May 19

Moodle has 12 SoC developers

Moodle, SOC No Comments »

This year I’m not going to be a Moodle SoC developer either. Something happens every year, too much work, other projects, etc.

As I said in another post, my SoC is about Moodle but is not a Moodle project…This is a strange world, Sakai fundation wants to enable Moodle to interact with their CMS.

But this post is about the real Moodle SoCs, so let’s go. This year there are 12 exciting projects and I would like to comment some of them and encourage all their students and mentors.

  1. Usability
    Laia Subirats is going to detect and solve some Moodle usability issues. Buff, it going to be a hard project. It’s easy to detect usability problems in Moodle but to fix them is work for daredevils. Molta merda, Laia! I would like to make you some suggestions: quiz and grades. Some time ago I worked at UPC’s Moodle help desk and teachers had several problems at creating quizzes. This summer we are going to upgrade our platform to Moodle1.9 and I have a theory: our teachers are going to freak out with grades… I hope I’m mistaken, but my old partners will have a lot of work and phone calls.
  2. XMLDB/SQLite
    Andrei Bautu will be mentored by Penny Leach to develop a new database abstraction layer and adding a mechanism to copy a live Moodle database into a SQLite database. This will be very useful to implement a database testing utility. A couple of friends of mine are going to be very grateful for this project. They are administrating and improving Atenea and backuping and restoring its database to test new indexes and partitions it’s a horrible work…
  3. Animated grade statistics report
    Jejejeje, teachers won’t need MS Excel anymore. Great idea!
  4. Blog improvements and the addition of a blog assignment module
    Since version 1.6, Moodle includes a blog. It’s an awful tool. It was time to decide to improve it. Also including a blogging activity could be very useful.
  5. Messaging improvements
    Luis Filipe Romão is going to improve messaging interface and to develop an API to send messages from other part of the system.
  6. Moodle IDE
    Grady Laksmono’s project is about create an IDE based on Eclipse to make life more easy to all Moodle’s developers. I’m going to try it!

There are some other projects, but I have no time to comment them, today it’s Monday, I arrived to my office an hour and a half ago and I must start working right now… :)

ps: “Integration with bibliographic systems such as Wikindx” is the project that I always wanted to do, this year was not assigned to anyone either. Next year must be mine!

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Apr 23

Google Summer of Code 2008

Moodle, SOC 1 Comment »

Two days ago Google announced the accepted student proposals list at their project home page. Yes, I’ve been accepted!! :)

I was at my weekly poker game when I remembered that April 21 was the Day. Staring at laptop screen instead of at opponents is not a good strategy in this game. Wasting 20 mins pressing F5, were enough to loose nearly all my chips. 2 or 3€ it doesn’t matter :) :D :) :D

SoC

It will be a great summer!

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Apr 08

Applying for a Google SoC at few hours to deadline

DFWikiLABS, Moodle, SOC 1 Comment »

Today have been a strange day.

This morning I entered to my boss office like every Monday: we usually make the working planning for all week and also we meet some of his grad students that need help, orientation or (even) more work.

Today was a little different, we had a Campus project meeting at 9h. So we talk about weekend, music and finally about work (not too much). We also attended Gonzalo, he wanted to explain us last improvements that he have made to the WikiBook.

I don’t know what time was when we left FIB (at UPC north campus) to take the bus to the UOC buildings but I’m sure about one thing, we were late.

When we arrived to the meeting Pablo Casado was speaking about problems they faced during the implementation of OKI-bus and we discussed about the chosen solutions. After his speech, was Marc’s turn. He was supposed to talk about our implementation of Moodle gateway using OKI OSIDs, but he told about our next Moodle contribution instead. Moodle headquarters asked us to design and develop their new API and web services layer. It’s cool, it’s great, it’s exciting… but it was not the topic. It has a lot of relevancy on this project but it has not at same time… I love Marc, he can improvise a speech and liven up a meeting.

After having some coffee, Dr Chuck Severance one of Sakai guru guys talked us about IMS TI solutions. I was wondering what was going to say because I have never been in a meeting with him (nop, I’ve been in one few month ago but I had to leave to go somewhere). Some new ideas and people in these boring “official” meetings are welcome.

He was talking about how does IMS TI take 2 works when I started freaking out. He was explaining how great would be to convert Moodle into a IMS TI producer. Marc and I have been working in this idea around OKI during last year!! It can be possible… Using a hacked Moodle with our 3 modules to avoid new development and extra problems to fulfill our compromise with Campus project was the solution that Marc proposed to me some month ago. After a big effort of time and drafts I found the way to incorporate my boss idea without hacking Moodle core. We created some kind of OKI Compliant Activity Service Oriented Moodle. That’s the same that Chuck was explaining us! Ludo, you are absolutely brilliant.

After the meeting I have been talking with my boss and wondering how great would be to get a Google Summer of Code to develop something that people at IMS are designing. “Tomorrow I’ll ask Chuck if is he as interested as us to work together in this project” he said.

This evening I was in a bar drinking some beers with a couple of friend when my telephone rang. “Ooops, I’t my boss!” I said. “Do not respond” said one of my friends. I picked up it.

“I’ve been speaking with Chuck and you must go to SoC web page and apply for an IMS project, deadline for applications is in few hours!!” What!?!?! Now? So I got out my Vaio from its bag and booted my Ubuntu while I was crossing my fingers to find a wireless connection. When project application page was shown on the screen the first thing I saw was project abstract (2000 chars) and project description (7500 chars). Buff, “Waiter, another beer please, I’m going to be here for a while…”

I have nearly 0 documentation about the work I have done for Campus and I have heard about IMS TI about 3 or 4 times. Great, I had nothing to explain!! So I digressed along a plenty of lines about our work in Campus and in Moodle with NWiki and with Web Services layer. I suppose that my application would be an excellent example of rusty English and emptiness of content :)

In few weeks I will know if not to savor my beer was worth to it.

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