Chamilo 1.8.7 to manage timezones

Well, it was rather a low priority task (due to its possible difficulty), but it has been advancing so well in just two days that I think I can already make a little preview on this... First of all, I'd like to officially welcome Guillaume Viguier-Just, who joined forces with us just yesterday. Guillaume has a considerable PHP development experience, so it's been pretty easy for me to give him a few basic tasks in Chamilo and it's apparently been pretty easy for him to honor them.

Sakai tricky to install from normal Linux distribution

We have a student working for us on comparisons between various LMSes here, and we recently moved on to Sakai. We've been looking a bit at installing it on an Ubuntu 9.04 and boy... is this a challenge. While there seems to be a few sources of documentation around the web (including on the Sakai website itself) on how to install it, they're all giving a 20 pages-long guide on how to install a specific version of Java (from sources), a specific version of Tomcat (from sources) and a specific version of Sakai (from sources as well).

Blackboard Popularity Chronicles - Part 2

Although not directly related to Blackboard's *popularity* per se, the open letter to Blackboard's CEO by Desire2Learn's CEO is just one of the things I just have to note down for further reference... http://www.desire2learn.com/Million/ I haven't tracked the thing itself, so I don't know what happened next, but that's a pretty nice letter, I would say. For the sake of information preservation, I am copy-pasting the contents of this link here, because I recently had a case of permanently loosing a link and it's just one of these upsetting s