Alex Little

Ever since I started working on MSG we’ve been asked for extra functionality to be added, most notably group-chat and option to have audio/video chat. We’ve always tried to resist giving in to these requests – on the basis that other IM services already do these things so why reinvent them, also, it’s all open source so if you can add them if you want!

However we’ve kinda given in to one of these, the video/audio chat one, the reason being that it’s actually relatively little work – we already have a service (FlashMeeting) which provides this type of functionality – so just need to link the 2 together. Well, we’ve nearly got this finished so when you’re in a chat session, there’s a one click launch flashmeeting – which automatically books the meeting and gives you the link to it…. so far so good – and also dubiously solves the group chat issues, since flashmeeting is multi-user rather than 1-1 (in fact better at multi-user than 1-1)…. but then we realised that we’ll only be able to apply this solution to the OpenLearn server.

The FlashMeeting and MSG OpenLearn servers have the exact same user base and account ids/emails etc all match up – so it’s quite trivial, however we run into problems with our general FlashMeeting and MSG servers as they have different user bases and even different policies on who can get accounts on each server. FlashMeeting accounts are only created by the FM team (you can’t self register – well, not without an OU email address?), but MSG has (or rather, will very shortly have) the ability for anyone to register – so we can’t then automatically auto create accounts the FM server. I know there are ways we _could_ do this but too many variables and too much if.. else if.. else if.. else.. code for my liking Another case for us to seriously look into whether OpenID and oAuth can really help solve these types of problem for us.

There are other services that we could use (recently found MeBeam – or rather they found us) which offer free to use, no-registration multi-user chat/audio/video facilities. However, we’ve not finally decided on any of these yet… and any other suggestions for services we could link to gratefully received

I’ve (finally) updated the MSG Netvibes widget so that it can connect to the msg-openlearn server (more info). Has taken a bit of time because it needed some changes making on the msg-openlearn server too to allow HttpBasicAuthentication.

We’ve (finally!) got round to releasing the chat history function on the live OpenLearn server (more details).. so pleased we’ve now got that done

Having ‘fun’ this morning trying to figure out another little bug which I need to get fixed to get the chat history working properly on our MSG servers running on *nix. The problem is related to the case sensitivity of table names… we have the table (in MySQL) ‘jiveProperty’ and when I try to select from this table (using the given camel case tablename) from my java class in my servlet, I get the error that table ‘jiveproperty’ doesn’t exist (note the case).

However if I run the same code from a jsp it works fine… so it appears to me that something is turning the table name in my java class from camel case to all lower case, but this isn’t happening for my jsp pages – which are running from the same servlet container, so should be using the same mysql connector classes and settings.

any ideas???

Update (7/11)… problem turned out to be that when we overwrote the compiled classes in the servlet container and restarted tomcat, the tomcat work directory was still using the old version of the class. So before starting tomcat again we needed to clear out the work directory to make sure the new class was being used.

I’ve just made a few updates to the online users map block:

• made the initial centre point and zoom level options in the block settings
• Fixed a bug with getting the lat/lng of locations when not url encoded
• Applied the moodle “fullnamedisplay” setting for mouse overs on the map
• Translated into French and Hungarian – not by me, but by Valery Fremaux and Peter Csaszar-Cs – cheers

Spent the last couple of days at the OpenLearn conference, which was all quite interesting, although maybe not directly relevant to my day-to-day work – the things that were really relevant I should know about already!! – but interesting nonetheless. I won’t write about all the presentations I went to as there was some active blogging on all the sessions – so pointless for me to replicate all that here. The sessions I found most interesting were… John Seely Brown, Alan Cann, Erik Duval, Ray Corrigan and Tony Hirst.

One thing I did notice was that whereever Open Educational Resources (OERs) were discussed it generally referred to content – and essentially static content at that. Whenever tools were discussed they were as a surrounding/supporting activity rather than being OERs in their own right – as mentioned in the wikipedia OER article.

I’m currently at the OpenLearn conference and have helping with the live blogging effort on the Ochre website. However I’m finding this a little tricky – I’d be fine taking notes then writing up later, but my brain doesn’t work quickly enough to form sentences worth posting up as people are presenting. Think the best bet for me is to listen to the presentations then write up my overall thoughts at the end.

