Archive for September, 2006

Thanks to Patrick Moon of HumLug (Humboldt Linux Users Group) for providing a link to Lawrence Lessig’s recent presentation at LinuxWorld. Patrick showed the presentation at last night’s HumLug meeting, but for those of us who could not attend, here it is.

Lessig is a law professor at Stanford and one of the driving forces behind Creative Commons, an alternative approach to current copyright law. This talk is about open everything, open source software, open culture, open network architecture. That means it touches on a lot of topics crucial to anyone interested in our global dialog that the Internet offers. This includes copyright issues, network neutrality (he provides a succint and easily understood explanation of this issue if you would like to understand it), broadband as a municipal infrastructure, wireless mesh networks including municipal wireless projects.

Did I get enough buzzwords in there? Don’t be intimidated. He explains it all in very clear terms. And, he uses, his famous style that has become all the rage in geeky presentations. This is a must see! Thanks for the link, Patrick.

The last few weeks have seen a few dust ups on the discussion mailing list hosted by the Redwood Technology Consortium. In case you were not aware, I am President of the Board of the RTC at the moment. That’s my disclaimer.
There seems to be two themes being discussed in sudden bursts of postings in a normally rather complacent list. Some people are questioning the focus of the organization, what programs it offers, where it directs its efforts. I think this is a valid topic. However, inevitably, once the discussion evolves in to asking people to make concrete suggestions, or to offer to volunteer some effort, the discussion quickly dissipate back in to lassitude. It’s easy to criticize, much harder to come up with creative solutions and harder still to commit to do some real work. But this has been the cycle of the organization for many years. It’s not really surprising.

The other thread that keeps popping up has to do with the list itself. Every time someone posts a message that provokes one or more responses, someone raises the odd idea that discussions shouldn’t be taking place on the list! Instead of ignoring or deleting the posts, or better yet, unsubscribing, they clutter the list with complaints about the clutter on the list. I’m not sure why this is.

I suppose some people would prefer these kinds of discussions be held in a forum. Maybe we’ll install a forum again. We had one on the old site. We left it out of the new site because the old forum was hardly ever used.  Another option would be to offer an announcement only list. But I’,m not sure I want to administer another list.

In either case, if you would like to participate in this discussion, you can join the list. In spite of the complaints, even with these more frequent posts, messages only number around 5 per day. Not very high volume. You don’t have to be a member of RTC and you could affect a number of tech related issues that affect the county and the entire region. You can even receive the list in digest form so you get the whole day’s group of messages in one easily dealt with email.
The other

Now that the school year is in full swing, I thought I would write about Eureka City Schools PowerSchool program. PowerSchool is a communication system that allows students, teachers and parents to stay informed through the web and email. PowerSchool was originally developed by Apple, but is now being developed by a company called Pearson Education.

We have a daughter at Winship Middle School so have been using the system for a couple years and have found it really useful. Each Monday we get an email notice of events at the school. We also receive a summary update on our daughter’s progress in each class, if her lunch account needs more cash and other good information. The amount of detail and frequency of the email reports can be adjusted.

We can also login to her account on the web and get detailed information on assignments missed or late, and can email any of her teachers. If you area an iCal user you or your child can sync classroom calendars with your iCal. You can do the same with the general school event calendar.
Of course, none of this is a substitute for having real conversations with your child. But it certainly promotes clarity in conversations when all the facts are available to everyone. With everyone leading such busy lives, the availability of this information in a convenient form actually increases our involvement in our daughter’s school and progress.
While the warning says not all teachers are thoroughly up to speed on the system, we have had very good results. I imagine the more parents use the system the more teachers will need to participate.

I don’t know if other local school systems have the same or similar program, but Eureka City Schools should be congratulated for making this available. If you have a child in a Eureka City School and have Internet access, you really should take advantage of this handy tool.

CNet has an article that indicates the telecommunications bill pending in the U.S. Senate that has provisions in it to protect network neutrality (the idea that ISPs like AT&T should not be allowed to charge content providers extra fees to  prioritize  carriage of  certain content over others) is stalled in committee. With time running down for this year’s session, it seems unlikely the controversial bill will make progress. This means at the moment, there are no restrictions against the tiered Internet.

The whole arguement will start up again in the next Congress I’m sure.

HumGuide has received a slew of new sites for candidates in the November election. You can see the latest additions on the What’s New page. Or you can see what’s in the whole category here. There are probably others I’m not aware of. But what can I do about that?

