Two Brown Shoes :: The blog

Late next month I’ll be heading off to the States for a couple of conferences that look set to be really awesome.

May 29 - June 1 is Railsconf in Portland, Oregon, followed by the US MoodleMoot in San Francisco. I’m a little disappointed to be missing GoogleIO (since I’ll be flying through San Francisco on the day it starts (en route to Portland). Will have to wait for next year! hehe

I’ll be taking notes and sticking them here!

This past week saw a couple of interesting developments from Google.

Early in the week they joined the ranks of OpenID providers, making it possible for the squillions of Gmail users to use their account to authenticate at sites that support OpenID. At this stage its location appears something of a secret… although this is sure to change. It’s easy: just enter http://openid-provider.appspot.com/your_name_here as your OpenID.

It seems to me there’s huge potential here in education. Initially I’d been somewhat skeptical about OpenID, or at least hesitant; it appeared like a lot of hoo-har to set up our organisation to manage a server for this purpose, and even more hassle to use an external provider. If our setup can switch, however, to using Google Apps for Education, it seems like a complete no-brainer to take advantage of this new development.

Google’s release of their App Engine is an interesting development, most notably in that they’re suggesting that developers migrate to even use their development & deployment technologies (like Bigtable and the Google File System). This moves the product significantly off on a tangent away from other "cloud" solutions like Rackspace’s Mosso facility, where you bring your own software but deploy on their cloud. It’ll be interesting to see how things develop. The Rails devs at TechCrunch have had a go at rolling an initial application… and it looks promising so far. Heck - with the ability to deploy onto Google’s vast array of servers, the sort of issues that Dann and I have had with various hosting providers might make it worth getting into Python. Still, it’s certainly not yet a solution for those with a significant codebase in PHP/Ruby/etc…

Are we seeing the changing landscape of media in Australia as the seeming smaller media companies try to solidify their place in the market as new media providers?

Lets face it - when it comes to media, Australia is oft left behind. We may be a country that is statistically one of the fastest on the uptake of new technology but access to media is limited.

The rest of the developed world deals with media (internet access, paytv etc) very differently to Australia. In places like the US - customers are usually tied to the big nasty corporation to get all their paytv and internet access in the one place. However in Australia - we go the buffet idea - getting pay ty with one place (usually the terrible and pricey Foxtel) and paying another bundle for Internet (again more metered, capped and pricey stuff)

Mostly that has to do with our relatively small population that serves a larger country, and thus it hasn’t been as lucrative for media companies to invest heavily in the sort of infrastructure needed to deliver the content, and thus create a competitive market where there is a bit more hustle for the dollar of the willing user. However the changing way media is delivered has meant that somewhat minor media outlets in Australia  (mostly ISP’s) stand to be major players in the media market given some vision.

I have noted that TPG now offers as part of their ‘bundle’ IPTV. Nothing really standout about that (i.e. IPTV), apart from the simple reality that they see it as a distinctive to promote this in the Australian market.  The ABC announced a few weeks ago that it was aiming to have three online IPTV channels live by mid-year, so there is some genuine willingness to back this frequently trashed technology.

The big questions are:

1. Can one of these small ISP contenders step up ( in the face of expensive data charges from big brother Telstra) and compete with Foxtel in terms of offering a quality internet service and quality tv service?  or
2. Will Foxtel/Telstra see their massive dominance /market position and rollup their internet/paytv service into one massive package…(Foxpond perhaps…?)

I think the time is right to see some of these lesser ISP develop more so into fully fledged media companies, much like Comcast, Verizon have done in the states.  It seems iiNet and Internode are leading the charge with their naked DSL push(plus CEO Simon Hackett has been pretty vocal about the crappy payTV market in Australia and Internode’s opportunities thus..), Optus has a large mobile network, but piggybacks Foxtel for Paytv. I wonder if Soul Communications will be the genuine contender in five years. It is an interesting landscape that is for sure.

DHH announced today that the Rails team is moving to Git. Although this was met with howls of protest from some SVN-loving Windows users (see the comments to David’s post), this can only be a good thing in the longer term.

At TBS, we’ve recently moved to Git for managing our own projects. DHH’s move is definitely a positive step. There are already a stack of resources around to help Rails developers with the transition, my favourite being Scott Chacon’s screencast. Hopefully the days of dodgy, centralised source code management are over! Next task is to get my trusty design buddy over to using MSysGit (Git for Windows users).

It’s a familiar tale: school IT departments expected to perform miracles as they transform precious financial resources into the diverse array of services demanded by today’s teachers and students. One interesting development of the past 12 months or so has been the tailoring of Web 2.0 services for business. Google and others (like Amazon Web Services) are increasingly making it so that companies, schools, etc get little advantage from hosting their own mail… and (it now seems) applications.

I’ve recently been thnking through the merits of Google Apps for education. I think this is definitely worth checking out.

Think about it:

- we and our students use the same applications whether we’re here or at home (or anywhere else for that matter)
- we (i.e. the school) don’t have to store any of this

- it’s 100% school branded (a key difference with our current email software)

- software is automatically upgraded and managed
- spam is automatically filtered
- our students get 6.5GB+ storage EACH in their email

- we get a beautiful set of APIs meaning that we can program stuff on our local network to exchange data with the google setup

- we can shift our focus to the higher-end multimedia, CAD, stuff etc… and on genuine learning technologies, rather than MS Office issues, spam filtering, etc.

- oh, yeah - did I mention it’s FREE?

Robert Scoble (aka the Scobleizer) did an interview recently with a google guy about the new offline features of their docs - v. cool. Check it out >

 Seems it’s time to get serious about raising the bar on my tech skills - particularly syadmin ones.

This month some things on the shopping list are:

1. Improve my text editing skills in Vim with Smylers’ power usage tips and vim creator Moolenaar’s "7 habits of effective Vim"
2.  Get a LOT more familiar with Linux shell utilities like sed and grep
3. Learn how to use the Linux/UNIX make utility
4. Make my own Ubuntu packages for cooler Moodle deployment and, for good measure
5. Build and deploy some Ubuntu server appliances for VMWare using JeOS

Buckle your seat, Dorothy, cos Kansas is going bye-bye!

Over the past few months I’ve switched to using Git for managing source code. Mainly I’ve been using it for small Rails projects and for managing Moodle code changes.

One ongoing frustration has been having to switch to Subversion when working on our main Rails sites, like AAIBS (and this one). Imagine my joy then in discovering Scott Chacon’s great (free!) screencast demonstrating Git with Rails & Capistrano. 

Over the next few days I’m therefore going to be moving this site to Git… and deploying to the GridService at MediaTemple. I’ll be sure to post my deployment scripts here.