Think I may be making thing even harder for myself by writing to this blog and the Ochre blog at the same time…!

Came back from holiday yesterday (see the pics!) , to find a stack of emails about problems with MSG crashing IE. This is a bit odd as we’ve not updated MSG for a little while, so strange that it just seems to have started occuring. It seems quite an erratic problem, but it does bring the whole browser down – something I find a little odd for a purely javascript application.

I’m really hoping to get this fixed very soon, but haven’t yet found the root cause, I can reliable recreate the issue, so just need to find why it’s happening.

Plus I need to get my presentation for next weeks OpenLearn conference written sometime soon!

Update (29th Oct)… I have now got the problem resolved, though still don’t know the real root cause. I fixed it by going back through the changes I’ve made recently and seeing at what point the error started occuring.
The change which appears to have been causing the error was when I switched from using <a href=”javascript:….”> to using (what I thought was the proper way!) of adding/removing event listeners. The actual problem occured with the call to detach event, although it didn’t fail everytime – it would work for the first few times and then randomly cause the browser to crash. I did notice that the carsh would only happen if I had the MSG client and the referring site (the one with the users presence icon) open at the same time, if only one was open the crash wouldn’t occur.

For info this was the code that was causing problems:

var oldImg = presenceNode.firstChild;
//remove any current listeners
if(oldImg.removeEventListener){ // Mozilla, Netscape, Firefox
oldImg.removeEventListener('click', launchClick, false);
oldImg.removeEventListener('click', readMessageClick, false);
} else { // IE
oldImg.detachEvent('onclick', launchClick);
oldImg.detachEvent('onclick', readMessageClick);
}


So I replaced this with the code below that just alters the location and title of the link (also a bit of adjusting to add the <a> in):

var oldAnchor = presenceNode.firstChild;
var newAnchor = oldAnchor.cloneNode(true);
newAnchor.href = "javascript:readMessageClick();";
newAnchor.title = MSGAPIconf.str_oneMessageUnread;

So, glad to have got it fixed, but would be even better to know why this was really happening at all!

Update Number 2 (1st Nov) – The fix has now been made live on the MSG-OpenLearn servers.

Over the last few days I’ve been taking a look at OpenId and how we could use it to solve some of the single sign on problems that we have – and in the process making some of the KMi tools OpenId-enabled.

We would like to set up our own OpenId server, mainly out of interest, but also so not then relying on an external service to be our OpenId provider. Whilst there seems to be a fair amount of documentation and usable code out there related to making your site (esp blog) able to be an OpenId consumer, there seems to be very little about the OpenId server.

There are a few OpenID server libraries available and standalone servers, but generally they appear to be very poorly documented. I was just looking at libraries/servers for PHP or Java (our ‘normal’ development platforms), but some lacked clear instructions on how to set them up, or the examples didn’t work. Out of the 5 or 6 that I tried, I was unable to get any of them working – ok, I’ve not spent a huge amount of time looking at these, but with most I was pretty stumped as to where to even start getting them running.

I know some people might say that many of these are open source projects, so if you don’t like it then do something about it (write some docs, get the examples working etc), but I just don’t have the time at the moment to try and figure them out in that much detail. Maybe the people who have got them running could write some clear(er) documentation?

I think it’s in the interests of the OpenId Foundation to make help these OpenId server projects improve dramatically if OpenId is going really make a difference to the single sign on problem. My feeling is that most organisations would not want their logins handled/maintained by some outside service, so they’d want to be their own OpenId provider. So if stable & easy to setup/use/integrate OpenId servers aren’t available, then this will limit the take up of OpenId by organisations who have the same issues we do in KMi, with tools/services needing different logins.

Just been having a tidy up of my RSS feeds – I had some in Google Reader and some in Netvibes and some bookmarked in FireFox, which all seemed a bit daft, so I’ve moved them all to Google Reader. This now means that the only thing I’ve got left on my Netvibes page is the GMail widget and my MSG widget – which now makes my Netvibes page redundant, I’m usually logged in to MSG via MSGAlert seperately anyway, so that basically leaves GMail – and if that’s all that’s left, I’d just go straight to GMail.

Not really sure what I think about that – maybe it’s just the way I’ve been using Netvibes and the widgets I’ve been adding…