Monday, January 03, 2005

Commonor's Remote Control Castle. The automated life used to be the exclusive realm of the rich. Now home automation is coming to a subdivision near you. By Tom Vanderbilt from Wired magazine. [Wired News] 9:50:34 AM      .

Online Tests Allow Spoken Responses. Questionmark announces the integration of Questionmarkâ„¢ Perceptionâ„¢ testing and assessment software with vocal collaboration tools from Horizon Wimba, a leading provider of vocal solutions for education and online business. The integration enables lea [Online Learning Update] -- this is progreess -- BL 9:46:04 AM      Google It!.

Special aspects of moderating virtual classroom-scenarios - Heike Hufnagel & Mareike Geisen, Eurodl. A 3-dimensional virtual classroom that supports synchronous collaborative learning and working is presented. In this environment participants are represented by avatars. They can communicate by audio- or text-chat. In addition, a specific nonverbal re [Online Learning Update] 9:43:34 AM      Google It!.

Unsung heroes of open source. When my e-mails to vendors went unanswered, I turned to open source. A Google query for "sourceforge vx4400" yielded this first result: "Welcome to BitPim." On the BitPim project site, I found not only sync software for Windows, Linux, and OS X, but also a wealth of useful documentation, including a beautifully written online help system. Thanks to these docs, I avoided buying the straight-through USB cable that would evidently have caused problems with my particular phone model, and instead got the alternate USB-to-serial cable. It wasn't all clear sailing. I couldn't get the recommended FutureDial USB driver to work, so I wound up using a different USB-to-serial driver from Prolific Technology. After I sorted that out, BitPim could read and write the phone's contact and calendar records. Although BitPim can import and export various contact formats, it as yet has no similar support for calendar events. You can move events back and forth interactively, but I wanted to automate the process. Happily, BitPim offers all the tools I need to make an easy job of it. Because it's written in Python and uses the wxPython cross-platform GUI library, it's open and easily extensible. What's more, BitPim's developer, Roger Binns, thinks the same way I do about managing collections of simple objects. To export calendar entries to the phone, I only had to write a simple script that emits the ASCII serialization of a Python dictionary. Sweet! I haven't taken the next step yet, which is to bypass the GUI and move data directly to and from the phone by means of a scheduled task, but it's clear that BitPim's architecture will make that undertaking a straightforward one. When people talk about the heroes of open source, you tend to hear such familiar names as Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Brendan Eich, Guido van Rossum, Monty Widenius, Miguel de Icaza, and Rasmus Lerdorf. No question about it: These people are my heroes. But so is Roger Binns, and so are the countless other unsung heroes of open source. For solving a host of vexing problems with quiet competence, and for doing it in ways that invite others to stand on their shoulders, I salute them all. [Full story at InfoWorld.com.] ... [Jon's Radio] 9:40:06 AM      Google It!.

Wikipedia Criticised by Its Co-founder [Slashdot:] the battle of the encycloedias is announced as we move closer to "reliability" of information.  -- BL 9:37:28 AM      Google It!.