The Philippe Back Report

I am in the process of deploying Chamilo for our eLearning project. Chamilo is to be used in parallel with Tiki.

From the Chamilo Blog, here is an interesting article on how eLearning help you thrive and dispels some myths about it.

As you know, I am using a lot of Open Source software.

Be it Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, Mantis, ProjectPier, Ubuntu, Squeak, Tcl, Perl, LAMP, WordPress, OpenX, R, Octace, Maxima, Gimp, Scribus, Inkscape, OpenOffice…. there are lots of areas where Open Source provides tremendous leverage and ability to customize that is unmatched by commercial offerings once you’ve been through the learning curve and strategic decision. (Check my Oloh badge in the sidebar for more).

I’ve nothing against commercial software. On the contrary, some is really superb and beats the pants of FOSS (in this area, I do use Explorer2, Nusphere PHPEd, GotoMeeting, GotoMyPC, FinalCut Express on Mac, Diskeeper, Sparx Enterprise Architect to name a few). I may run above EUR 10K of proprietary software licences on my laptop – All dutifully paid for).

But FOSS quality varies. And now, there is QSOS.

QSOS is a method, designed to qualify, select and compare free and open source software in an objective, traceable and argued way. It publicly available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Here is an overview:

The assessment goes on like this:

The funny bit is that Atos Origin is involved in this. Atos Origin being one of my customers makes this even more interesting. The world is a small place!

Too bad, Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware isn’t listed. Well, soon enough it will be!

Tiki Suite: Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware + lots of other things in an appliance. You have seen the future:

http://www.lavoixdulibre.info/entrevues/detail-dune-entrevue/emission/tiki-suite/65/liste/2011/

Et une vidéo:
http://info.tiki.org/article156-Tiki-Suite-and-Confoo-ca

Check out how fun this could be (no compile time, only fun, runtime)

Controlling Arduino with Squeak
http://tecnodacta.com.ar/gira/Arduino.3.rar

And Kinect comes to the mix from the same great people (note that the little red car is driven through Kinect)

Pay them a visit at:

http://tecnodacta.com.ar/gira

Cool isn’t it?

Some pictures of (some) of the cool people I met there.

Thanks especially to mozilla for handing me a ton of goodies for students.

Yesterday, I got myself an Arduino experimenters kit. As a side note, the kits sold at FOSDEM come from Italy and support decent working conditions, something that is quite nice. I hope to have contributed a bit.
The kit is of good quality and there is all one may need to get started. What I do have in mind is to use the Arduino and the electronics to work on bridging a Microsoft Kinect device with Squeak Smalltalk and the Arduino. Software support exists for both of them in Squeak and it would be great to have fun activating my Lego Mindstorms through gesturing in front of a Kinect and controlling the little Lego blocks.

This is going to bring several of my ‘past lifes’ together. In fact I have the full electronics kit (including soldering iron, drill, components, and what not) that I haven’t been using for some time. Last time, I was making ISA cards for building 286-based oscilloscopes and AD/DA based boards. This means a loooong time. Anyway, ICs do not die,  they just lay there, waiting for new projects.

And now, as I have a brand new office with lots of space, I can devote a table for Arduino projects. Stay tuned, as I’ll have a number of posts describing how things are going.

Here are some pictures:

Kit Contents

The Arduino Uno board