USQ has 9 subjects/units available under the OpenCourseWare hat. More importantly USQ appears to be the only Australian university in the OpenCourseWare Consortium. I wonder why more Australian universities are not involved? Surely it would help to attract international students.

I’m interested in what is ‘under the hood’ of the USQ OpenCourseWare site. So far the content and activities are powered by PHP and static HTML (Dreamweaver Templates). It does not look like Moodle and might be some proprietary USQ made content system. …ah Universities building their own tools, to meet their own needs - Now thats a new idea!

… and so the popularity of Ruby increases yet again - Check out the November 2007 TIOBE Index.

In the mood for some light hearted mathematics (I lie, but the video medium makes it look simple)? If yes check out this video on Moebius Transformations.

Just how precise can vectorization get? Ever wondered?

Well pretty exact if you try Vector Magic - an online tool.

I’ve loved the Express Editions of Visual Studio for a while now - they get the job done, are not bloated and are a fraction of the Visual Studio install. This makes the Facebook Development ToolKit for Visual Studio Express very tempting.

…. there is even a Facebook PopFly block! Microsoft sure seem keen….

Scholar360 is a new LMS/CMS/NLE - Network Learning Environment. I have not reviewed Scholar360 as I can only request a personal tour. Seems to include blogging and eportfolio features. Competition is the LMS space is a good thing, so I am glad to see new products on offer.

It’s troublesome to test a site behind a login for accessibility. Education.au have an ongoing project to build a Firefox extension that is able to perform accessibility tests. The demo looks very impressive and also looks like a tool that will be able to educate users on good accessibility design. Glad to see that the project was driven by the need to test content with Learning Management Systems.

Since I am going to purchase an iPod touch, thought I’d start looking into building apps for the iPhone. I love the Rails support.

Choice is good and viable open source choice is upon us. This is great as MySQL becomes the predominant database that I’ll be using for my Web apps that are powered by Rails.

The two cool apps that I am trialing are:

• HeidiSQL
• SQLyog
  The comminity edition is open source. Seems to have everything I need and is very easy to use.

So far I prefer SQLyog but the jury is still out as both products are excellent.