Dokeos in Colombia

Dokeos in Colombia

I’m leaving in just a few minutes from now for the airport, to go to Colombia for 2 important conferences. One about freedom of knowledge, another about Ubuntu in Colombia. This is the second trip Dokeos makes (officially) outside of Perú this year to hold conferences or provide training.

The first one was in Guatemala earlier this month, for a one-week training to a national university. As Dokeos starts to leave its mark in Latin America, we are starting to get invitations from other countries around us, which I see as a nice sign of progress.

Presenting Dokeos is always a pleasure, as people never seem to cease being impressed by the product and the fact its basic but complete version is free, or maybe by the fact that the lead developer took interest in developing countries of Latin America…

Either way, we’ve put an announcement on the website: http://www.dokeos.com/latino/anuncios/colombia-2008 to make sure the most people over there get a chance to meet part of the Dokeos team, make suggestions, get questions answered, etc.

I’ll try to show off the new features of Dokeos 1.8.6 there so that people get an idea of what they can expect in mid-December.

Dokeos en Moquegua

El Jueves 20 de Noviembre del 2008, exponemos en Moquegua (en el evento CICIS) para presentar a Dokeos como solución de e-learning para instituciones y empresas grandes.

Carlos Vargas (capacitado por mi para proporcionar esta charla) presentará las bondades de Dokeos para capacitación, así que una vista “desarrollador” del proyecto.

Fixing WebCalendar 1.2.0 + iCal, in French

While trying to debug WebCalendar 1.2.0 a little, combined with iCal and using French, we found a series of things that might be worth reporting in one go…

First of all, some weird warning messages appear reporting that mb_language() did not understand “French” as a supported language. Basically, the php documentation on mb_language() is quite clear: this function only supports “Japanese”, “ja”, “English”, “en” and “uni” as languages, and is mostly used in the context of e-mails to translate fonts from one language to another. This is fixed by adding a @ in front of the only (I think) call to mb_language() in the WebCalendar code. There is a suggested patch for this in the SourceForge bugtracker for WebCalendar, and it should be inside 1.3.0 (still to be published).

Second, a previous upgrade process seemed to have broken the database permissions (we probably upgraded as root and some database was created during the upgrade, making it impossible for the “webcalendar” user to see it). This is not a WebCalendar bug, but mentioning it here might help some of you. A quick fix to this is to grant all privileges again on the webcalendar database to the webcalendar user, like so: GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE webcalendar TO webcalendar; (while connected as the postgres user).

Third, while using French in non-unicode mode, it appears that the French language file is missing the “charset” variable, which then makes it impossible for the system to determine which charset to use. This effectively prevents the title element of the page to be displayed correctly. A quick (and good) fix is to edit the French.txt file and add “ISO-8859-15″ as the charset term’s value.

This being said, many problems remain with the iCal client, and this could not be considered by us as a satisfactory solution in comparison to Google Calendars.

Getting the Dokeos statistics right…

Following our recent clean-up of the campus.dokeos.com and a lot of talks I’ve been holding about the huuuge Dokeos community, I thought it was strange that these statistics (as can now be seen on http://www.dokeos.com/en/community.php) did not move a bit after we deleted 200000 users from campus.dokeos.com.

Checking all of this very quickly (because we’re still under high work load), I realized there was a little bug in the statistics gathering script which prevented updates, and that there was also a check a little bit too severe, which caused several portals to re-register themselves.

Cleaning all this mess only took about 10 minutes, but reduced our counted community from 1,500,000 to just 500,000 users. Portals fell back from 7500 to just 4400). This being said, and considering the update script was wrong, I’m quite sure the number of users’ll climb back up to a million before we know it (we just have to wait for admins to reload their admin page…).

Dokeos' worldwide community map - November 2008

These numbers, of course, do not affect the dokeos commercial side too much, as we are still providing good quality service for medium- and high-profile e-learning portals.

I’m still wondering how Moodle gets some 35000 portals. I’m sure they would also drop down a lot if they did revise their statistics scripts. Anyone at Moodle wanting to give me access to this database?

