How Time Flies When You Are Having Fun!

Wow!

There is an old saying that states:

Life is what happens when you have other plans.

Definitely holds true for me.

Since I lasted posted to this blog lots of things have happened with the enCore Learning Environment.
Some good some bad.

The Bad is that the enCore Consortium folded. Partly as a result of the unfortunate passing of one of the key movers and shakers, Barbara McManus, and difficulty in getting access to the old domain to maintain the mail list.

The Good is that we now have a JAVA free client for enCore V4 MOOs that is a drop in replacement for the JAVA based Mootcan applet. Jack Lewis at Western Michigan University created and supports the client at Literary Worlds and they have kindly made the client available to all enCore systems.

So where to from here?

I know there is still a lot of interest in enCore, more so now that we no longer have to fight with JAVA restriction policies at many educational institutions.

I know that those of us who have used these systems over the years have collected a fair amount of information tricks and tools and new users and builders could benefit mightily from access to that.

Community support via the old encore mail list was excellent and really helped those of us struggling with making enCore perform all the tricks our imaginations wanted it to.

Thus I have created a new Google Group to become the hub for support of this system.
You can access the Group here: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/encore-learning-environment

This group is not currently open to the public but feel free to request membership and I'll add you.

The Barn is hosted still at Literary Worlds here: http://brn227.brown.wmich.edu/Barn/news.htm

Watch the group and this blog for more interesting MOO news over the coming months.

Thanks for reading.
KJ


 

Javascript, moo code and webpages Oh My!

It seems that sometimes a bad Internet connection is a good thing.

I've been on a sort of "Busman's Holiday" out to Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast over the last two weeks.  During that time we have generally had an Internet connection of some sort, but it has almost always been a bit intermittent.

Normally this state of affairs would be sub-optimal for me to be sure.
This time however, I took the opportunity to apply myself to learning the esoteric art of JavaScript coding... Don't laugh, I have never had to do anything with it before now!

What got me thinking about this was how well the Edit Area Javascript package worked when I integrated it into the Xpress Program Editor in V4 enCore.  You can see some screen shots of the editor here .  The Edit Area Javascript package was created by Christophe Dolivet and can be downloaded here .

The Edit Area system adds a lot of nice capabilities to the enCore editor without using much if any MOO code.  I figured "how hard could it be to do something like that?" Heh...

After two weeks of reading from one of those 2" thick 4lb dead tree chunks, that purports to be "everything you need to know", and lots of experimenting on a copy of my Ewebbed enCore package running in a Virtual Box copy of XP on my Ubuntu EEEpc Netbook (?!?), I managed to add a "debugger" to the program editor.

Shiny new Ewebbed enCore Package available at The Barn

I have just uploaded a revised version of my Ewebbed enCore package to the Barn for download.

This version incorporates the new Xpress Program Editor and also includes a copy of the Neil Fraser's MOO Inspector.  You can download the complete package from this link.

http://www.encore-consortium.org/Barn/files/docs/Ewebbed-enCore-V4-a2.zip

The instructions and some documentation is here:

http://www.encore-consortium.org/Barn/files/docs/README-INSTALL-V4-a2.htm

You can see some screenshots of the Ewebbed enCore system in action here.
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For those of you who are not familiar with the Ewebbed enCore package allow me to explain.

One of the hurdles I had when first learning to code for LambdaMOO based systems was the lack of places to experiment.  Pure text based systems were pretty rare and open ones that allowed new users to be programmers were even rarer!  So I went looking for a way to easily setup a local MOO to play with.