Most of this is not surprising. Each year the number of candidates who offer web sites in support of campaigns grows. It’s almost required by now. But I wonder about one: Bruce Rupp is running for re-election to the board of the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District. While this is, I am sure, an important position, (after all we can’t live without water) is anyone running against Bruce? What is the slate for the board? Are there any controversies surrounding this election? If anyone knows of other web sites tied to this election, please let me know.

The Eureka Reporter has a story that the inquest in to the shooting death of Cheri Moore may be made available live on the Internet. What’s interesting about the headline and the reporter’s words is that the both state with assurance that this will happen. But the quote from county coroner Frank Jager states, “‘We are attempting to get a live feed on the Internet…’”. So, it’s not really clear that this will happen. The inquest begin Tuesday morning. This would be a good thing to make available. It’s not rocket science. I’m sure therr a plenty of people who could help get that feed going.

At the moment, no URL is available for this feed. If I learn the URL I will post it here and on HumGuide. Transperancy in government is a good thing.

UPDATE: Haven’t seen anything about the live feed. But the Times-Standard plans to put up video of the proceedings on the same day. The morning session will go up in the afternoon and the afternoon session will go up in the evening.

In previous posts on this topic I covered the reasons for using an open source content management system for the new Redwood Technology Consortium site and the process we went through in planning and choosing a system.

One of the core concepts of the open source CMSs I have looked at is their modularity. That is each system comes with a core set of features and then a long list of plugins or modules that can be added that extend the featureset of the site. These add-ons can include enhancements to existing features or completely new functions. Some add-ons are designed soley to allow integration of other open source systems that have been developed totally outside the core community. Examples of add-ons might include forums, shopping carts, elaborate contact management systems or photo galleries.

Many modules are created by third party developers and freely contributed to the CMS community. Drupal (which we used for the Redwood Technology Consortium site) has a long list of modules. This extensibility is one of the advantages of these open source packages. New modules are added all the time. And existing modules can be modified and themselves extended. A challenge in working with these systems is knowing what add-ons are the most appropriate for the particular task to be accomplished. Looking at the list of module descriptions in Drupal can be confusing. It’s often difficult to know exactly how one works from the description. It really becomes necessary to get involved in the Drupal community to learn more about modules, their functions, strengths and weaknesses.

Also, as the core package changes from one version to another, modules are not always updated to work with the new version. For example, the latest major release of Drupal is numbered 4.7. But some well developed modules only work for version 4.6. So, depending on the needs of the site you may have to make a choice between using an older version of the system with the modules you need already available, or use the latest version and either make do what what modules are availabe or write new ones.

In the case of the RTC site we found pretty much everything we needed in 4.7. But since then, on other sites we’ve started working on, this issue has become very important. Writing or modifying modules can take extra time and therefore raises the cost of the project.

One issue we did run across with the RTC site is trying to translate what the organization calls a member to what Drupal calls a member and make the two work together. Membership in a Drupal site is specific to how Drupal works. But this has only limited application to what membership means to RTC. We are still trying to work out this interface.

A drawback we have found in the Drupal system is the weakness or underdevelopment of ecommerce modules. Perhaps we haven’t found just the right module. Or perhaps there is an opportunity for a richly featured and easy to use ecommerce module.

Another weakness in the current stable release of Drupal is the integration of the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) content editor. This allows non-technical users to create and edit content without having to know or use any code for controlling the display of content. Drupal uses a third party Open Source module (called TinyMCE) that needs to be installed in two stages, one using a Drupal integration module and the other the installation of the third party module itself. But even that doesn’t complete the steps. You also need to integrate an image upload tool that allows the user to insert images into their web pages easily.

Finally, going forward, as Drupal evolves, some modules become incorporated into the core package, while others will need to be updated by the individual developers. This makes moving from one version to another a non-trivial matter. Some modules are updated quickly and easily while other suffer long delays. Unless you have the time and expertise to upgrade your installed modules to work with the newest version, you remain at the mercy of the module developers as far as migrating from one release to another.

So, while this extensibility and modularity has some tremendous advantages, careful research and planning needs to be built in to the management of any project based on them. It’s easy to throw up a basic site with any of several of these systems. But if your project has very specific needs that are not met by the core system or a module doesn’t work exactly as your site needs expect to either modify your site plan to match how things work, or to get your hands dirty modifying or writing new code to suit your needs.

Trying not to work today, I couldn’t keep my hands off the computer so I started playing around with Wordpress themes again. Eventually I just reverted back to my original theme which I had customized with lots of tweaks in the sidebar. I think I’ll keep this theme for a while longer until I have time to really work on customizing something else.