Alex Little

For a project which I may be working on in the near future, I need to think about how I can measure user’s bandwidth. Although there are many tools available for doing this already (such as speedtest.net and many others), these generally all require java or a recent version of flash to be installed. Plus they appear mainly geared towards testing a broadband connection, rather than a dial up (or other slow type of connection). I’d like to avoid creating a program that needs to be installed on a users machine as I need to keep it as simple as possible.

My current thinking, avoiding any installation and as little effort as possible on the users part, is to use a simple webpage with a small piece of AJAX to download a file of fixed (known) size and just use javascript to calculate how long it takes to retrieve. I realise that there are obvious drawbacks to this approach:

• hard to measure latency
• accuracy of javascript timer
• other processes running on the machine
• proxy or caching servers getting in the way

However, I don’t need something extremely accurate, just something that is easy to use and gives a reasonable approximation of a users bandwidth (which will be dependent on a huge number of factors anyway, such as time of day, no of other users etc), is it 2kbps, 20kbps or 200kbps?

To get a better idea of the usual speed of a users connection, I can attempt to download several files of different sizes (from different servers), and take averages.

Is there anything I’m missing that would make this a really bad way to approach this? Or would it produce results so inaccurate they’d be useless?

Seeing myself getting completely locked into using Google products, I thought it might be an interesting experiment to try not to use any Google services for a month. [I'm also still a little annoyed with them for not sorting out the problem I still have with Google Groups].

Perhaps I’ll find some other interesting tools and services, or maybe not, but at least it will push me to explore and look for them, rather than going into default ‘use Google’ mode.

The main Google services I use are search (obviously), mail, reader and alerts. A while ago I was also using docs, but stopped doing so once I’d been in Ethiopia and couldn’t rely on an internet connection. So what are going to be my alternatives?

Search
Not a huge choice here, but then I don’t tend to do very sophisticated searches. Going to give Bing a try, and maybe Wolfram.

I did question whether or not I should exclude myself from using Google for search, after all, then where do I stop – not using YouTube? But I decided it would be good to force myself to try out some other search engines.

GMail
Although I read my mail through my GMail account, it’s usually a forwarded copy from my own domain. I could, with minimal effort switch to the Squirrelmail or Horde mail interfaces provided by my hosting provider. This will work fine in the UK, but back at Mekelle Uni, these interfaces run off non-standard ports, which are blocked by the Uni proxy. So, I’ve installed RoundCube to use instead. It has quite a basic interface like SquirrelMail, but has some Ajax features such as drag and drop. I don’t think I’ll miss GMail labels, but it’ll take some getting use to not having the conversation style layout of messages, to which I’ve now become accustomed.

Google Reader
Again, this wasn’t a huge deal to switch from. I installed Tiny Tiny RSS on my domain and imported the OPML from Google Reader. The functionality is very similar to Google Reader, but it has the advantage that I can choose to cache images from feeds. It may not sound like a huge deal, but it will mean when I’m in Ethiopia that I’ll be able to view the photos and other images from blogspot feeds, which are otherwise blocked in Ethiopia.

Google Alerts
This was the only service where I failed to find an equivalent. There are other alert services (alerts.com, Yahoo alerts and more) but these seem very restrictive and targeted at people wanting updates on news, sports, stocks etc. rather than general web and blog alerts. So, for now, I’ve kept my Google Alerts in place, but I’m very willing to try out other alerting services if anyone can point me in the right direction.

I like the idea of being more in control of the tools and services I’m using, despite the fact that I need to be more self-reliant for backups etc. Having my own domain (and associated email), made it relatively easy to install and run roughly equivalent services without huge upheaval.

Will the reduced (or just changed?) functionality and usability make me miss Google too much? I’ll find out in the next month, or maybe just the next couple of days.

After a little time away from programming and active web development, I thought I’d get back into things by giving myself a little project to create a Google maps and Upcoming mashup.

At the moment it’s fairly basic as I’ve only spent a few hours working on it, but seems to be working well. I’ve deliberately tried to keep the number of options and fields down to a minimum (I know there are far more options and functions I could add).

Enter some search text in the ‘What?’ field, then a location in the ‘Where?’, finally select ‘When?’. All the events matching your search (within a 50mile radius of the location) will be shown on the map. Click on the marker to get more info about the event.

Neither the ‘what?’ or ‘where?’ field are required, either or both may be left blank. If the ‘what?’ is omitted then all events in the area are shown and if the ‘where?’ is omitted then the centre of the current view of the map is used.

All the events are from Upcoming and you can use their interface to add your own event, to then appear on the map.

For the technically minded, the site uses the Google Maps API (including for geocoding the location) and the Upcoming API.

If you know of any other feeds I could use for adding events to the map, then please let me know so I can try adding them.

I’d also be grateful for any feedback, problems or suggestions – just leave a comment below.

I’ve used Camtasia Studio (Windows) a few times before for creating some training/how-to screencasts, but now I wanted to have a go doing something similar using open source software (on Ubuntu Jaunty) instead. To make it more interesting I also wanted to run it all on my Asus Eee PC (4G) – not exactly a machine designed for heavy video processing.

First issue was how to record the screen, for this I used RecordMyDesktop. A very simple program to install and run, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Selecting the area to record (I wasn’t selecting whole window) was a bit fiddly and sometimes took me several attempts to capture the right area, without chopping off a side or two.

