General

Found on ZDNet...

I received an e-mail from someone at the GPL-violations.org group, regarding an inquiry I made about a company that might be infringing GPL with an unproper use of Dokeos. Basically they're telling me I should investigate the case with people that have previous knowledge of GPL violations case in a country where the company is established (for example the US in this case). Well, it's all very interesting, but then I sent the inquiry about a year ago... yup... one year.

In an article about "Building Respect for Usability Experts", Jakob Nielsen's explains some techniques on getting to implement usability testing to get respect from people not using usability testing and generally disregarding it. It also gives a handful of links on how to implement user testing sessions.

Firefox 3.5 just came out and, within a bunch of improvements and new stuff, we can find a geolocation implementation. What's that? Che Hodgins explains that on his blog with an example. If I had to define it in a few words, my definition would be "it's a feature that makes it possible for a website to ask your location to your browser". Now, the thing is that, obviously, many new great cell-phones have both a GPS and a browser integrated. And this means...

[caption id="attachment_548" align="aligncenter" width="149" caption="DOKUDA - Dokeos Users Days America"]

Basically, I'm not going to write all this again, but this is one more of these ugly things Microsoft does that makes me sick about them.

Note: in 2010, after several years of working with Dokeos and for multiple reasons (of which some ethical), we decided to create Chamilo on the ashes of what became the "community edition" of Dokeos. This article is maintained for historical purposes.

Today I went to the Escuelab in the centre of Lima to meet with Alberto, Kike Mayorga and Kiko Contreras. My visit was apparently taken with great interest and they've video-interviewed me for some time to talk about DOKUDA and my projects with Dokeos and the OLPC (now updated to Chamilo and the OLPC). Apparently, the idea to have Dokeos/Chamilo run on one of the XO itself was never thought about, and that seemed to be an announcement of uttermost interest to them that this *could* be done at all.

There's a funny thing happening in Lima, which I tumbled upon the other day while walking around at lunch time. Normal people in the street start to dance on their own without much reason (well, a loud music can be heard, but that's pretty much it) and then just stop (at the same time as the music stops) and just walk away like nothing happened. It all made me think of that video clip of 100 people "stopping time" in New York's Central Station at the same time. Apparently, the event, whatever this is, is happening right now and is taking momentum.

I'm currently tracing what might have been an attack on the free campus through the Apache logs... Nothing related, but then I just realized we had some OLPC visiting the free campus a while ago:

zzz.zzz.zzz.zzz - - [16/Feb/2009:11:47:55 +0100] "GET /main/forum/index.php?cidReq=GR03 HTTP/1.1" 200 6839 "http://campus.dokeos.com/courses/GR03/?id_session=0" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008072400 OLPC/0.4.6-1.olpc3 (XO) Firefox/3.0"

I guess we're going to have more of these in the near future (with one million sold worldwide as