With Owen Kaser and Yuhong Yan, I am organizing our eBusiness Technologies course for this winter.

Now, Yuhong is in Fredericton, Owen is in Saint John and I’m in Montreal. How do we give one course all together? Last time was through expensive videoconferencing equipment, but this time, we are looking at cheaper, PC-based solutions. Owen and I are Linux users, Yuhong is a Windows user. Yuhong suggested we use IBM Sametime. I thought “Great! IBM is very pro-Linux!” At first, it looked great because the preferred Sametime client is Java-based with an added browser plugin. Well, after 4 hours of fun, the results are so-so. My experience with Sametime, both under Linux and Windows, wasn’t great. In both OSes (Windows and Linux), Firefox crashed on the first attempt to use Sametime. I didn’t get this problem using Internet Explorer. Restarting Firefox after a first crash fixed the problem. Then, the desktop sharing feature was, at first, completely disabled for me under Linux. Restarting Firefox a third time fixed the problem. However, desktop sharing under Linux was not great: in order to share a window, it has to be entirely visible so, this means, you must keep the window above the others. Not great. You don’t have this problem under Windows. Finally, videoconferencing is entirely disabled under Linux whereas it worked well under Windows. The only glitch to videoconferencing under Windows is that if you want to select another input device than the default one, you have to restart Sametime for the changes to take effect, but you get no dialog box warning you about it. Oh! And the license for Sametime was around $20k, though the client is available for free as a Java applet.

So, why not use gnomemeeting (Linux) and netmeeting (Windows)? Because gnomemeeting makes not effort to support the full T.120 protocol: this means no desktop sharing features under gnomemeeting for the foreseeable future. Of course, you can use VNC but if all you want to do is broadcast slides remotely, it is an overkill and since you don’t have integrated chatting and videoconferencing, this means a lot of fiddling around.

What I’m looking for is simple. I want basic videoconferencing and slides sharing (to display my PDF slides remotely) between Windows and Linux (and MacOS). It is sad to see that in 2005, I still can’t get this work.

As I was writting this, I was reminded of a post by Harold on Marratech which is available for Linux, Windows and MacOS. The best thing is that you can try Marratech for free (though without the desktop sharing feature) and even pay as you go at a rate of around $36 a day. Maybe that’s the solution I’m looking for? (I’m not related in any way to Marratech and I don’t even claim their product work. I haven’t tried it.)

Finally, a picture of me with my new son, Louka, by my fireplace, no less. I had to remove red eyes using gimp.

The buzz is all about tags these days. Tagyu is an interesting tool which claims to suggest tags based on the text content of the page. I’d like to see a description of the algorithm, but I see none.

• http://www.daniel-lemire.com/ gets the tags “firefox” “web2.0″.
• http://www.daniel-lemire.com/en/ gets the tag “job”.
• http://www.daniel-lemire.com/fr/ gets the tags “france” and “uqam”.

It seems like the tags for my blog make sense, but the tags for my home pages (French and English) are really bad. Tagging my French home page with “france”? Maybe because I use the French language? It is a bit of a stretch. Tagging my English home page with “job”? No. I don’t think so.

The problem is interesting and I bet there are solid solutions, but we are not there yet.

I also question whether collaborative tags have a future. I must admit I don’t use them, so I won’t comment much further, but it is a bit too empirical for my taste.

Version 2.0 of the most complete Open Source OLAP engine on the market has been released.

Mondrian 2.0 has several major new features since Mondrian 1.2, including aggregate tables and user-defined functions. This release is a release candidate. It is not suitable for production applications.

In an earlier post, I asked whether Open Source was ready for Business Intelligence. As it turns out, yesterday, the Mondrian team announced that they were partnering up with Pentaho which they claim to be the world’s leading provider of open source Business Intelligence (BI).