If you’re recording a for a long time and your screensaver kicks in (or screen goes blank for power saving), you’ll need to disable the screensaver and power saving – unless you particularly need a recording of it.

What I had most trouble with – and only came up with a workarounds solution to – was capturing the audio. RecordMyDesktop wil capture the audio fine but had problems getting the recording volume level right without creating a lot of hissing. The hardware on the Asus for sound isn’t exactly fantastic. In the end I found that I had best results when using a jack lead to plug the headphone output into the microphone input! If anyone has a better solution to this or some advice about on the recording levels to capture the audio more reliably, then please let me know.

So, now I’ve created a .ogv (OGG video) file but want to edit it a little. I wanted a really simple video editor for 2 reasons, firstly I don’t wand to spend the time learning a bit video editing package and, more practically, secondly, I don’t have a huge amount of disk space left on my 4Gb drive!

I opted for Aviremux, though unfortunately this doesn’t accept OGG video files, so I used mencoder to convert to AVI (basic instructions).

For the actual editing I used Aviremux. I found it very easy to get started with and use – unlike some other video editing software.

In the end I found that my original screen recording had sound out of synch with the video – not in the initial few mins of the capture, but further in. I’m not sure why this should be the case – if anyone has any idea why, I’d be pleased to hear them.

Overall, it was a little frustrating getting this to work. I’ve not managed to achieve what I set out to do, but think this was more to do with the hardware than anything else.

After a long time of not doing much (ok, any) development on my Moodle online users map block, I’ve finally had chance to return to the code to make the necessary changes for the block to run on Moodle 2.

It was always going to be tricky trying to maintain this block whilst in Ethiopia, not only with the slow internet connection, but the university firewall blocks many ports and this is my normal internet access point. So now that I’m temporarily back in the UK, I thought I’ve got chance to get back up to speed.

In the end only minor changes were needed to get the block running on Moodle 2. If you’re downloading the block from the Moodle modules & plugins pages, then please check you get the right one (v1.9 and earlier or v2) for your Moodle installation.

If you’re getting the code via CVS then HEAD currently contains the version for v2 and the MOODLE_19_STABLE branch has the version for 1.9 and earlier.

I’ve also set up a demonstration Moodle site so you can see the block in action. Just sign up, and you should see yourself marked on the Google map. You may have to wait until the location lookup script has run before you appear on the map, but this should only be a few minutes.

Please let me know if you have any problems with either getting the block to run on Moodle 2 or with the demonstration site.

Mike Ellis posted an interesting article up about OpenID, which is quite critical of OpenID and although I do like OpenID, I agree with much of what he’s saying. Maybe I like OpenID because it’s a way of reducing the number of usernames/passwords I need to remember, rather than being a good way of reducing password overload.

I’ve recently been in conversation with the OU Communications group about how they can OpenID-enable some of their sites and my feeling is that it’s going to be difficult explain what OpenID is how to use it. I feel that to be able to use an OpenID at all you need a basic grasp of how it functions, which may be why it appeals to techies? I’m sure using a url as your identity is going to be an alien concept to people used to using usernames & passwords.

Also there’s plenty of room for confusion when logging into an Open University website using an OpenID… is my OpenID something the Open University gives me?

“Does MSG do multi-user chat?” is something we’ve been asked about countless times, and our response has always been no, and we’re not intending to add this feature, on the basis that many other clients already offer this functionality and we’re not here to reinvent the wheel.

Well, this is only partly true! The MSG web-client interface doesn’t offer the facility to create and join chat rooms, but the server that MSG runs on does (OpenFire Jabber server). This means that if you have an account on our MSG server, you can log into this account with another Jabber compliant client, which does have chat rooms.

Liam and I have been trying this out this morning using the Pidgin client (he’s also just had a meeting with few people using it) and all seems to be running well, these are the steps you need to go through…

1. Create account on MSG (use the register link)
2. Install Pidgin and connect to the msg server (msg.open.ac.uk) using you rnew username and password
3. From the ‘Buddies’ menu in pidgin, select ‘add chat’
4. Create a name for your room (only seems to like alpha-numeric characters, so no spaces)
5. Fill in the options you want, or just leave on the defaults

We found the ‘invite’ function a bit flaky (didn’t track down the exact cause or where it was going wrong), but you can just give people the name of the room you’ve created for them to join.

Any feedback/comments etc welcome

I’ve just updated our OpenID server with a new site design (which is more OU-brand like) and also a much cleaner interface. There are also a few minor changes that I’ve made, e.g. showing people what their OpenID URL is and I’m going to update some of the help documentation too later this pm. This is essentially in preparation for me to hand over the server for someone else to look after

Have just spotted this posting about the Remember The Milk GMail extension for FireFox, so you can manage your RTM tasks directly from GMail. Looks pretty good (saves having 2 browser windows open), but seems its something else I’ll need to wait for, as you need the most recent version of GMail, which hasn’t yet been rolled out to my account (should note that now I do have the offlline version of Google Docs!). Only thing I’m not too sure about is how it will look on the small screen of my Asus Eee – might just be too much to squeeze onto one page – but will give it  go anyway….

I noticed the announcement the other week about Google Docs adding the capability to work in offline mode (using Google Gears) which is great – especially for me when I’m going away and may only have intermittent/unreliable internet access. Unfortunately the capability hasn’t filtered through to my Google Docs account , but hopefully it will soon (I noticed their release mentions it’ll take a few weeks to be available to all)