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 Daniel Brookshier's BlogSeptember 2004 ArchivesI want my 5.0 - A Mac user's lamentPosted by turbogeek on September 30, 2004 at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)I am an Apple-based Java developer. I love my Apples (17 inch powerbook and a Dual G5) and the really love the way that Java performs. But where is Java 1.5 when you need it? Versions of Java 5.0 are released for Linux, Solaris, and MS. When will Apple release 5.0? Not really sure, but the rumors are that the sometime next year when Apple releases their next release of OS X. That's a long wait for someone that needs to be building products with the latest and greatest. One of the fastest growing customer segments for Apples are Java developers. You can see them all over the place - even at Sun. So, where is all the Apple love at Apple? If they want to sell more machines, why not get a preview out the door ASAP? Is it resources? If it is, Apple needs to shift gears and get over the fact that Java is a growing developer segment. There are a lot of Java developers out there. We need to get together and let Apple know we need Java 5.0 now. Can nothing be done to get Java 5.0 on my Apple? Let me know what to do or how I can help the cause! New Projects in Java Education & Learning Community for September 29thPosted by turbogeek on September 29, 2004 at 03:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)This week we are getting another wide range of new projects from supporting education to robotics. Check out the project descriptions below and join the ones that interest you. CheckME - easy knowledge testing
Owner: ciukes
edumis - Make a serious of java class for exam administration.
Owner: kiwhw
jotazul - Learning POO in an Object Oriented Java IDE.
Owner: morgade
pide - Portable Interface Display Environment
Owners: arasbilgen, fragile_x, kissaki, tutic, waaagh
JRobotics - JRobotics for robotics fans and researchers
Owner: leventb
There are four subprojects for jrobotics: JRL (Java Robotics Library): This project has generic implementations of mostly used machine learning algorithms plus robot specific utility classses. The machine learnig algorithms currently available are:
o Neural network (only bacpropagation with one hidden layer for now)
JRS (Java Robotics Simulator): This project contains the things related to simulation of robots. It currently has a 3D simulator based on Java3D which simulates Khepera robot. A simulator which is more realistic based on odejava is being developed. JRI (Java Robotics Interface): The aim of this project is to define the interfaces (e.g. Simulator, Robot, Obstacle...) between the simulator and the real world. The library will also contain utility classes to communicate with other robotics softwares (e.g. simulators and libraries in other languages) easily. So, both JRL and JRS libraries will use this library extensively. AntLejos: This is an Ant task for Lejos. It is based on lejos tools. Currently, installation of lejos is required to run this task. New Projects in Java Education & Learning Community for September 29thPosted by turbogeek on September 29, 2004 at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)This week we are getting another wide range of new projects from supporting education to robotics. Check out the project descriptions below and join the ones that interest you. CheckME - easy knowledge testing
Owner: ciukes
edumis - Make a serious of java class for exam administration.
Owner: kiwhw
jotazul - Learning POO in an Object Oriented Java IDE.
Owner: morgade
pide - Portable Interface Display Environment
Owners: arasbilgen, fragile_x, kissaki, tutic, waaagh
JRobotics - JRobotics for robotics fans and researchers
Owner: leventb
There are four subprojects for jrobotics: JRL (Java Robotics Library): This project has generic implementations of mostly used machine learning algorithms plus robot specific utility classses. The machine learnig algorithms currently available are:
o Neural network (only bacpropagation with one hidden layer for now)
JRS (Java Robotics Simulator): This project contains the things related to simulation of robots. It currently has a 3D simulator based on Java3D which simulates Khepera robot. A simulator which is more realistic based on odejava is being developed. JRI (Java Robotics Interface): The aim of this project is to define the interfaces (e.g. Simulator, Robot, Obstacle...) between the simulator and the real world. The library will also contain utility classes to communicate with other robotics softwares (e.g. simulators and libraries in other languages) easily. So, both JRL and JRS libraries will use this library extensively. AntLejos: This is an Ant task for Lejos. It is based on lejos tools. Currently, installation of lejos is required to run this task. No child held back!Posted by turbogeek on September 28, 2004 at 07:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)No child held back! It's the war cry from Sun Microsystem's Scott McNealy at the first meeting of the Education and Learning Community's