Semester approaches

The semester is coming at us fast. Early in the summer, the plan was to replace the BCRC server. In the end, for various reasons, we didn't quite make that happen. For the past few days, I've been sorting out how to build resources for the fall on the old server. Making good progress.

Yesterday, I finally wrote a new script that builds an instance of drupal for a course site using symlinks from a template and runs the database dump, .htaccess, and settings.php through sed to rewrite the course specific parts. It works perfectly except for setting the name and slogan of the site. Upon reflection, I think I'm going to install drush and then call drush after the site is built to set those.

As if I needed another project to work on, I decided to involve myself when the department wanted to have digital signage. I've been skeptical about buying one of the closed-source solutions, since I've heard nightmarish stories about trying to support them on other parts of the campus. They wanted to show a video on one in the ISB and several faculty spent hours trying to make it work before they got me, with ffmpeg to begin systematically exploring the fileformat/codec space until we found one that would work. Stupid. We bought an inexpensive LG display and a MacMini and are planning to use this recipe. Basically, you create a unique URL at your drupal site that presents content with a special theme optimized for your display.

The recipe is really cool. I showed it to Tom to see if he would be interested in working on the special theme. He was super excited because the Dean's office has been interested in solving the digital signage problems they already have.

I've run into some roadblocks. Apple just rev'ed macmini line and so the hardware architecture is completely new. I tried using our existing macosx install and it wouldn't work. I explored putting ubuntu on the macmini and found that the macmini hasn't been out long enough for ubuntu to work on it either: I couldn't even get the installer to boot. I expect it will be fixed in a few weeks, but that was frustrating. So I went back to macosx and built a unique radmind image to support display machines. All the machine has to do is run either plainview or firefox in kiosk mode.

I also ran into a bit of skepticism from the chairman who wondered why we couldn't just use Powerpoint. Sigh... He's concerned about getting faculty to contribute and review content. I pointed out that the person who's probably going to enter most of the content is already putting up the announcements on the website and this will just become an extension of that. If they had to pull all the information out of powerpoint slides to make announcements, it would be more than twice as much work.

I've got my Esperanto course basically ready to go. It's always a challenge to guess how much time outside of class students will be willing to invest. I've aimed at 2 hours. I've outlined 4 tasks to do each week that I estimate will each take around a half hour: 2 lessons at lernu and two chapters from Bonvenon en nia mondo. I think if they actually do everything, by the end they should be pretty fluent in Esperanto -- I guess we'll see.

The writing class I've taught often enough that I'm not worried about it. I still haven't come up with a good theme for the writing class, though. I usually try to come up with some kind of unifying theme that ties all the activities together: invasive species or something. I've been thinking about doing this one about models. When we have to do our final research project in late November, it will be warmer to study a model, rather than try to collect data in the field. I also need to think up a good object for them to investigate during the first day...