Moodle, IT and me

We’ve just received the iPad at Moodle. I’ve played one minute with it. My first feelings are:
* Browsing the web is awesome specially with a the big virtual keyboard.
* If on iPhone I didn’t care about Flash, I’ve been little frustrated to not be able to play my blog videos.
* Some javascript will need to be modified all over the web to match touch screen UI (like voting stars).
* As empty of software as the iPad was, when I first ran the iPod app, it took 2 seconds to launch. A bit strange…
* Waiting for testing a bit more the device

I was really happy that Steam released a Mac version of their gaming portal. I was also very surprised that it came with that many games, including Portal for free. But what a shock to discover that Steam does not run on any network administrated by a professional.

If you want to try to run Steam on a university network or on a company network, you will make laugh your system administrator. Steam requires not less that 40 ports to be opened. Obviously your system administrator will refuse to open that many ports.

Source: my sys admin and the very good Steam support (it’s not sarcastic, they do answer quickly)

26th May 2010 Update

Since this morning, Steam got updated, and I can now access to the service. What a fantastic game service for Mac! Just waiting for real blockbuster to come on the platform… and buy a new Macbook Pro

It’s not that easy to find a ISO 3166-2 country region code file. After some Google searches, I ended up on a Debian page with the ISO codes. The thing requires Git. As I will install it soon or later on my Mac OSX, I decided it was the good moment and I installed Git with an installer. I’m not that much a command line guy

Then I retrieved the git repository of the Debian page:

git clone git://git.debian.org/git/iso-codes/iso-codes.git

After 10 minutes, I got all the stuff, and found a file of 300Ko (iso-codes/iso_3166_2/iso_3166_2.xml). Note that they also have different translation for it, they did a good job at Debian.

Finally I just needed a little PHP script. I quickly found one about the country codes and modified it to support regions:

<?php
$filecontent = file_get_contents('iso_3166_2.xml');
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($filecontent);

$out = "<?php
$regions = array();
";

foreach ($xml->iso_3166_country as $country)
{
    foreach ($country->iso_3166_subset as $regions) {
       foreach ($regions->iso_3166_2_entry as $region) { 
          $out .= "\$regions['".$country->attributes()->code."']['".$region->attributes()->code."']='"
                  .addslashes($region->attributes()->name)."';";

       }
   }
}

file_put_contents('isoregionnames.php', $out);

I don’t know why, but yesterday my Time Machine external hard drive would not show up in the finder, neither being detected by Disk Utility. However on a linux machine, I could “see” the hard drive, and the lighting LED indicated it was still working. To display it again I had to enter the following line in a Mac console:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

Then restart, the hard drive should be displayed. Set it back to FALSE. Then restart a final time.
Hope this post will help some people.

Download the MAMP Moodle package and follow the installation process.
Note: when I run MAMP, I changed the Apache Port to 80 into MAMP preferences.

Then follow all the steps on this page: http://www.webopius.com/content/355/getting-mamp-working-with-ssl-on-os-x (Note: I didn’t set the optional virtualhost). This will not be enough to make Moodle works straight with https, that’s why I’m writing this post. But you’re almost there

In /Application/MAMP/conf/apache/ssl.conf, change the document root (DocumentRoot) for the one you have into /Application/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf

Turn off MAMP if it’s not already done

Go into your apache folder (‘cd /Applications/MAMP/bin/apache2′)

Run your apache 2 server into ssl mode (‘sudo ./apachectl startssl’)

Bingo, it should work.

Today after posting about how cool the iPhone is, I could not start few applications that I bought!!! After few seconds, the applications were killed. In front of this massive problem, I decided to reset the settings and reboot the phone. It still didn’t work.

Hopefully after looking at some blog comments I found out the solution. I launched iTunes on my computer, downloaded a free app (iDare), and sync-ed the phone. Then all worked again. I could also see that the App Store application on the iPhone told me that I had 3 new update. I’m quite sure there is a bug on the App Store application messing the iPhone database.

Hopefully it will help some people. Have a good weekend