first advisory board meeting. I have to admit, Sun is becomming a very different place to me. Meeting at the Executive Briefing Center on the Sun campus starts out like you expect, all business. But then things really get going when Scott McNeally entered the room. It seems that we might be at the beginning of a new revolution in education. Nothing earth shattering or a leap in technology, just plain old community activism and cooperation. Watching Scott was like watching a ticked off whirlwind. It seems that Scott McNealy really wants to change the state of education. From the cost of text books to standardized tests that hide the answers from parents, to the lock-step of industrialized teaching, Scott is ready for change and willing to pull education into the light of common sense. He sees "No Child Left Behind" as just a drop in the ocean and the real problem with education in the world today . "No Child Held Back" is the direction we need for effective education. Why No Child Held Back? The current problem with education is that it is a machine that forces a certain pace of learning. If a student is allowed to create their own pace, learning is unbounded and moves as fast as the student's capabilities and interest. Learning is also bound by the teachers skills. By exposing a student to a wider field of study that is unbounded, the student is not forced to live within the bounds of a teacher's limited circulum. Not to say teachers are inadequate, the system should just allow a student access to any teacher or expert as the student's need for specific mentoring progresses. But how do you get education to be a road that you can travel as fast as you can? As you might guess, it's all about technology and the internet. You might say that it is old news, this internet education mantra. Well, I don't think this is quite the same thing. What Scott was talking about was an effort that brings together every school, every teacher, and every student with a set of tools meant to educate everyone regardless of language, politics, or dysfunctional school board. How can this happen? Scott had a few ideas for that too. From getting the soccer/football and film stars on the ticket to promote the concept to creating a JCP-like world-community process for creating standards from software to test questions. More importantly, the community of individuals, schools, and governments need to created and share common resources. Put simply, provide the tools and students will learn. The benefits of a world-wide internet-based education and testing system are enormous. Rich countries benefit from cost savings while poor countries take advantage of a system they could never afford. There might be a reduction in politics too if it becomes harder for the crazy school board member to get their way. So, we have a dozen or so of the world's leaders in education in the room, what was the reaction? I was completely amazed. The reaction was positive! There was even a positive move toward making this dream possible. All over the world it seems that pieces of this dream are now happening. For instance, Alberta Canada is well down the road of internet instruction and testing. They also seem to be willing to share. Dr. Lyle Oberg, Minister of Education for Alberta, Canada and an honorary board member for our community is in the position to make such a decision. Dr. Oberg is willing to share as were others. The benefits seem to have a low enough risk with a greater return that it is easy enough to volunteer, even if there is a great investment so far. Of anyone at the meeting, Dr. Oberg had the most power to make a decision. But dear reader, the world has you to count as a member too. If you are a parent, student, teacher, or anyone with a voice, you too can help. If you know of any projects either in current use or in development for education, we need to know about them. The no child held back concept goes beyond simply porting lessons to the internet and automating tests. We need multimedia, reference, mentoring, one-on-one help, and collaboration. It goes much farther than the tools. Think of the hosting and maintenance of such a system. This effort also needs money and people from those paid to run the system to volunteers. Some money and resources will come from sharing what already exists. To meet the world's needs, we need a lot more money and people to make it work. Anyone ready to start a non-profit company to collect contributions? How about the company that maintains this beomoth? Is it one system, or spread all over the world? If you are a retired CEO, lawyer, educator, researcher, or developer, we need your help. Talk to your school board, teacher, polititions, rock stars, hollywood stars, and pillars of your community. Lead them here and let them know that education is the responsibility of all of us. Think of this as the Electronic Peace Corps for education. What's next? We are working on that and you should too. Lot's of things happened at this meeting that need volunteers and in some cases funding. If you can help, please let me know.
