Chamilo P@rty 2010, a success

The 7th of July of 2010 will definitely be a date to remember for the Latin American community of Chamilo. Chamilo P@rty only lasted 2h30, yet we had time to
  • discuss open-source tools to manage the education process (by Yannick Warnier, Director, BeezNest) [slides]
  • present the challenges we face everyday in e-learning (by Sergio Correa, Director, NO2) [slides]
  • explain the Chamilo association and the developm

PHP Day Lima 2009 – Retrospective

Before I forget all about it, I want to make a note of what happened, what was good and what could be improved for the PHP Day event we organized jointly with Mobile Bridges, another software development company in Lima. The schedule was the following (translated to English for the purpose of this article):
  • 5.00-5.10pm: Welcome words
  • 5.10-6.00pm: High availability, efficiency, efficacy and interoperability in PHP - Humberto Bejarano, RPP
  • 6.00-6.50pm: Flash with PHP - Alexander Quevedo, Mobile Bridges
  • 6.50-7.40pm: Increasing the coverage of PHP solutions i

Boys with toys...

I'm always surprised at what horrible things web developers can actually do in their work just to use AJAX stuff. I won't hurt anyone because there would be many useless deaths, but guys... use your head! A user wants interfaces to look nice, but not to hide the whole screen while reloading a single block (where's the point of using AJAX?), and they don't want to have to click on every single element to extend it just to be able to see data, either.

OLPC project, Escuelab and Dokeos/Chamilo

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.

Dokeos Latinoamérica (now BeezNest) lended 6 XO for Dokeos-XO integration

Quickly, because I'm a little out of free time right now, we've been lended 6 XO green laptops for 24 months, fo a project we intend to start shortly on a Dokeos-XO integration work. More details: I'm very happy about that and I can't wait to finally be able to wo

Giving PHP training as a means of recruitment

It's been a while since the idea first came to me, but yesterday we managed, with a bunch of acquaintances, to setup the basic structure so, starting 23rd of May, I'll be giving an 80-hours long specialized PHP course to 10 pre-selected candidates from Perú, in order for them to prepare for the Zend PHP Certification and for me to spot the good ones and give them a job right away. The training will not be very expensive, but we will put a psychological entry test and will ask for a bunch of important prerequisites. I'm used to give the training as I just ended up a 3-months training for my e