Category: Uncategorized

New laptop : Dell Latitude D505

I’ve just got a new laptop, on which I couldn’t resist installing Debian. Here is the report of my setup in case others would need it.

Nice to have 1400×1050 resolution and wifi working. I suspect I haven’t finished with all problems (mainly for suspending, etc.), but looks like it works 😉

Update : I have experienced some strange crash on this system, so I’m not so sure if I would recommend to install the same setup finally… maybe there is a problem with Linux and the hardware support… you’ve been warned in any case 😉

Free maps of … the world ? … uh, Genova

I’m a contributor to the UPCT project whose goal is to produce free geographical data, aka free maps of the world.

I try to collect GPS data whenever I travel, and so did I for my recent trip to Genova to attend OSS2005. I’ve been able to record a track of the flight between Paris and Genova (above Mt Blanc : nice view… too bas I didn’t take a GPS point… nor did I make a picture) and of my wanderings in Genova city.

UPCT is a very interesting project, which may be in the future something as interesting as wikipedia… who knows…

If you are interested in finding out about UPCT, you may have difficulties in finding elements in English, but at least you will find a description in this article.

Gild : very intersting tool for introduction to software development with Eclipse

I’ve discovered a very interesting project, Gild, which was developped by collegues in the Victoria University, for the means of introducing students to both software development and the eclipse tool.

From the abstract of the paper presented at OSS2005 by Daniel German (actually I must confess I’ve had no time yet to read the full paper, and only attended the presentation and talked to Daniel…) :

This paper discusses Gild: An open source, Eclipse-based IDE for teaching and learning programming. Gild was designed to simplify and add pedagogical support to the Eclipse IDE to make it more appropriate for novice programmers and their instructors. Its development has greatly benefited from the ability to study, reuse, and modify existing Eclipse code. The core members of the Gild team are primarily researchers, making the maintenance of a growing code base difficult. It is challenging to create a community of developers because unlike most open source projects the developers (researchers) of Gild are not the main users (novice programmers) of Gild. To overcome this problem, we discuss techniques for making Gild more attractive to skilled developers (professors and graduate students). These techniques include improving instructor support in Gild and developing a grading perspective. We hope that these additions will attract able contributors and make Gild a self-sustaining community.

I find it very interesting as far we are concerned at GET, as we are also trying to teach computer science to our students using the same kind of approach : using libre software tools, and introducing them to the best practices of libre software projects.

We have actually adopted a similar strategy in developping a “scaled-down” sourceforge-like platform in the PicoLibre project, in order for students to discover these kinds of tools without spending the whole projects learning the intricacies of the platform. In this respect I think both tools, PicoLibre and Gild, are really very complementary : one concerning the environment of the project more on the server side, and the other focusing on the IDE on the client side. Our experienced is described in the paper PicoLibre: a free collaborative platform to improve students’ skills in software engineering by Éric Cousin, Gérald Ouvradou, Pascal Pucci, Samuel Tardieu that we had presented at the Second international IEEE conference “Systems, Man and Cybernetics of the twenty-first century”.

Not so surprisingly, both projects seem to suffer the same difficulties in maintaining a live community of contributors around the tools.

Maybe we’ll try Gild and adopt it… and who knows, maybe students of Victoria University will also work on PicoLibre in the future ?

Slides of Open Educational Symposium at OSS2005

I’ve collected slides from the speakers of the Open Educational Symposium at OSS2005… Update : They have been added to the page on the conference’s site, but are still available at : http://www-inf.int-evry.fr/~olberger/OpenEducationalSymposium/OpenEducationalSymposium.html. A report from this symposium will come later.