Talkback Lead-In
Day one with the JELC Advisory Board and "Desert Steve" RagsdalePosted by turbogeek on September 12, 2004 at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)Tonight I got to meet with many of the folks on the JELC advisory board. It is amazing what subjects a smart group of folks can come up with. One subject, brought up by John Gage, was the 10 thousand year clock project being built by the Long Now Foundation . An interesting subject in its self that started a few threads of conversation. We ended up for a moment on the fact that the clock team had purchased a large area of a very geologically stable mountain and land around it to safeguard the clock. The subject was raised that the idea of land ownership might not exist in the future. Well, I have some experience in changes in perception. I have a great grandfather that owned a good portion of the Santa Rosa mountain in southern california. My great grandfather was quite a character. He was also said to be more than a little eccentric. In fact prior to his Death he had donated much of what he owned to the forestry service (thus promoting a call of eccentric from relatives that would have liked that land). So in fact my grandfather had gone from the idea of ownership to public lands in his lifetime. But this blog is about the Java Education and Learning Community. So what does my great grand dad have to do with education? Well, as I said, he was a character. He founded a small town called Desert Center. He made his millions from having gas, food, water, and ice cream. It is called Desert Center simply because it is in the middle of the desert at about the right location for a car to run low on gas and water crossing the desert (there is still a 40 mile gap of desert wasteland in one direction). Despite years of prospecting and searching for lost gold (he created a monument for that too), he hit the jackpot providing what people needed at the right place. From what I heard, gas food and water was nothing compared to the draw of ice cream in the middle of the desert(desert dessert). My great granddad has a choice quote on such common sense:
A central place sounds like java.net and the JELC. Like my Great Granddad, Sun, O'Reilly, and Collabnet have created a community that we can make our own 'center' to attract all that pass through looking for information. Perhaps they will stay and add to our community or become frequent visitors. I think we have all the attractions. All we need to do is get the web to dispense ice cream :o). Java Education & Learning (JELC) Advisory Board MeetingPosted by turbogeek on September 10, 2004 at 02:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)This week I will be in Palo Alto meeting with Scott McNealy, John Gage, and education leaders from all over the world. We will be talking about java.net's Education and Learning Community (JELC). The tasks will be to organize the advisory board for the first time, talk about open source in education, and to work towards creating a stronger community. Featured Projects One of my tasks is showing off what we have so far. We have 142 projects (including topic areas) and 975 members. That's quite a lot for a community that was relaunched just a few months ago. The projects range from student research to university infrastructure. Some are for research and other projects are real working software. Here are three of the projects that I will be showing off at the meeting: Globalcode ( globalcode.dev.java.net) is a dual-purpose project that combines software for educational institutions with computer science. With the global team based in Brazil, the project's mission is to teach Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EETM) by example and to benchmark code to show how different strategies of architecture design compare. Their reference application is designed for a school's management of courses, classes, teachers, and students. With more than 80 members dedicated to its progress, Globalcode is already one of the largest projects in the JELC. BioBox (BioBox.dev.java.net) is a collection of biology research projects, including the Bio-ClusterGrid. With 28 of the most popular bioinformatics applications built into the Bio-ClusterGrid and accessed via the project portal, biology researchers from Singapore and India to the U.S. are able to collaborate. Twin Peaks (Twinpeaks.dev.java.net), a project housed with Indiana University Libraries Information Technology, is developing a user interface for accessing digital library resources from within Sakai v1.0, an open project used to build integrated systems for universities and schools of higher education. The Twin Peaks project is working with the JELC, along with the Sakai project, to expand their reach to other universities and to create a community where library science developers can interact. Why Have an Advisory Board? The Advisory board accomplishes a few things. First, because they are leaders in education and education technology, they understand what currently exists and what is needed both by institutions and in general by staff, teachers, and students. This helps our community by helping the community move in directions that should improve education. The second reason for the board, and this meeting is to guide the process we use within JELC. This includes our governance and our management. It can also include what topics we choose to peruse and organizations we partner with. Finally, because the members of the board are well placed in the community, they are also the ambassadors for JELC to help promote our community and increase the number of projects and members. They will be taking back to their organizations a wealth of information about why and how this community works and why others should get involved. Life Long Learning We will also be talking about life long learning. We should be students for all our lives. This has become more important in a global economy with its pace of technological and social change. It is also important for a strong mind and an interesting life. The problem with learning however is that there needs to be teachers, mentors, and resources for billions of people. Access to resources for life long learning is the hardest. Without the resource, teachers and mentors are limited to personal contact teaching, email, and the telephone. With millions of students there needs to be an infrastructure of management and learning tools. Life long learning is the moral equivalent of adult or corporate education, but on a wider scale. With open source, it is hopped that tools can be created and easily adopted by open universities, professional institutions, and traditional universities. You should be able to take a class on programming as easily as psychology or nuclear medicine. Tools to support you should range from automated tutorials, grading systems, and even virtual mentors (one of