Flash 10 Beta 2 for Linux will support V4L2

Wow... this is great news for us. Mike Melanson, the developer of the Linux version of the Flash plugin, just announced on his blog that Flash plugin 10 beta 2 will start supporting V4L2! For Dokeos, this means that we will now be able to use the video recording of our little webcams directly from Linux. This is probably the great news of the day...

2008-10-11 update

I'm just finishing an hour of testing here.

Upgrading campus.dokeos.com to 1.8.5

Tonight I'm upgrading campus.dokeos.com to dokeos 1.8.5. One of the things that is difficult to put in a human mind is the number of users and courses on this portal and the implication it has on upgrade time. Over the last 5 days, 600 new users have registered on this portal, which made it pass the 200K users for the very first time. The portal still works nicely. It's now on a single cuad-core server, but it used to work on a Pentium 4 for 125K users. That's the beauty of Dokeos. However, upgrades to newer versions are always a difficult task.

End of July update on Dokeos development

I thought I'll write a short update on what we are doing at Dokeos at the moment, so you don't think we're just sleeping through the summer holidays... Eric and Julian, of the French team, are currently working on a project for a specific hospital management school in France, and on a large and long-time review project before the migration of portals to version 1.8.5 for an important Belgian client.

Canonical, Microsoft and Apple

Just wanted to highlight a post I randomly found and that is interesting and is from the blog of someone (I don't know whom exactly) obviously close to Ubuntu (the blog is full of articles and links to Ubuntu). http://jonreagan.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/canonical-microsoft-and-apple/ It makes me think we should really get Dokeos packed up for Ubuntu (or at least Edubuntu) as we're really starting to have something good here...

Don't let yourself get blocked by memory problems

There are a few shortcomings with PHP5, but not so many. One of them, though, is that memory limits are a bit tricky to handle. We don't handle them very well in Dokeos either, so the results of experiencing a memory limit in Dokeos is this: Yes, nothing. That's generally what you would end up with. So if you want to make sure Dokeos can handle pretty much every kind of thing you would want it to do, you would be wise to put a memory limit of at least 8MB in your php.ini file.

So, what's so good about Dokeos videoconference?

I'm often faced (locally) to the question about our videoconference tool... It is true that a lot of videoconference tools have appeared recently, even in Open-Source, so we don't really have a unique marketing argument to defend it. The initial idea behind the videoconference was that, at a time where DimDim and other videoconference tool were still closed-source or didn't even exist (in mid-2006, that is), we wanted to offer a videoconference tool as a complementary tool for Dokeos, so we asked Sebastian Wagner, a German developer, to do this for us.