Dokeos en Colombia, del 26 al 30 de Noviembre

Esta confirmado que estoy invitado a Colombia para hablar de Dokeos en el II Congreso Internacional de Conocimiento Libre, Desarrollo Local, Regional y Economía Solidaria

Si usted vive en Colombia (Bogotá o Santiago de Cali) y tiene interés comercial o comunautario en la plataforma de e-learning Dokeos, quiero encontrarles!

Envíenme un correo o un comentario en este post mismo.

Primera reunión de la COmunidad de DOkeos en PERU – 15 de Noviembre 2008

La primera reunión de la COmunidad de DOkeos en PERU (CODOPERU) se hará este Sábado 15 de Noviembre 2008 en Miraflores, Lima.

Más que una reunión técnica, es un encuentro de gente motivada para ver donde se quedan los intereses de cada uno y como combinar los esfuerzos para empujar este maravilloso software adelante.

El programa (variable) es el siguiente:

4.00pm: Bienvenida y presentaciones Inter-personales
4.30pm: Presentación del proyecto Dokeos y de su comunidad en el mundo
5.30pm: Desarrollo de una herramienta en Dokeos
7.00pm: Tiempo libre para hablar de la visión de Dokeos para el futuro y su plan de Conquista mundial (y el evento latinoamericano del próximo año)
8.00pm: Cierre del evento

Más informaciones e inscripciones en el sitio web de la empresa: http://www.dokeos.com/latino/eventos/comu-lima-2008-11-15

Net Renderer

I felt upon this website while checking out a few web development extensions for Firefox: http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/

Basically, the site allows you to check what a website would look like under IE5, IE6, IE7 and IE8 Beta by simply taking a screenshot of the website actually opened in one of these browsers. What’s more, it allows you to see a made-up screenshot of the differences between IE6 and IE7 rendering.

This might well become part of my useful tools for web developments…

The Firefox extension can be found here: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/6455

Podcast de Julio de Dokeos Latinoamérica en Guatemala

Durante la estadía de Julio en Guatemala, Gustavo Reyes de Interactiva Web grabó un podcast con Julio sobre Dokeos y sus objetivos futuros. Su presentación del tema me sorprendió bastante (no sabía que iba a grabar algo así, ni creo que lo sabía el), pero esta interesante

>> Sigan este enlace hacia el podcast <<

Installing a new chart of accounts in OpenERP 4.2.3

I’ve been trying for some time to get a new chart of accounts for Peru into the OpenERP system, and I was frequently confronted to an ugly error saying:

(‘Error ! You can not create recursive accounts.’, ‘parent_id’)

The annoying thing being that it didn’t actually tell me which parent_id that was. Considering the size of an XML chart of accounts, it proved very difficult (if not impossible) to find the actual error, so I decided to drop the idea and continue integrating peruvian things into OpenERP on other aspects.

Today though, preparing a demo for a prospect here, I realised that the error was, in fact, detailed in the live logging of my OpenERP server. It was saying something like this:

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:22:57 INFO:init:
<record id=”chart32″ model=”account.account”>
<field name=”code”>322</field>
<field eval=”False” name=”reconcile”/>
<field name=”close_method”>none</field>
<field eval=”[(6, 0, [ref('chart32')])]” name=”parent_id”/>
<field name=”type”>view</field>
<field name=”name”>Edificios y otras construcciones</field>
</record>

…which means that I had an element coded “322″ which was using the same id as another element declared previously (chart32). Knowing this, I just had to fix the XML file (I also realized that I had two repeating entries around that one) and import it again into OpenERP and… tadaaaaa! I now have a running chart of accounts for Peru!

This, though, will only be helpful if you actually start the server by hand and have the logging appear in front of you. Damn, it feels so easy when it’s done.

Dokeos 1.8.6 – Todo list

For those of you who wonder when 1.8.6 will be out, basically, the answer is: when this list is closed. There are probably a few more bugs to appear before we actually close them all, but we should be on track until the end of November, when we expect to release it.

If you want it out faster, don’t hesitate to help us like Juan Carlos and Ivan do (through http://projects.dokeos.com), that will definitely speed up development.