Moodle

Moodle is a free, OpenSource course management system for online learning.
Yesterday at the Löss seminar at my school I heard about the project for the first time.
(For some reason I always mentally picture a noodle eating cow when hearing the name "Moodle", probably just me.)

At my school (Hogeschool Zuyd) we have a semilar system called Blackboard which is propriatary software. The seminar yesterday got me interested and so I went on a journey today to see what this OpenSource alternative had to offer. Mainly because teachers as well as students at my school are often complaining about Blackboard.

And WOW, does this "noodle eating cow" look great. I have only played with the online demo for an hour now. After that the demo was resetted. Lucky for me I made a backup of the created course and could easily restore it after the reset. I loved what I saw, great functionality. A clean and clear interface, which however could be improved on some minor points I discovered during this one hour session.

After a while I discovered it is translated in Dutch (and many other languages for that matter) too. This is surely a great topic to make and hold a presentation about at our school one day on behalf of the HSZLUUG.

I will keep you updated on the subject.

(Thanks go out to the Löss for letting me know about this project and for letting me participate in the seminar for free.)

Driver's Seat

Yesterday (2006-03-24) I succeeded for my drivers licence, or in Dutch 'rijbewijs'.

So be carefull on the roads ;)

Big day countdown.

Exactly two months to go.

Details will follow shortly.

Pomme & Kelly

I was just working at school with Dennis Laumen and we took a 10 minute break.

It was a good idea to surf to Google Videos, we found the videos of Pomme & Kelly. They are like the Chinese Backstreet Boys:

only difference, they're girls and apparently Dutch.

This is the video we found, it's a lipsync of Aretha Franklin - Respect:


It even seems there is a complete online Idols version, where you can link your own made musicvideo and compete with others.

Don't you just love the internet.

Sunglasses at night

After using my old hackergotchi for half a year now I finally decided to change it to a new more fashionable one.

I am not sure yet if it is more Corey Hart style or more Benjamin Mako Hill style, oh well what does it matter anyway, behold...

The old one:


The new one:


What a difference.

Wallpaper payback

A friend of mine (Collin van Banning) downloaded the Breezy Live CD about half a year ago and was really enthousiastic. First thing I did the coming weekend was install Ubuntu on his laptop. Needed some additional memory which I got from another Ubuntu-NL member (thanks again Hein-Pieter). Since that weekend, he started to love Ubuntu more and more, and is now even handing out Live CDs to other people.

That same friend made a picture on his vacation to Switserland in December 2005, which I liked so much I have had it as a desktop wallpaper ever since. So I decided to ask him for releasing this picture under the Creative Commons, he agreed on the idea, I edited the picture where needed and uploaded it to art.gnome.org.
It got accepted last night and is now an official art.gnome.org wallpaper.

An easy and good way for people to contribute without posting bugreports or coding.

PHP Object Generator

Just found this nice generator.

Generator

One who, or that which, generates, begets, causes, or produces.

By Wiktionary

Well it produces things, automatically, which is always a good thing for us lazy Software Engineers. The following is said on their website:

By generating PHP objects with integrated CRUD methods, POG gives you a head start in any project. The time you save can be spent on more interesting areas of your project.

I just tested it, and it looks really cool and timesaving.

Bravo Tango

When I saw the new iconset in Ubuntu the orange Tango one as seen at Jeff Waugh's Blogpost, I was in doubt. It looks really good, but than again, it isn't really that Gnome HIG compliant.

So I posted this issue as a bug, not to really report it as a bug but more to get some clarification on the subject.
And well I got it, from the Dictator himself.

The bugreport can be found at launchpad.

Reactie op DRM lied van Dennis Kaarsemaker

Wil ik bij deze even reageren op de blogpost van Dennis Kaarsemaker daar hij geen reactie mogelijkheid heeft op zijn eigen blog.

Pure genialiteit!
Leuk vooral als je even het nummer opzet om de melodie te pakken te krijgen.
Vervolgens hardop met je hoofdtelefoon op begint te zingen met de lyrics voor je
op planet.ubuntu-nl.org.
Even stopt om te horen dat je zusje zegt: "Wat je nu zingt klopt helemaal niet."

Ik denk dat we nog maar eens een Ubuntu-NL meeting moeten houden, en dan maar meteen de nieuwe versie van je grote DRM lied opnemen.

Schitterend.

Congratulations Wikipedia

1 Million articles on Wikipedia, congratulations.

Vliegenmeppers en metrosexuele eenden

I just ran the new Ubuntu 6.04 Dapper Drake (Flight 4) Live CD.
It looks really promising, all kinds of cool new things, and although I can't test this really because I am using a Live CD, it does feel a lot faster.

