Its Halloween, and the Zombies have attacked!

There has been a bit of a  struggle to get the "cron" job running on the Moodle setup.  cron.php is an admin routine that is run every few minutes to do a number of maintenance things, like pulling in information feeds, external blogs, clearing away pending messages, etc.  It need a bit of setting up and a couple of different mechanisms using the Windows Task Manager had not been working correctly.

I had settled on a way to initiate the cron.php script by calling it from a job every few minutes which launched the Firefox/Mozilla browser run the job, and then should have terminated.  I got that suggestion off blog postings by others who has similar problems getting cron to run.  It seemed to work after I set it up on testing, so I left it for a day or so...  But when I came back... spookily... there were many "Zombie" processes running.  My colleague experienced in these matters tells me that happens when you launch a browser to run a script in a web page and he had seen this issue before.

We are also still working to get the outward bound e-mail going on our Moodle 2.1.2 setup on Windows.  This is way more complicated than it should be with many layers involved.  Settings are all over the place in Apache, PHP, Moodle and beyond your machine in the SMTP server you use, as well as perhaps in multiple firewalls and out bound messaging spam filters on the way.  We have been gradually picking our way through these layers.  Our University will not allow e-mail out with a "from" address that is not validated as a legitimate University address - sensibly.  So we are having to use a "Moodle Admin" address personally tied to a staff member at the moment, which is not ideal. We have established a "noreply" address that will validate now too. More layers to work out before its working properly I am afraid.

In general, I also am finding a lot of Moodle settings are hidden away a bit or are in several places or in multiple layers whic all need to coordinate. Things like e-mail setup is under Site Administration -> Plugins -> Message Outputs -> E-mail.  The site admin/support e-mail addresses also appear there and in Site Administration -> Server -> Site Contact.  Rooting round to change the roles an individual is assigned is also convoluted, rather than just a set of check boxes off the user page you have to edit roles... and not via the edit button but by knowing to click on the role title hyperlink. And some roles are considered "System Roles" which are changed on a different web page.

There is an iPhone/iPod/iPad app called "My Moodle" which provides mobile device access to Moodle 2.1+. See http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-moodle/id461289000

The experimental Moodle 2.1.2 site at AIAI now has mobile web services enabled as required to support this app - they are off by default. See http://docs.moodle.org/20/en/Enable_mobile_web_services

My initial attempts to snap a screen shot image with an iPod and upload it via the My Moodle app indicated the file exceeded the maximum upload file size, yet the PNG file involved was only 44KB... and our site is set for upload file limits of 8MB to 128MB depending on what layer is filtering.

 A future road map for development of the My Mobile app is available. See http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Mobile_app

I have been testing elements of the SLoodle Second Life toolkit version 2.0.10 alpha alongside Moodle 2.1.2 and the SLoodle module 2.0.10 alpha with a few revisions being made by Edmund Elgar, a SLoodle developer and one of the owners of Avatar Classroom (http://avatarclassroom.com). The testing is throwing up some minor issues and a couple of PHP scripts have been changed as a result.  They will appear in the next alpha test build of SLoodle as the developers move towards the first beta version suitable for Moodle 2.

To date the tests have included:

1. chat link up between a Second Life classroom and the Moodle chat tool, and logging of authorised by individual avatars in world
2. in-world assessment delivery drop box
3. presentation screen using shared media web based image, video and web page URL assets
4. multiple choice voting and presentation display

You may have heard that John McCarthy died this week. See 

• http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/october/john-mccarthy-obit-102511.html
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/25/john-mccarthy

John was an early pioneer of AI, inventor of Lisp, and indeed originator of the term "AI" in 1956. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_(computer_scientist). It is good to see how broad and expansive John McCarthy's vision for computing was:

From Wikipedia: In 1961, he was the first to publicly suggest (in a speech given to celebrate MIT's centennial) that computer time-sharing technology might lead to a future in which computing power and even specific applications could be sold through the utility business model (like water or electricity).

Take a look also at his short sci-fi story "The Robot and the Baby" for some great fiction (or is it?) about future robotics. See

• http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/robotandbaby/robotandbaby.html

I worked with John both before and after his formal retirement, and it was a very enjoyable experience. His interest in formalising the notion of "context" was his most recent work which I spoke to him about. The ability to "assert that the proposition p is true in the context c" is a key to much of what we do in planning... and my own work some 30 years ago was involved with something I called "functions in context" that had similar aims.

Here is my assessment as a trainee hairdresser on blow drying... from the first go to my final attempt on a live model today.

Emma very patiently let me do her hair today during my training session:

I now have access to the Hairdressing Foundations e-Teaching course at http://eteachhairdressing.co.uk along with some exercises to complete there.  I have also been given Hairdressing Trainee Model Sheets showing my experience and an assessment of my progress.  They will appear in my Hairdresser Training Photo Log at http://atate.org/mscel/hair/ and are available via a link on my new Personal Learning Space at http://atate.org/space/

For a full photo diary and report on my ULOE11 Learning Challenge see http://atate.org/mscel/hair/

After a small change in a login method made by Edmund Edgar, one of the SLoodle developers, to one file at mod/set-1.0/shared_media/index.php the 2.0.10-alpha release of SLoodle works in the SLoodle classroom on the VCE region in Second Life connected to Moodle 2.1.2.

This change will be in the next build.The experimental classroom is at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/VCE/223/226/23

I have been in contact with the SLoodle development and test community in the last few week, as they are preparing a release that can work with the latest Moodle 2.1+.  The time now seems right to try the alpha code version they have prepared, and after a brief exchange this week updated to 2.0.10 alpha.  This could be near to being set as the first Moodle 2.0+ and 2.1+ SLoodle release. Previous versions only worked with the older Moodle 1.9+ reelases.

I have also been in touch with the SLoodle web site folks to point make suggestions on improving the descriptions of how to obtain and build a SLoodle setup.  These changes were made to http://sloodle.org on 23-Oct-2011.

I now have the 2.0.10 alpha Moodle modules zip distribution and in world SLoodle rezzer object from the "Fragile" systems dispenser in Second Life on the Chilbo region:

• http://download.socialminds.jp/sloodle/sloodle_v2.0.10-alpha.zip
• http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Chilbo/181/19/93

So, these are ready to start testing a SLoodle classroom in Second Life with our Moodle 2.1.2 setup. I have made notes and given links to assist people intererested in Moodle and SLoodle at http://openvce.net/sloodle

Addendum: Cron job now set to run every 5 minutes to handle messaging and other matters.  Set up as scheduled task on the server.  See http://docs.moodle.org/20/en/Cron

I have now used the admin account to set my self with a role of "course creator".  Logging back on as myself I had the extra site administration menu to create a course.  The setup was pretty easy and I set up a sample "IDEL11 Moodle" course... adding in a few initial "blocks" for a course collaborative Wiki (choosing simple visual NWiki editing style), a survey element, and a simple radio button style quiz showing everyone the answers to date before and after the vote.

The site uses the latest stable Moodle 2.1.1.  It is not set up to scale or be properly managed so we will just add students manually for our testing. But after I get some of the basics I would be happy to let anyone on the IDEL11 course join a sample "IDEL11 Moodle" course as a student if they want to look round or have not used Moodle before.

When I have things working reasonably, I would be happy to manually add users accounts with role "Student" for other IDEL11 participants who wish to explore Moodle a little.