There are hundreds of open source projects ranging from simple email software to publicly dedicated WWW servers and full operating systems. This article describes an online platform for educators with free open source educational systems including wikis, blogs, bulletin boards, Content/Course Management Systems, and MOOs, all open systems which are easily installed and managed. By setting up a content-based server, educators can save and archive their files online easily, and integrate their online resources without needing web design skill. With full control of these different educational tools, educators can form a collaborative learning community based on their teaching goals. Thus teachers and students can build an online community as partners. They can learn from and with others, share and try out web learning tools, distribute leadership and inspiration, and support and interact with others from all over the world.
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There is an ongoing information war raging in the software world. Despite free software developers’ best efforts, new proprietary software continues to proliferate. Improved techniques must be developed to reverse engineer efficiently closed data formats so that free, interoperable solutions can be deployed under Linux.

Software reverse engineering occurs on various levels. It may be necessary to study a piece of poorly written, poorly commented code developed in a high-level language such as C++ and understand what the original program was supposed to accomplish. It may also be necessary to disassemble a program that has been compiled into machine language and express it as a higher-level language. In doing this, the underlying algorithms can eventually be expressed as higher-level concepts in a human language. After obtaining an algorithmic description via reverse engineering, the algorithm can be reimplemented for any language on any computing platform.
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All SimBLOX simulation products employ an agent-based or object-oriented architecture. This allows the user to create very large, complex, macro-level simulation models by connecting together many smaller, easily understandable, micro-level “building block” models. In this simple tutorial, we will show you how to use the Water Resource Planning SimBRIX.
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A number of new geospatial viewing tools from major players in the Internet industry have recently appeared on the scene and are taking the geospatial world by storm. Google,Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon have all released web-based mapping tools in the recent past, and collectively these new players to the industry have raised the bar for Internet mapping. Although their functional capabilities don’t provide anything we haven’t seen in web offerings from traditional GIS vendors, their emergence has been significant in that they have managed to capture a wider audience. Google, in particular, has emerged as the leader of this pack with it’s recently released Google Maps product which provides a slick, highly responsive visual interface built using AJAX technologies along with detailed street and aerial imagery data, and an open API allowing customization of the map output including the ability to add application specific data to the map.
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BioTeam first became interested in Univa UD’s software efforts after hearing Univa CTO Steve Tueckespeak in Regensburg, Germany at the 2007 Grid Engine workshop. Shortly after that event Univa formally became Univa UD after merging with United Devices. At the time, Steve’s company seemed to be one of the few companies positioning themselves to offer full support and professional services encompassing commonly used open source products such as Sun Grid Engine that BioTeam often works with in the field. Individually these popular open source resources are relatively easy to acquire but Univa UD seemed to be making an interesting effort to become the one stop shop for a fully supported and integrated set of commonly required tools and technology.
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Many developers have learned to use PHP over the years because it’s a good solution for creat- ing Web pages and the price is right. The PHP acronym is like many other new acronyms for the Internet—the acronym is recursive (refers back to itself). PHP stands for PHP Hypertext Processor. This general-purpose HTML scripting language works much like ASP (see Chapter 6) or other page description languages you might have used. Essentially, you mix HTML with scripting information. When the PHP process sees HTML, it sends the text directly to the user. It processes any scripting information, and passes the resulting HTML to the user as well.
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The fact that you are reading this handbook probably means that you are experienced in e-Learning implementation at a university or similar institution. You will probably be aware of the tools and styles of working on LMS, and will be used to communicating whilst working and learning online. But at the same time, by surfing the net and probably by observing your students, you will clearly see that changes are coming. Freely available new technologies, common access to the Internet and to information, new types of social interactions mediated by technology; all of these things require a shift in the way that we learn and teach. e-Learning using new technologies is an innovative learning method.
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As an industry we continue to struggle to find respondents to provide us with survey information vital to the success of our industry. To survive the Internet revolution we must use innovative methods to motivate and engage respondents and maintain their long term loyalty. Over the years much has been written about intrinsically motivating respondents through survey design, communication and the use of incentives, however, researchers are still looking towards technology to help improve or even solve the problem. Web 2.0 is the latest ‘buzz’ word in market research that promises to make the online research more dynamic and interactive. It offers the potential not only to increase motivation, but also to provide new levels of insight from our collected data.
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