Canonical, Microsoft and Apple

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...

Don't let yourself get blocked by memory problems

There are a few shortcomings with PHP5, but not so many. One of them, though, is that memory limits are a bit tricky to handle. We don't handle them very well in Dokeos either, so the results of experiencing a memory limit in Dokeos is this: Yes, nothing. That's generally what you would end up with. So if you want to make sure Dokeos can handle pretty much every kind of thing you would want it to do, you would be wise to put a memory limit of at least 8MB in your php.ini file.

So, what's so good about Dokeos videoconference?

I'm often faced (locally) to the question about our videoconference tool... It is true that a lot of videoconference tools have appeared recently, even in Open-Source, so we don't really have a unique marketing argument to defend it. The initial idea behind the videoconference was that, at a time where DimDim and other videoconference tool were still closed-source or didn't even exist (in mid-2006, that is), we wanted to offer a videoconference tool as a complementary tool for Dokeos, so we asked Sebastian Wagner, a German developer, to do this for us.

Surprisingly good position in Dokeos-Moodle-ILIAS comparison

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.

Howto make the Dokeos footer float

I don't know about you, but I really don't like the Dokeos footer moving around the screen when there's less content. Luckily, CSS offer an easy way to change this. Let's say I want to update the css/dokeos_classic/ theme. The rule, as always, is to make a copy of the directory that is the closest to what I want, and only work on a copy, so I'm going to do that.

Preparing Dokeos 1.8.5 RC1

Next week, we will be releasing an RC1 for Dokeos 1.8.5. The main targets for this version are:
  • fixing SCORM (import, export and reporting)
  • fixing audio recorder and some videoconference minor bugs
  • improving the templating system
  • adding repetitive events to the agenda (and iCal import, as well)
I'm quite annoyed because I will have to update the database structure to allow for repetitive events, but we're still before RC1 so it is still an "acceptable" change, and apparently it's been said it would be in 1.8.5, so...