SPIRAGRAM

My First post..

Our first company meeting in the new office :) It's probably the first for some of you.For those who were back with me in Ocean Towers, the month end company meeting with free food will probably bring back some memories. The only difference now will probably be that we are speaking up more. haha.

It has been a while since we heard about vision, the company direction and the new opportunity in the market. As boss speak, I can see some "excitement" in some of us.. I guess all of us like the feeling of looking foward to good things coming our way.

I will vote for more sessions like yesterday. More sharing of ideas, concerns, etc.. I am sure there are alot of things we can learn from each other... Any supporters? Spiragrammers...  :)

A Proposed Open Source Sandbox

<Note: this entry is still being edited>

I am starting this entry to document the installation procedures to get a good-enough installation on my laptop for the open source stack that we talked about. Please give me your comments or components which I might have missed out. For a start, here's a list of things (hopefully in that order) I wanted to install, including a short blurp on why I wanted to install them:

1. MySQL
2. Apache HTTP - webserver
3. PHP - a good number of web-apps out there uses PHP
4. Drupal - an emerging CMS that is great for building online communities
5. Jakarta Tomcat - Servlet container
6. Apache Cocoon - a component-based web development frameworka
7. Apache Lenya - a CMS suited for managing corporate websites
8. Apache Lucene - search engine
9. Apache Portals Jetspeed 2 - enterprise portal
10. ...

Multiple Outlook Instances?

I just reinstalled onto a new laptop when I discovered this. Note that this probably only happens when you use Microsoft Outlook and SpamBayes (a spam filtering add-in). In any case, you can do this to see if you would also have the same problem:

1. Quit Outlook.
2. Open "Task Manager" and see if the OUTLOOK.EXE process is still around.
3. If it is, launch and quit Outlook again and see if you now have 2 OUTLOOK.EXE processes.

As you can tell by now, the problem will keep taking up your precious memory and when its low enough, you'd start paging and the entire system will be slow.

The problem is caused by Outlook not being able to quit normally under certain circumstances.

The solution is to download and install another Add-in that terminates the Outlook process properly upon exit. You can find this at Dave's Website, and its called Shutdown Add-in.

Cheers!
Shoop

Researching on LCMS

Here a list of interesting links and research I've collated today.

• OLAT
  Open Learning And Training (OLAT) is a open source web-based Learning Management System (LMS) / Learning Content Management System (LCMS) used in the public sector of Switzerland. Currently version 3.2. 100% Java, runs on Tomcat and MySQL. Assessment is based on IMS QTI 2.0 specifications.
  Note: Not Scorm-compliant.
• ILIAS
  An open source (GPL) web-based learning management system developed by the University of Cologne (Germany). Based on Apache HTTP, PHP and MySQL. Version 3.4. Comforms to SCORM 1.2.
• Moodle
  Open source Course Management System (CMS) based on Apache,PHP and MySQL. It is designed based on a particular philosophy of learning known as "social constructionist pedagogy" (see here for an in-depth discussion).

If you are keen to start getting to know more about learning and IT, here are a couple of starting points:

• Wikipedia's entry on E-Learning
• www.elearnspace.org
• EduCause Review
• Theory and Practice of Online Learning is a good book to get you started on the practicalities of designing an online learning system. The best part is that it's free and comes in a 1.8MB PDF!

Calling on Day 1 of the Week?

Just got a call from the MD of the Hwa Chong Institution (HCI) with a request to look into developing a Learning Portal for the new school. Not just any Learning Portal but one that is based on open source and hence can be economically deployed to the school's franchisees all over Asia, with Jakarta and China next on the list.

Though I have espoused with a colleague a couple of weeks back on how CMS is a better fit for us than LMS, with HCI as a platform, it will seem plausible for us to investigate this opportunity.

First, I'd have to read up on LMS's.

If you are keen too, here's a good start - What is a LMS?

"Eadem mutato resurgo"

This is the phrase that inspired the name "Spiragram".

It started when I was speed-reading all of Dan Brown's novels over a period of 4 weekends, second of which was his most controversial, "The Da Vinci Code". This was the first time I came across the Divine Proportion or phi. This spilled over to "The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number" by Mario Livio.

To me, the most wonderful attribute of phi is its representation as spirals, moving outwards in a virtuous cycle in equi-angular turns, creating a pattern that is self-similar.

To Jacob Benoulli (16454-1705), an accomplished mathematician, the Golden Ratio was a symbol of resurrection and hence, the engravings on his tombstone comprised of the diagram of the spiral and the words "Eadem mutato resurgo", meaning "Though changed I shall arise the same".

I've decided to name the new company "Spiragram" in very much the same spirit. Spiragram is the resurrected entity of Aretae. In the past, we've done many things - some right, others wrong. Perhaps we were too caught up with the burden of everyday affairs, and too many a times, letting them cloud our judgement and ability to enjoy the journey. With Spiragram, I hope we can see what is right with better lenses and even though we are still in the same industry, we will all arise changed and enjoy this part II of a journey :)

Cheers!
Shoop