my ideas). Lots of work ahead. Your efforts, ideas, and participation are apriciated in this effort. Education & Research As Community The primary reason for the JELC is the community. Open source is what is provided, but the common threads of education and areas of research are reasons to get together as a group and into sub communities. From developers, to administrators and students to teachers, there are many areas of common discussion and a need for maintaining a history and reference to discussions and ideas. Communities sometimes just happen. But the truth is that communities have backbones of supporters, organizers, managers, and champions. A small part of these fine people are meeting this week. Speak up in the comment section below or email me. Give us your input so that your voice in the community is heard too. How do you run an open source project?Posted by turbogeek on September 08, 2004 at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)Managing Your Open Source Project Many want to know about getting people to join and how to manage their project. This is asking quite a hard question :o) Attracting and vetting people in open source is something that can be done in a lot of ways. You also will find an issue with people that want to join as a developer or even as an owner, but they are asking for something that they may never act upon. So, it is really three things:
Getting Volunteers to Join For 1, getting people to join, the keys are organization, information and promotion. Be clear about your goals. Be specific about the tasks and what needs to be done and in what order. Lay out the phases. Make sure people understand why this project is important. Also talk about why participating in the project is good for them too from the types of technology to what they may be able to put on their resume. The primary place to do this is with your project pages, but you can also use the wiki, forums, documents and files, the issue tracker, the help wanted wiki, and finally blogs. The more that you talk about your project in both volume, location, and frequency, the greater the probalility that you will get someone that will help. Beyond that, you have one key volunteer to do the important work and that is you. How Do You Manage Your Project? For 2, this depends on how you want to manage. Open source should not be about code changes happening at the will of every member. Usually there is an owner (you) that acts as architect. This person often creates the first prototype. It does not need to be big. Either it lays out the features, and does not implement them, or is a pilot, or just the first couple features. Work from there still rests with the architect and getting people to help design or to shepherd others on tasks. Once a project has actively participating members it is a matter of passing out assignments. Very often it is volunteers that pick assignments. Rarely can you assign someone with something unless the task is related to a request,bug, or area that the participant is very familiar with. Remember that this is about voluntary involvement and not a boss/worker relationship. If tasks are laid out in a way that people can see something interesting to do or something that they want so bad that it must be done by them, then they will do it. People must be drawn to their tasks. Your tools are coolness, interesting problems, learning opportunities, resume filler, irritating bugs, needs from other tasks, and even self promotion. What About People That Join To Just Join? For 3, the problem is in part about 1 and 2 and also not reading up on 1 and 2. The more you make it clear what the responsibilities are, the greater the chance that they will select the right option. Many request that the joiner email prior to joining other than observer. Some require observer before any other request. Some require joining the email lists and the forums. The key is to require something for being other than observer. You need to be careful about anything beyond observer because there are people that can really mess up your site. Only grant higher rights to people that are properly vetted to your satisfaction. In the jxta.org platform project (one I think has one of the better models), you need to be an observer and submit a fix or enhancement via the issue system. If the proposed patch is good or that there are a series of good patches, the user is upgraded to developer. All code changes are submitted as patches which are attached to feature/bug issues. Each patch must be approved by at least one other member of the development team before the code is allowed to be physically changed in the cvs. The cvs commit must contain a reference to the issue and the person that approved the patch. Of course this is with an established project that has had many versions, but it is a good model that can be expanded to larger features. Remember, open source is not anarchy. Linux is run by Linus and his closely held team - not by the millions of Linux users and contributers. It is a commons with agreement from a gentile monarch or a tight team. Information is power both to keep things on track and to cause people to take action. Active forums, email lists, issues, project pages, documents, demos, releases, and blogging can help cause people to take action. Note that this has been added to the wiki. See ManagingYourOpenSourceProject Graduation Day in the Education and Learning Community Sept 8thPosted by turbogeek on September 08, 2004 at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
giantpicturedictionary
Imagine a web site (or desktop application) where you can type virtually any word to instantly retrieve strikingly descriptive pictures and symbols for that word. Want to know where your fourth metacarpal bone is? VERY COOL PROJECT!
Project BioBox is a collection of projects for Biology research. The first project is Bio-ClusterGrid. Bio-ClusterGrid is the first of many deployment architectures that realizes the benefit of the BioBox initiative. Implemented using Sun's Web Start Flash technology (which populates the grid computers), the core components of the Bio-ClusterGrid comprise of Sun Grid Engine (SGE), the Grid Engine Portal (GEP). With 28 of the most popular bioinformatics applications built into the Bio-ClusterGrid through the portal the system’s most important feature is saving researchers time. Biologists access the portal either through a browser in Sunray Thin Clients in the access tier or through any browser-enabled device. The Grid Engine software provides the resource management mechanism to schedule all the bioinformatics applications to run on the cluster of execution servers. The project is also international with project members in Singapore and India. The project, though open source, has been run on university computers. The project has now moved to JELC to increase exposure, add new members, and to utilize