Moodle, IT and me

Few months ago, I switched from my slow iPhone 3G to the Nexus S. My decision was influenced by the price of $269.

Why I would not switch back on iPhone yet:
- the Android navigation software is awesome. It’s so good that I through my old GPS away. Navigate works in Australia, in France, displays traffic, has a clear 3D view, it’s quick, efficient, and super well integrated to the OS.
- I replaced the phone battery by a bigger one. The phone is now bigger. However I feel secure to use my phone an entire day without the need to be recharged. And it’s actually easy to hold.

Something else making Android attractive to me:
- the todo list widget + next calendar events widget on the dashboard.

Other things worth mentioning but not worth switching :
- quick access to people on the dashboard
- nice bookmark widget
- killing all apps in one touch
- installing apk on the fy
- really good Google service integration

Why I didn’t want to switch to an Android phone a year ago:
- my favorite apps that I was using on my iPhone were not ported. I now find most of them on the Android market or at least some good alternatives.

It was quite a battle to install a LDAP server on my mac and make it work with Moodle. Here are the steps for OpenDS in Mac OSX Lion:

1- I had Moodle installed with Apache LDAP module installed too.

2- I downloaded OpenDS for Mac and installed it.  I changed the hostname for jerome.moodle.local.  Which is translated into dc=jerome,dc=moodle,dc=local. I didn’t change cn= Directory Manager. I set the password to ‘admin’. Finally I selected to generate 5 users (if you missed out this step, you can uninstall and reinstall the server. That’s what I did when I ended up to have some difficulties to create a new user.).
To test if the LDAP server was correctly installed I run the following command line (in OpenDS/bin folder):
./ldapsearch -h 127.0.0.1 -p 1389 -b uid=user2,ou=People,dc=jerome,dc=moodle,dc=local -D “uid=user2,ou=People,dc=jerome,dc=moodle,dc=local” -w admin “(objectClass=*)”

3- I opended the control panel, and changed the user.2 username for user2. i also changed his password for ‘admin’.

4- In the Moodle LDAP settings, I changed the following:

Host URL: 127.0.0.1:1389 (it didn’t work without the port LDAP number)
Distinguished name: uid=user2,ou=People,dc=jerome,dc=moodle,dc=local
Password: admin
Contexts: ou=People,dc=jerome,dc=moodle,dc=local (you need this entire linet, just ‘ou=People’ doesn’t work.)
User attribut: uid

Note: disconnect your computer from the network, otherwise the LDAP server could send requests everywhere and could end up to be banned by your sys admin. I didn’t try, but I’ve been told

I’ve just pushed a beta version of my first enrolment plugin. Once enabled, teachers with the right capabilities can send email invitations. Each email contains a token that can be used once. When the user clicks on the link (s)he is automatically enrolled in the course. It’s currently in beta.

Fix coming soon:
* the user should be redirected to an automatic enrol script if he is not logged before clicking on the link. (Fixed – 2/11/11)
* teacher should not be able to add multiple instances of the plugin to a same course. (Fixed – 2/11/11)

There are also few more tests to do.

You can download it and submit pull request on Github.

The updated beta is available on github. I extended the Google Oauth2 auhentication plugin to support Facebook and Windows Live (Messenger Connect). I guess the plugin should aim most of the people now. I hesitated to add Windows Live but my father only use Hotmail, so I added it for him. I though to add Twitter but it seems they don’t support Oauth 2 yet. Anyway I doubt anyone signed up on Twitter and is not registered on at least one of the three other implemented services.

How it works:
- like I described in my previous post for the Google Oauth2 plugin.
- if you connect with the same email address with two different providers, then you are logged as the same user. Otherwise a different user is created for each different email addresses. I invite you to save the user/computer default choice in a cookie and only display the default provider next time the user come back to the login page (but with a little link to see the other provider if ever it was a public computer) .
Live demo 

I’m happy to announce I’m releasing my first authentication plugin for Moodle 2. It is working but still in beta, and it will stay in beta till the already good looking Google Oauth2 is final – they are themself waiting for the Oauth2 draft to go final.

How does work the plugin:
1- it displays a Google authentication request window. Only email and basic information (name, locale, first name…) are requested from the user. Then user click on ‘Allow access’.
2- if the user email doesn’t exist in the Moodle DB, then it creates a new user and it logs the user in.
3- if the user email exists and if the user authentication is set to Googleoauth2, then it logs the user in.

What is not working because not implemented by Google Oauth2 yet:
-  The Google authentication window offers to the user to remember the authorization.

Get the plugin from Moodle.org
Get the plugin from Github – Installation instruction are in the README file.
See a live demo on Socialfutsal.com 

I wrote  a Git start guide for developing with Moodle sometimes ago. I still use it time to time to remember some commands. Feel welcome to improve it, but try to keep it as short as possible, there are more complete Git Moodle docs (they are linked in the guide).

From Ellen Van Deelen

It’s been 3 months that I upgraded my MacBook Pro. I haven’t noticed any SSD performance degradation. Between the 3rd and 5th week, my Mac crashed 6 times – some OSX fatal errors. But the problem went away by itself.

At this moment, in term of performance/portability, I believe it is better to upgrade a 13” to OWC SSD/8Gb than buying the most powerfull 15”.

Some more benchmark

Boot: 1st week after upgrade: 35s – 3 months later: 22s
Netbeans search: 1st week after upgrade: 45s – 3 months later: 43s
Surprisingly, the results look better. I did some ‘cache and software’ cleanup, it could be the cause. Or Apple discretely started some SSD optimization.

I just discover this show on youtube. It’s the ‘Master chef’ of soccer. It’s quite pleasant to watch.