Introduction: the requirements

A customer of ours wanted a website which could manage the integration of just about any external content (meaning video, audio, images, but also Google docs, slides from Slideshare and books from Scribd) in a 'Resource' content type.

We've had a lot of teachers ask us for streaming capabilities and, over time, we've grown tired of setting up videoconference servers for a few bucks a month because teachers just can't afford the budget. While there are many tools around to do video streaming or classroom conferences, most of the operations to set them up seem to be a pain in the neck for most people desperately wanting to benefit from these features, and while Chamilo is preparing its first tests with BigBlueButton as a free, open-source videoconference classroom environment, this might still take a while to come out so I t

Today I just saw one of the most beautiful examples of what our efforts (as a community of free software, standards, formats and knowledge evangelists) are all leading to. In short, I'm talking about the Wikipedia page in English for the OGG standard, which I'm publishing a capture of below.

As we are closing in on the first Alpha release of Chamilo, we can already see the first glance of the large e-learning machine being built here. In only 3 months, we'll have passed from a first, timid, release of Chamilo 1.8.6.2, to a much more stable and complete 1.8.7. In order to improve it, we have listened to our users.

Disclaimer: this article does not pretend to be a complete picture of using swap on UNIX. Most of the time, recent GNU/Linux distributions insist on creating a swap area. Swap is generally used to temporarily store memory used by running(/sleeping) applications, but might as well be used to store a copy of RAM to disk for hibernation.

GNU/Linux supports swapping to a file on any filesystem, with reasonable performance impact since kernel 2.4.

I've been looking around for nice ways to build mindmaps that would not require nor Java nor Flash widgets to display them in a navigator.

I had a problem with a very old Compaq PC not detecting the keyboard anymore. I used the PC as a local server, not a real problem, except that the BIOS didn't allow the PC to boot when the keyboard was not plugged in. One solution there might have been to use some USB keyboard (I didn't get a chance to try that - didn't have any USB keyboard lying around). Luckily enough, I happened to have a clone of this computer, so I just swapped the disks from one PC to the other, and booted.