LeMill Blog

During last weeks there have been an insidous defect with print resources: you can create them, and they seem to be saved properly, but when trying to download a newly uploaded pdf, it will give an 8kb file that won’t open in pdf viewer.

Last week we became aware of this defect, and found that all of the new print resources were saved in temporary folders and not in their proper places. All of the print resources created before thursday, 19th were moved to right place and should work fine.  At sunday we finally found the cause: After any object is renamed or moved, there are certain scripts that need to be run, but these are run in such way that if there are errors, they are not visible in usual places and running of these scripts just stops, thus leaving some important cleaning operations undone. Now print resources should work fine. Also this was the real cause behind many problems we have had lately with broken catalog objects breaking some collections or member portfolios.

Now we still have to repair those print resources created between thursday evening and monday midday, and check the catalog once more for new broken resources. But in total things should be better now: there are no data lost, and recent slowdowns are also caused by time-consuming creation of error messages and extended looking for missing objects.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Some things went wrong with the last upgrade. We replaced the old WYSIWYG text editor with the new one that supports also Safari browser. You can see the new editor in Methods and Tools section. Unfortunately the editor is not working correctly in the web page and exercise templates (#1927). The second major defect is related to presentation template. People receive an error message after the presentation is uploaded (#1929).

It might take more time to fix these defects. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Update: both problems were fixed on 09.11

At tuesday, 27.10 there still may be problems with some broken search results, but they will be fixed during the day. Also some of the background installations to allow nicer math equations and saving collections as pdf are done today, but they shouldn’t affect LeMill use. Small slowdowns may occur when some of the servers are restarted.  I will comment here on how things are proceeding.

We have finally a spot to do our much needed upgrade! It will require taking the service down to safely upgrade all of the resources without breaking references or having other unintended consequences. We’ll try to put the service back on as soon as it is safe to do so, but there may still be some weird behaviour while the less critical upgrades are running.

Upgrade mentioned in previous post, originally planned for 28.9-29.9 is postponed to 10.10-11.10. The upgrade didn’t happen because of unprecedented long network outage in TaiK (Helsinki) which disconnected the name server that connects the address http://lemill.net to correct IP-address and also disconnected both servers where our development code is hosted and servers where LeMill-blogs are hosted. To avoid such incidents in the future, we have changed our name server provider.

We will postpone the upgrade untill Estonian LeMill competition is finished, as we don’t want you to suffer any more outages before the deadline. In the mean time, we can make the upgrade even better.

Hello!

We are upgrading LeMill to a new version at weekend (27-28.9) and it will require several hours of downtime. I hope we can finish the upgrade during sunday, but if something unexpected pops up, like it often does, then the process can go on until monday.

The upgrade will be a “snow leopard”, meaning no new features, but major internal changes for speed and efficiency.

• Upgraded wysiwyg editor, the new version supports Safari, the default browser for mac users.
• Refactored stylesheets and javascripts, both are loaded as one file shared through the whole site and about 30% in size of the previous versions. Pages should be lighter to load, especially on slow network.
• Refactored templates, simplified them and got rid of redundant code. Pages should be a bit lighter to load.
• Changed the logic of discussions: every resource can contain discussions, much like in wikipedia. Groups’ pages only aggregate all of discussions of their resources, the actual discussion is within the resource. Since this requires moving and rebuilding all of the existing discussions and references to them, this will be the risky part of the upgrade.
• Refactored portal messages
• Enabled downloading collections as pdf:s. (At this point it is still uncertain if we get this to work on server.)
• Simplified RSS-feeds significantly. They should work as before, but they consume less processing power.
• Refactored and enabled OAI-export that allows LeMill content to be visible for other resource repositories. New OAI-export is 13 times faster and can break large result groups into smaller batches when necessary.
• Lots of bugfixes

At 22.5.2009 it was three years since release of our first working prototype, version 0.3 “Louhi”. To see what fine features we had working or barely working by that, see this milestone report.

I am surprised how much of the essence of LeMill these functionalities captured. Though these features were implemented three years ago, we still have been returning to them, trying to make them more efficient and robust.

The last few days have been about looking back. We’ve been revising an article about LeMill, and that requires comparing LeMill to other learning resource repositories, learning resource editors, learning design editors and such. My initial reaction was that our approach of preferring design and ease of use to learning object and metadata standards has been a good one. When services are built to satisfy some pre-selected standards, the user interface will end up resembling that standard, and as long as abbrevations like IMS-LD, LRE LOM or SCORM are not meaningful to teachers, user experience ends up being quite confusing. It is easier to convert our content to those standards than to convert those standards to good user experience.

However, there are few interesting and positive findings that I’d like to point out: Our ‘sister project’ in Calibrate was the Calibrate Portal, which was supposed to be a place where you can find European learning resources coming from ministries of education and publishers. Development of that portal has been continued in MELT-project and the outcome is Learning Resource Exchange for Schools-portal. There is much more Creative Commons content there than used to be, and the use experience is much better than last time I visited.

Another interesting find was Cloudworks, an UK project in alpha state that has took simplification of learning resources even a step further from LeMill. “A place to share, find and discuss learning and teaching ideas and experiences”, so not so far for our goals. All resources there are “Clouds” and groups or collections are “Cloudscapes” and it is up to the users and their tagging strategies to build further structures. Personally, I like how the discussions are linked to Clouds. There are no true collaborative editing of clouds yet, they work more as a conversation starters. Also, some more structure would probably be required for proper multilingual work.

Thanks for the patience and apologies for the few users who met some after-upgrade errors.

The upgrade took some more time than estimated, because we had to copy and backup huge database files and before that, we needed to make room for them. Only after these operations the upgrade could start properly, and then it took over 24 hours of computing, when all content of the media pieces was moved to external storage. Now when the pieces are out of the database, it is faster to use and all of these upgrades will be simpler and faster.

One new much requested feature is implemented: Every resource can now belong to many groups.

One another important feature is almost done, but needs still some tuning, and that is easier creation of presentations. Since that is something that is not so nice to do online, unless you use applications especially designed for it, we want to give you an option to upload existing presentations created for example with Open Office Impress and convert them automatically in LeMill. Until we get that done, creating new presentations is disabled, because we feel that the current solution creates too many unusable media pieces.

LeMill.net server will be closed for upgrade from Friday 17.04 at 15.00 UTC. This is a major upgrade that will change the way how media pieces are stored in the system. The upgrade might take up to two days. We hope to be up and running again on Sunday evening. More details about the changes will be posted after the upgrade.

We are happy to announce that LeMill community has reached 5000 members tonight when Tatiana Tarita joined LeMill. It is difficult to give the exact numbers of users that we have in different countries because many people have not filled up their member profiles. However, we can say that we have members from at least 53 different countries. The most active coutries in LeMill community are Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Finland, Czech Republic and Lithuania.