Summer of Tech (in general known as Summer of Code, but NZ expanded it to include more disciplines) is still almost half a year away for us. To shorten the time until then and to keep students and companies involved, the Summer of Tech team organized a Hackfest today.

They brought soon-to-be graduates and mentors from IT companies together to work on small programming projects in either PHP, Perl or Ruby on Rails for 5 hours and present the results at the end.

The e-learning team from Catalyst had dispatched François Marier and Jonathan Harker to mentor students in PHP programming. François supervised 2 students who worked on developing a block for Mahara that would display updates from Twitter and Identi.ca.

Jonathan had one student as another one had dropped out with short notice. His student created a search block for Moodle to read data from a library catalog that uses Koha.

The other teams developed a Twitter ticker, a system that would build your semester schedule according to previously defined rules, a spam protector, and a 3-player pong game to be played over a network.

The students worked closely with their mentors for the entire time. Occasionally, they had a brief break for drinks, food, Ubuntu stickers, PostgreSQL blue elephant pins, baseball caps, and shirt and bag prices.

Ruth McDavitt had the organizational hat on and made sure that everything was taken care of and that everybody was happy in general.

A group of enthusiasts of the OLPC project in New Zealand meet every Saturday at the Southern Cross Bar to play with the XO, test it, record tutorials, give newbies like me their first opportunity to see an XO live, and to have a good time.

After I had spent the previous two Saturdays in Wellington with shopping for stuff for my apartment, I finally found time to go to a meeting on 10 July 2010. It was a cold day, but I found my colleague Alastair, who is a member of the group, with a bunch of XO laptops sitting outside. I was thankful for the heaters outside because otherwise our fingers would have been frozen pretty quickly.

Alastair immediately set me up with two laptops and we started with something “geeky”: upgrading an older XO model to OS300. He basically told me the commands to type in and we watched the installation process. After that was done, a couple more people had joined in and Alastair had also installed Sugar, the Linux version that runs on the XO in my virtual machine so that I can also test it without actually having an XO.

The laptop is very sturdy and spill-proof with its plastic keyboard. The keys take a bit to get used to because they are so tiny, but I could type pretty well on them after I had gotten the hang of it.

OLPC = 2 per adult

The laptop is designed so that also very young children who may not yet be able to read can use it. Therefore, the default view lacks text and the favorites are aligned in a circle around the laptop symbol. Only when you hover over a symbol do you get the name of that activity. There is also the list view that offers more information, but nevertheless, everything is kept simple and without clutter.

The coolest thing we did, at least for me first-time user, was to set up a network among a couple of the XOs and write together in a text document. The so-called mesh network does not require internet access, and it can be activated within seconds by pushing a button on the keyboard and clicking on another user’s application that they want to share. And then you simply type away. Everybody receives their distinct color in the text document, and you see immediately what the other person is typing.

Application sharing à la XO

Our youngest XO tester that day was another colleague’s daughter who is approx. 6 months old. She happily clapped on the keyboard and was keen to test how sturdy the laptop material is by trying to bite into it.

Another regular at these Saturday meetings was Tim who recorded a couple of tutorials for upgrading to the latest version of XO and for revealing some of the hidden fun features.

Click here to view the embedded video.

He recorded a tutorial on my Nikon Coolpix S3000 and I was totally impressed by the quality of the video and the audio. As I am not into recording video, I have not had the need to use the video function of this camera which I have not yet had for very long. However, if I should need to record something, I know that I have a pretty good camera with me. And with a 4 GB SD card, I don’t have to worry to run out of memory too quickly.

If you want to know more about OLPC, here are a few links:

• OLPC in general
• OLPC in New Zealand
• OLPC wiki

I recommend to get your hands on one of these small laptops to test yourself what they are capable of and how powerful they are.

Some weeks ago I decided to purchase Aperture 3 after a long time of non-decision due to bad reviews of Aperture crashing, eating photos and databases etc. Lucky for me, I had no problems importing my Aperture 2 database and photos and everything went smoothly.

I updated to Aperture 3 not necessarily to be up-to-date with the latest software, but to take advantage of some of its features. The ones very high on my list were:

• geotagging
• face recognition
• Flickr uploader

Geotagging

Up until this update, I have hardly ever geotagged my photos as the process was a bit cumbersome with an external software. It did work well, but was just not easy for the workflow. Now with “Places”, a browser view in Aperture that shows where your photos are on a map, geotagging became easy as pie. Of course, having the GPS coordinates committed to the metadata immediately upon taking the photograph would be even better, but I do not have that luxury. Thus, I go for the second best option: tagging manually.

Places works very well and you can easily see which photos you have already geotagged as they have a little red pin in the Places view.

