature rather than a bug).  

My understanding is that there’s always extraneous code coming over from Word, but that the various WYSIWYG editors (TinyMCE, CKEditor) endeavor to strip out said code. The problem, aside from the fact that Firefox 3 has changed the way it does copy and paste, is that the editors haven’t caught up with the changes. I found posts for both editors discussing how to deal with this.

On the CKEditor site, there’s a tracker report about improving the editor itself:

• Ticket #2291: Simple copy & paste from Word document - extra code not stripped

Authored by Kenneth Newquist. Hosted by Edublogs.
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http://knewquist.edublogs.org/2008/11/04/moodle-scheduler-doesnt-deal

Scheduler, a third-parting appointment scheduling module for Moodle, doesn’t deal properly with Daylight Saving Time. Events spanning the daylight/standard time boundry appear one hour earlier in the scheduler after EDT reverts to EST.

A report for this bug is up in the Scheduler bug tracker (which is independent of Moodle’s own tracker; registration is required to view/comment on this bug)

• Scheduler doesn’t deal with Daylight Savings Time

 

Authored by Kenneth Newquist. Hosted by Edublogs.
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http://knewquist.edublogs.org/2008/11/03/the-wordpress-magazine/

WordPress Magazine is a new webzine focusing on WordPress; its inaugural issue looks at how to change the popular blogging software’s physical appearance by developing custom themes. There’s not a huge amount of content here yet, but I’ll be keeping an eye on it to see how it evolves.

Authored by Kenneth Newquist. Hosted by Edublogs.
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