General

As I was looking into reducing the size of a video, I felt upon this wiki page, which proved super-useful:

HOWTO Convert video files

Note: As commented by one reader, xvid is not really divx though, but changing the title and the url of my post 6 months later would just add to the confusion. Sorry about that, I wasn't meaning to confuse anyone, and I thought in good fait it was the same (the results are the same for me though: very high volume loss for very little quality loss).

It might seem kind of weird to mention it, but I had somewhat of a big scare when Secunia sent us an e-mail entitled "Security Patches in Dokeos 1.8.5". If my fears had been right, it would have meant that we would have needed to re-package 1.8.5 only two days after the official release.

[digg=http://digg.com/tech_news/Dokeos_1_8_5_released] Dokeos 1.8.5 has been released, after a long 8 months development! Check it out on http://www.dokeos.com/download.php There's a lot to say, so I won't comment about the release itself in this post. You can find out more about this release and what it brings you on the official website, by following the link on the right panel. We are sorry to have kept you waiting for so long for a new version, but we're sure you'll understand why when using it!

It's still a bit premature because we'd like to try it out a few times more before officially announcing it on the website, so if you want to help, feel free to download your version from here: http://www.dokeos.com/download/dokeos-1.8.5.zip In a few hours from now we will make the official announcement, so the official release date will be the 12th of June anyway. If you happen to witness some wierd thing in the install or upgrade procedure, please, let me know as soon as possible! Otherwise, just enj

Wouldn't you know...

[digg=http://digg.com/programming/Dokeos_1_8_5_Beta_2_Released] Alright, so I did release a little brother for Dokeos 1.8.5 Beta today.

As Jesús Castagnetto was presenting a long talk on how to improve one's PHP coding practices, I decided that the event was worthwile and went a little earlier to follow Diego's presentation on GNOME and Fernando's presentation on Drupal (although these two were of little interest to me, I still learnt a bit from both). Diego was presenting GNOME 2.24 (if I remember well) but for some reason (I got there several minutes after he started) he didn't have internet access, which seemed to prevent him from showing what he wanted.

I've already touched the topic slightly earlier, and there is a nice Dokeos 1.8.5 page in the tabs above that give a global idea, but Dokeos 1.8.5 comes packed with a lot of tiny but practical new features, and tiny but practical improvements. Some of the things we are working on at the moment are listed below

Regional Managers and Human Resources Managers

It's been a repeated complaint among our users that the flexibility of Dokeos roles was not complete enough for medium to large-size companies.

I'm back on track now and preparing Dokeos 1.8.5 which release has officially been announced for 19th of April 2008 in the March Newsletter. As usual, there will be a Beta and possibly some Release Candidates one and two weeks before that. We are trying to release a beta next week, I will keep you updated here. Note that an alpha version with many bugs has already been released internally, and we are submitting the last bugfixes at the moment, but we still have one or two new features to integrate before the beta, which is what is going to take the most time.

I´m currently on holiday in the Galapagos Islands (for 3 more days). The weather is excellent and the local wildlife is just as expected, wonderful. If anybody wants to contact me here about Dokeos, I´m in Puerto Ayora, hostal Los Amigos, room 1. A few pictures, in no particular order...