General

http://www.develop-one.net/blog/2008/08/27/HugADeveloper.aspx So realistic...

Following my article on SCORM 2.0 White Paper call, and the kind personal invitation to contribute from Mike Rustici, I decided to go ahead and submit my list of suggestions to the SCORM 2.0 thinking process team just before the deadline (I've been quite busy on other stuff, including urgent personal matters). This is the first time ever that Dokeos contributes somehow (even though it's a very little piece of the enormous puzzle) to the design of an e-learning standard.

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.

There's a nice comparative study (if I get it right, it's based on analysis a few months back) between e-learning solutions here. The nice thing is it offers a cute chart of 4 axis of analysis, by an external company, so this is more likely to be a neutral result. No mention of Blackboard though...

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...

Although not very reliable per se, the following article, written in 2006, has an interesting set of comments (part by me) about statistics about Moodle, Blackboard/WebCT and Sakai, and Dokeos of course. http://zacker.org/higher-ed-lms-market-penetration-moodle-vs-blackboard-vs-sakai

I was playing around a little bit with a code metrics tool on the Ohloh website and, although I'm sure there's some kind of arguable element there as some included libraries add a lot of "noise" in code contributions, I was happily surprised to see that Dokeos isn't doing bad at all and is starting to get back at Moodle, in terms of code, contributors and global activity.

In case it would be of any interest to you, I am currently developing a kind of "branch" of Dokeos (although nothing legally-binding about the branch stuff) in Latin America, and more specifically in Peru. Peru is still what I would call a developing country, so at the same time it is hard to get used to (living there) and possibly excellent for future business opportunities.

I wanted to write this post for two reasons:

1. to remind everybody that we (the Dokeos company) continue to vaguely support this mode because we understand it is still more practical when installing it on a free/cheap hosting server
2. to help you avoid the tricky issue in the installation process when deciding which main db name to use

As the first point is pretty much complete, I'll go straight to the second point. In the Dokeos installation process, the database configuration screen asks you for a prefix and a database name.

There's some new stuff on the net in terms of code analysis.