Aperture 3: Places mode

Face recognition

At first I thought I would be finished with tagging the faces in my pictures very quickly as I hardly ever take photos with people in them (how wrong could I be?). Once I fired up the Faces browser mode, Aperture told me that it found over 10,000 (!) faces in my photos. First, I thought: Yeah, right. But then, when I saw some of the faces, it dawned on me that I indeed had a lot of photos with people in them. I just did not upload them onto Flickr. As I tend to document events like special seminars or conferences that we had organized, by default, these pictures featured mostly people.

So it took me a long while to sift through all my faces and label those that I wanted to have in my Faces browser and reject all others. As I rejected the majority of faces, Aperture was not so good in “learning faces”, but that was fine by me.

Faces is actually nothing more than a special tag for a photo with the name of the person’s face. I could have achieved something similar by tagging the photo with the name in the keyword field. However, then the name would show up as regular tag everywhere. In photos with a number of people in them, I would still not know who was who. The Faces tagging resolves that problem. In addition, I can quickly see how many photos I have of a certain person, and I only see their face in a close-up and not the entire photo. This is especially great for photos of small children. You can see their development in seconds by flipping through these close-ups.

Flickr uploader

I had hoped that the Flickr uploader that was incorporated would be FlickrExport 3 for Aperture or something similar. However, I got disappointed. The Flickr uploader merely takes photos that you have selected and creates a new album on Flickr for them. That is nice for people who start out with Flickr after purchasing Aperture, but not for all others who already have Flickr albums. The Flickr option in Aperture does not allow you to view your already existing Flickr albums and add photos to them. I learned that the hard way as I tried to upload a photo to one of my albums and another one with the same name was created in Aperture AND Flickr. In the heat of the moment, I moved the image to the already existing album and deleted the newly created one on Flickr. But alas, the album still existed in Aperture. And I can’t delete the album there. That is the only time when Aperture actually freezes me out.

Aperture still needs to do quite a bit of work on this Flickr uploader. Meanwhile, I use FlickrExport which works like a charm and does not give me headaches.

Since Camtasia for Mac came out last year, I have been using it to create screencasts. I had used different screencasting tools before buying Camtasia (Jing and IShowU), but they did not allow me to edit the screencast.

Camtasia is very easy to learn and you get the hang of editing a video quickly. I only wish that it were possible to copy shapes from one project to another. That would save time when I need the same items in multiple projects. Furthermore, the properties pane is a bit clumsy.

Nevertheless, it is a great tool to record the screen and then be able to zoom in and out to the details that are necessary to show, to add shapes and text and even have multiple video sources in one final video.

I knew that I could also record myself using my iSight camera. However, I had never tried to record both the screen and the camera at the same time always assuming that this would not be possible.

But, there is always a first time. Yesterday, we held our 6th TechLunch session. Prior to it we had decided to do away with the big DV camera for recording and instead do a screenrecording and use my colleague’s Flip camera to record me speaking to use that for the in-screen. Despite this plan, we did not have the Flip available yesterday and thus thought we would only do the screenrecording.

A few days ago I had downloaded the update for Camtasia for Mac. As my colleague, Bob Reuter, did not know the software, I showed it to him. Then he just asked: Can you also record the iSight at the same time as the screen? We just pushed the camera button and I was damned: We could record both. That of course, saved our day because now we did not need any additional camera anymore, but could record the screen and the talking head at the same time with one computer. And of course, the quality of the recording is much better than filming the video projector image. Much crisper.

I don’t know if Camtasia for Mac could already record the iSight image in version 1, but it can certainly do so in version 1.1. The editing of the recording was thus also reduced by many hours because we did not have to use Final Cut anymore to transfer the DV video to the computer and then wait endless hours for the export.

The ability to record the screen and the talking head at the same time of course makes Camtasia for Mac well-suited for recording lectures or other demonstrations where one wants to have the speaker video as well. Even if the speaker walks around, the computer could be pointed in his direction to capture him but still always also have a very clear recording of everything that goes on on the computer screen.

Click here to view the embedded video.

My first impressions of OmmWriter in video. You should watch the HD version in order to see the text.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here is the text that I typed in the video with a few added links:

Via a Twitter message by D’Arcy Norman, my attention was drawn to OmmWriter.

Having installed it, I must say that I like this slick software because it just offers you to type text. No thrills, no bells and whistles. Simply text.

As keystrokes and background music are not my thing, I can turn them off. I can also change the frosty winter landscape to a simple white to see even less on the screen.

OmmWriter forces me to separate content from layout because there are no layout options. Usually, I play with headings, bullet point and pictures. It will be interesting to see if I get jumpy from not being able to do all that or if there are also instances when I don’t need to layout.

You can actually also use OmmWriter to create audio text art when you use the music and / or the pitches of the keystrokes to convey meaning.

Clayton M. Christensen brings product improvement down to a simple statement in his presentation at the ECS National Forum on Education Policy: “Understanding the job rather than understanding the customer is the critical insight” (at about 8:30 min in the video).