Using an alpha assures you will run upon a few bugs, I found 7 this evening, mostly small ones, and reported them all using Launchpad - Malone.

Maybe I will test my XS4All VOIP tomorrow with Ekiga, (Treenaks get ready for some questions ;)).

What details are for

Todat I received a new kernel image through the Ubuntu updater.
I expanded the Details to read a bit more about it, and this is
what I saw:

Version 2.6.12-10.28:

"MOMMY MOMMY! Soyuz eated my previous upload!! MOMMYYYYY!!!!!"

aka: "The let reupload 10.27 and hope.."

You just got to love it.

Tux Tax

We can't make it more fun, but we can make it easier.

As the slogan of the Dutch tax collectors office goes.
They really gave that slogan some strength.

Behold: http://www.belastingdienst.nl/download/1122.html

Maybe a little too late, but hey, they made a Linux app.

Belastingdienst we love you.

NTFS write support

Well I just came home from the Irish Pub where I went for a drink with two friends. And like every geek I always check my comp before going to sleep and check the familiar newspages.
And I read about the release of the new 2.6.15 kernel. Skipping through the list of major changes I read the following.

NTFS write support: NTFS finally implements write support so "vim /ntfs/foo.txt" works. You can write(2) to a file even beyond the end of the existing file. Resident non-resident files and are supported. Sparse files can also be written and holes will be filed appropriately. truncate(2), ftruncate(2) and open(2) with O_TRUNC flag also works. There're some limitations with heavily fragmented files which you won't be allowed to change. Also, notice that creation/deletion of files and directories is still not supported and mmap(2) based writes is still not complete (commit)

"Well hooray that looks promising." was what I thought.

I'm pickin' up good intentions

Happy new year everybody.
I just wanted to wish you all the best for 2006 and let you know I am still alive.

Normally I don't have any good intentions for the upcoming year, but well I must admit I couldn't elude from the one I made for 2006.
Which is of course to Blog a little bit more.
And I'll promise you the last week of December has enough things to blog about. So stay tuned :)

Cheers...

Get Internet Explorer

As you might all know the website GetFirefox there is another "browser" ;) called Internet Explorer. It too has a website GetInternetExplorer. Go and read all about it.

Funny.....

(Update: the "browser" even has a community, I thought MS didn't do these.)

The bird has landed

Finally OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been released.
Go and download at http://www.openoffice.org/

Open the fridge and feel the Breezy

Finally, it is October the 13th, which means that today the new release of Ubuntu Linux is there.
Version 5.10 codenamed Breezy Badger has finally arrived.


Yesterday some people of Ubuntu opened the Fridge, "Got something to report?" "Stick it on the fridge."

I am sorry for this short post, but my Ubuntu Linux CD has just finished burning, so I am heading for an install, I'll keep you informed.

(A picture of my fridge will follow when my sister returns from Rome and brings the digital camera back.)

OpenOffice.org into the water

I just read an announcement on OSNews.com linking to an article telling us that the OpenOffice.org team has decided to develope a port of their great office suite for Apple Mac OS X.
This is great news, now Macintosh users finally have a good alternative to Microsoft Office for the Mac and AppleWorks.
NeoOffice.org already took a shot at this goal with NeoOffice/J based on the old OpenOffice.org 1.x series, but seeing the OpenOffice.org developers giving a shot at it, is a bright perspective. If I understood it correctly it will look like the average ordinary Aqua application, which is a real improvement compared to NeoOffice/J which was only partially Aqua style.

Keep up the good work OOo.

CPUs designed for Operating Systems

That Linux and MS Windows are two opposites most of you will already know. When downloading a Linux distro one can choose between multiple CPU compiles, one for x86 CPUs, one for 64bit CPUs, one for PowerPC CPUs and probably a few others.
This is because different CPUs have different instruction sets and the Operating System needs to be compiled the right way to use these instruction sets.

Now what if we could turn this concept around and design the CPUs so they have the instruction sets the Operating Systems want? Sounds strange doesn't it.
Well let me tell you it does exist apparently. I received an old Compaq PC from a neighboor, he didn't need anymore and he knew I could probably use some parts, so he donated it to me. I was getting all the still useful parts out of it, floppy disk drive, cd-rom drive, sd-ram, cables, etc.
The CPU was passively cooled and had a nice heatsink, which a friend of mine was looking for for some time, so I decided to pull it of the CPU. And there it was a nice AMD-K6 looking me right in the eyes.

Nothing special about that, but when I examined the CPU a bit better after disposing it of the coolpaste I noticed something very strange. This CPU was designed for a specific Operating System, apparently AMD designed these CPUs for a specific Operating System.