the open source tools and community servers. Indiana University Libraries Information Technology is developing a user interface for accessing digital library resources from within Sakai v1.0. Project “Twin Peaks” (separate mountains of library and course management) is a fully JSR168 (The Java community’s open Portlet Specification) compliant tool being developed as an experimental option within the new WYSIWYG authoring tool of Sakai. Twin Peaks is taking advantage of the open standards of the Sakai. Sakai is used to build integrated systems for universities and schools of higher education. Sakai is an open source project with its own open standards and open source code base to serve as a foundation for their efforts to save on costs and promote its use, integration, and collaboration in the education community. Twin Peaks is using JELC along with the Sakai project to increase their reach to other universities. Though Sakai is open, the membership is not and that limits the number of collaborators that Twin Peaks would like to attract. JELC provides a truly open and free community outside Sakai and allows the Twin Peak team to interact with other library science developers. Networking Java Framework The main statement about the RFWNet is to provide a source for Java and Software Engineer students initiation through professional Java development (i.e. not "Toy Programs") based upon Software Engineering techniques like GoF Design Patterns. This goal is aimed to achieve through the delivery of a dynamically extensible multithreaded server (following a Servlet-like extension model) for TCP/IP (socket) servers. Java applets to simulate Physics phenomena Some students have a hard time learning Physics because the subject is to abstract. Having simulation applets can help them to better understand Physics phenomena. Therefore, we want to develop Java applets to simulate some phenomena which are difficult to understand. People can also request us to develop some applets for them. The project can be extended into other fields such as chemistry, biology, geophysics, engineering, etc. Current simulations include: cellular, charge, pendulum, projectile, wave. These are very cool and include code for a lot of different modes of graphical representation. java open source info platform Jactiongroup include two projects : sharej will build a platform that share java projects for excellent tech or idea.The platform include open information management and correlative articles as web components which base on spring and hibernate. spring is a translating project which plan to translate springframework reference into Chinese for the more developers within springframework.(We had completed spring-reference 1.0 version on spring chinese forum).Now we will revamp the project by docbook and version control. please visit our site by http://www.jactiongroup.net for getting more information with the projects. Edit and apply Alghorithms on Graphs like Dijkstra, Bellman Ford This is a GraphTool helped me to understtand better Graphs Theory This is a tool for Graphs Learning. It has an IDE where you can draw edit, move, delete, save, open, etc. graphs. It is easy to use and has a very intuitive interface... New Projects in the Education and Learning Community for September 8thPosted by turbogeek on September 07, 2004 at 10:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
descriptiveastronomy
This development plan is to allow user friendly tools for students with special needs, that will enhance cooperative agreement with NASA for educational purporses and Research, with Security Priority.
easyframe
Simple Frame with a TextField (for input) and a TextArea (for output). The aim of this project is to provide an easy to use UI for beginners who does not know UI or does not want to use System.in... This projects also ease the learn of the MVC pattern
extremesoftwareengineering
This project is a space where students, teachers, and professionals using "Extreme Software Engineering:A Hands-on Approach" can compare notes, exchange ideas, and create projects for use by others.
giantpicturedictionary
Imagine a web site (or desktop application) where you can type virtually any word to instantly retrieve strikingly descriptive pictures and symbols for that word. Want to know where your fourth metacarpal bone is? VERY COOL PROJECT!
gmsi
Project of graduation for development control and maintenance of systems
javaproject
Project is to link my computer lab at my college with a reliable intranet mailing system.this project of mine is performance dependent as i have about 300 systems at my lab.please help me i completing my project
kp2webots
Method for webots (WWW.WEBOTS.COM) motor kontrol image Processing graphical interfaces amer and localisation 2D spatial représentation evolution with genetics algo applied on neural networks
mentorship
This is with some help from experts is the place to come to learn how from start to finish to become marketable programmers in the Java language. For those who have studied every resource that has been available and yet cannot grasp the necessaries to cross the gap from unusable to usable.
ring
Rin'G is an environment for the study and implementation of Graph Theory algorithms that allows users to view interactive, step-by-step animations of their executions. Users can draw graphs on a graphical user interface, load and save graphs and animations and add their own algorithms to be executed. An english version of the user manual will soon be published on this site. The environment is being developed in Java, for desktop platforms, and uses state-of-the-art technology, such as advanced Swing programming, Design Patterns, and the java.lang.reflect API. There is a stable release available in the Documents & files section, and source-code will also be available in the near future. This tool is being developed as an undergraduate project at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and it will be open for collaboration as soon as this process is over.
scholarsboxinterfacing
The Scholar's Box is a tool that enables users to gather resources from multiple digital repositories in order to create personal and themed collections and other reusable materials that can be shared with others for teaching and research. As such, it sits at the interstices of digital libraries, educational technology, personal information spaces, and social software. This project is aimed at building interfaces from Scholar's Box to important Java-based educational software.
schoolclipse
subtechclass1
This is the place where TechClass members will develop activities related with the main project. Its main target is to provide a shared area for post the artifacts of Universo projects. For more information about Universo projects, please access http://www.jarley.com/universo (portuguese only). | |
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