His example is the buying of milk shakes. Collecting data on who buys milk shakes is not enough. A company also needs to understand why the people buy milk shakes at that particular time. In his example, people buy milk shakes before starting their long commute to have something to do while driving. Thus, the company would do good to bring the shake dispenser to the counter and equip it with a pre-paid swipe card system so that customers – who are in a hurry in the morning – can get their milk shake without having to wait in line. Customers who buy milk shakes in the afternoon will most likely have very different needs and thus the company needs to think about a different strategy to get them to buy more milk shakes.

via @ctscho

Click here to view the embedded video.

It is nice that I am reminded to renew my membership in the library by January 2, 2010. But why the heck can’t I get into the interlibrary loan form when I am already logged in? I do need to renew my membership immediately though it is not up for another 54 days. It is just “approaching”. When I called the library, the renewal was done within seconds and the friendly person from the interlibrary loan department (he’s a gem getting articles really quickly and being helpful all the time) said there was nothing I could do besides the renewal.

Expiration is approaching

Fortunately, the library did not leave a paper trail that would rival Alan’s experiences.

Oh my gosh. No comments? When I do get some, even two on one post within a really short time, I’m told I don’t have comments? Come on. That’s not fair to the commenters at all.

I will have to take a closer look at my installation over the weekend as I could not approve the comments in the dashboard but only by going into the database itself.

No comments. Really?! 1+1=0?

Since last Thursday I have picked up snippets of buzz around Google Wave and finished watching the demo video today (had kept it for my workout to have that pass more quickly ). I am just speechless and can’t wait for it to be publically available.

Wave is a new communication tool that is email, instant messenger, microblog, blog, collaborative writing tool, and some more all in one. It redefines the way online communication is done because you do not have to think about whether you want to write an email, send a Twitter message or start a chat. You just do it all in Wave.

The Wave team from Australia demonstrated so many features and extensions of Wave that your head spins (not in a particular order):

• email
• instant messenger
• embed waves into a blog
• wiki
• drag and drop photos and links
• embed videos
• spellchecker
• instant translator (I think that one got the biggest applause)
• add people to an ongoing conversation
• connect waves
• inline commenting
• collaborative gaming
• linking other services, e.g. Twitter, bug tracker, and be able to either update from within Wave or these other services
• federation: communication between different Wave installations
• playback of the development of a Wave conversation

I think the only things that are missing are audio and video chat. I could imagine audio comments to show up like text comments or have an audio conversation be recorded while working on a document.

Now, how can some of these features be used for learning and for research? The one point that jumps to mind instantly is the possibility of collaborative writing (including using visual media). You see instantly what the others type and do not have to wait until changes are committed. That is similar to EtherPad. You can add comments to a document which can be hidden or displayed which is easier to detect them and to deal with them than in Google Docs where you write them inline with the text. Parts of a current wave can be opened as a new wave to branch conversations.

When you want to research the flow of communication, for example how people interact when writing collaboratively on a document, all you have to do is hit “playback” and the wave unfolds in front of your eyes. I already liked the “playback” feature when I discovered it in the concept mapping software CmapTools. Even though I have not used it yet beyond testing purposes, it has a ton of potential if you are involved in that kind of research because you do not need an additional program to record what has been done, but you can have all actions recorded automatically.

Another great thing about Wave is that it can run on any server and does not have to sit on a Google server. The GUI is also changeable. This is great news because Google is often accused of listening in on conversations, using it all to their own benefit. When the Wave runs on a server different from the Google one, there is no information exchange. However, Wave communications can take place across different servers so that Wave users do not necessarily have to create accounts on all Waves. They then form a federation. According to the developers, only the content that is meant for the Wave users across the systems will be sent to the federation Waves. If a private comment is made between two users of one Wave, the other server does not see that comment at all. That makes Wave attractive to companies, institutions etc. that want to use it, but do not want to put their communication and documents out there on a Google server for confidentiality reasons.

The demo made it all look so simple, but the Wave team spent two years on getting this far and they have pooled resources from other Google programming teams. Google opened the code and invited programmers to get busy on extensions and gadgets for Google Wave to make it more powerful even before the official launch. Let’s see when the Wave will hit our keyboards.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Update: Mashable has a great resource page which they call “Google Wave: A Complete Guide”. There you get all the information that is currently available.

While watching “Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009″ on YouTube, I saw two new buttons to the top right of the video. They allow you to dim the lights on the page and to open the video in a separate window.

YouTube's new features

The result is that all the noise is either turned off by the light dimmer or not shown when you open the video in a new window.

Reducing the noise

Having the lights dimmed around online videos is nothing new. A lot of services do that. On Reddit I read that this feature has been around for some months. I did check a few other videos, but did not see the features there. I got the impression, that only Google videos had these added possibilities.

Sure, there is a light bulb beneath all videos with which you can turn the entire screen either darker or completely dark. However, the video is darkened as well which the dimming feature does not do. It only blocks out the noise.

I like to dim the background because if the quality of the video is not sufficient to blow it up to fill the screen, I can still focus on the video only and not be distracted by all the other things around it.