TwoBrownShoes

A great spread of business cards. Something for future TBS stuff?

http://dailypoetics.typepad.com/photos/business_cards_and_other_/p1010161_3.html

One of my students this week started a month on Linux. He's excited by the prospect of having a portable operating system - with persistence... and is embarking upon the challenge of installing Ubuntu / Fedora on a USB stick.

At school I'm constantly trying to help students make intelligent decisions about open source... to recognize the right tool for the job. Sometimes, even the MS product is the best choice (open source alternative to Captivate, anyone?)... :(

Moved house in the past fortnight... and was stunned really at the inordinate amount of "stuff" that I seem to have acquired over the past decade or so since I first left the family home.
It strikes me as bizarre that it can seem so damned ESSENTIAL to be surrounded by so many things - sporting equipment, kitchen appliances, clothes, ...

Given that we're all blatantly aware of how temporary our time on this earth is, it's a little sobering to think that it can ever have been a priority to buy all these things.

Dann recently put together a new design for the site >

With various other sites (the new SydneyStormChasers and others for work) taking most available time, it hasn't been possible. Dann's been WAAAY too busy too with the ongoing renovation work, profiled of course at http://talesfromthebox.com.

This weekend I've decided to get started. It's a great design - no doubt Dann will write up some notes on the design itself. For now, though, I'm going to get to work designing a Drupal theme for it. That reminds me too - have been thinking about rebuilding TBS in Rails... but perhaps that's a little too ambitious for the start of the Term...

Are school students really interested in learning about Linux? You bet!

In response to the massive demand from our students at school and at HSC Online (http://hsconline.nsw.edu.au) I've started putting together the skeleton of an online course. I'll be using the HSC Online site... and all the capabilities of Moodle... hoping

Initial suggestions from students include:

- the power of the shell (getting away from GUIs for real power and control)

- dual-booting (Linux + Windows... or others, too!)

Launched a new site at school yesterday. We've spent the last 12 months gearing up to massively expand the online distance education program offered by school under the guise of SCIL (Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning). Finally yesterday I was able to take the covers off our new Moodle site at http://hsconline.nsw.edu.au. It's an awesome coup for us really - having the ability to use that URL.

On the 30th we've got the full day workshops with our new cohort of Year 11s - including over a dozen young Software Design and Development students (my class!). Looks like a great year ahead!

Yesterday I sat down on my dev box at home... depressed at the thought of the challenge of migrating all these silly sites... We have about 8 different resources (perhaps more) that had previously been on the same domain name... I want to redirect some, set up aliases for others (some of the old names just won't cut it)...

Mod_rewrite answered the call! mod_rewrite is the coolest piece of gear I've played with in a while!

All is now sorted... and the universe is in balance once again ;)

Great places to go to for mod_rewrite are this cool cheat sheet from ilovejackdaniels.com and apache's own url rewriting guide

Yesterday, after MUCH frustration at the noise from the jet engine beside me, I finally succumbed and bought a new power supply for my computer... and I've been in a great mood ever since.

Dann - you have GOT to get yourself one of these... more efficient power consumption and NO NOISE! This thing sits at ear level a metre from my head and all i hear is the occasional whirring of my HDDs!

As part of the processing of migrating our moodle sites to their new home, I investigated setting up apc - the "alternative php cache" managed as a pecl project.

Installing apc on Ubuntu couldn't be easier... this is basically a post I contributed to Moodle.org ... thought it'd be useful here too.

Assuming you have php5 and apache2 all up and happy on your Ubuntu server ;)... this should get you over the line with apc:

1. Install pear (and the various libraries for pecl to install)

The time has come to finally transition off our crazy Windows box at work. For the past couple of years the site had gradually been grinding to a halt... and it certainly wasn't the hardware.

To be honest, the build process had been a shocker. My predecessors had basically "imaged" a previous Windows server onto a new box... and the performance was terrible from the start.

The first stage of my plan calls for a transition to Ubuntu Dapper Server (64bit)... although I don't have a spare server and can't afford more than about an hour's downtime... the answer? Host the site for a short period on a desktop box... and pray hard!