General

Sometimes I like to treat this blog as a personal one and write down things that might affect in fundamental ways our future... or at least my own future, potentially. Anyway, I'm currently living in Peru and had a series of meeting over the last two months with the new Electronical Government Office (ONGEI).

Migrations on production systems is one of the most complex thing there is in the field of software because it requires all-in-one system administration, database administration, software development and quality management, each at a high level of skill. We generally delegate  a certain level of quality management to the customer (because they're most qualified in telling us what's wrong) but all the other aspects have to be dealt with, without the smallest mistake, otherwise you don't get a running system in the end.

In just three weeks since the announcement of the split between Dokeos and Chamilo, Chamilo has already received support from many organizations and independents that seem to have thought alike for a long time.

I started using InPhonex, a VoIP provider for individual customers, about 2 years ago because I needed a professional phone number in Lima, Perú, and there were very little providers for this kind of number at the time. During the first 6 months, I had disconnect problems almost every week. While discussing with InPhonex support, it appeared they changed their codec, then something was supposedly wrong with my internet line (I had another IP line from Belgium working just fine on the same phone, same internet connexion).

Starting 1st of January 2010, BeezNest Latino, formerly known as Dokeos Latinoamérica, will join efforts with BeezNest Belgium to provide its customers with a wider set of products and services, as well as regular support in Spanish.

I'm stealing a post from Marie here, to remind myself of a great list of resources linked to Freemind, that allow for extending the use of the tool: http://www.mindmeister.com/33158470/100-ressources-autour-de-freemind No time to analyse now, but I will surely need that in the future.

Today I found Loop11.com (through a job advert in the Australian Web Standards Group mailing), an interesting site allowing for user testing (for $350) of your site for up to 1000 users. The application puts a JavaScript layer on top of your website and requires you to define tasks for your users to complete (without documentation, of course).

I can't resist posting a link to this blog post :-)  Takes around 1 minute to read it all... Great effort from the author. Comparative installation of simple cards game under Ubuntu and under Windows.