Thin Linux Workstations to Save the Planet?

ThinLinX is a Queensland based company which sells Thin Client computers. These are used as smart terminals for a Linux server, allowing several cheap terminals to be driven from one PC. Thin clients are not a new idea, but with more Linux software being available and low cost hardware (hundreds rather than thousands of dollars), it is becoming feasible to use for mainstream computing.

The boxes have just enough processing power and memory to drive the screen and keyboard and communicate with the server (where the applications are run). But after a standard USB keyboard, mouse and a VGA screen is plugged in, the user will not notice the difference. The units provide audio in and out, USB sockets, Ethernet and a memory card slot, but no CD-ROM drive.

One benefit of this minimalist approach is the units consume about 3.5 watt. A conventional PC will consume about 108 watt, or thirty time as much. Of course some allowance has to be made for the power the server which runs the application for the thin client will use, but even so it should use considerably less power.

One question I have for the maker of these machines is if they can boot from a flash card or a USB flash memory stick and run a web browser locally. They would then make a handy web terminal and driver for digital singage.

To make a web terminal you would add an LCD screen (some even have a 12 DC output would could power the thin client), a keyboard and mouse. For a digital sign, the thin client would be attached to the back of a large LCD or plasma panel and serve up a preprogrammed sequence of web pages. As an example,this could be used for the workstations and signs on the Amnesty International Australia replica of a Guantánamo Bay cell.

How to Create On-line University Courses in Electronic Archiving: Part 6 - More on Moodle

In Part 5 I looked at Moodle as an example of a CMS. Some of the issues of pedagogy for an online course are covered in Doherty, C. (2005). Understanding trouble in paradise: Intuitive natives and
screaming aliens. A paper presented to the OLT 2005 Conference, QUT, Brisbane, 71-80.

Heres is more detail on Moodle as an application. I mentioned that Moodle should be usable on small screen and smart phones without many changes . I was able to get it work okay on Opera web browser in small screen mode (this emulates a PDA type device), but on with the Openwave SDK Mobile hone emulator. The web pages displayed on the mobile phone, but each column of text was squashed to fit on the small screen and so was unreadable.

The Moodle team need to install an alternate CSS style sheet for mobile devices, to tell the web browser to use just one column (this is what the Opera browser does for its small screen mode).

Leaving that to one side, a good way to see if the advocates believe what they are saying is to see if they use their own tools. So I tried the Moodle Features Demo Course. The is a Moodle course to show off the features of Moodle.

The course first presents you with a typical three column screen. The screen is a bit too busy for my tastes, but that may be because the designer is trying to show off all the features of Moodle in one place, or perhaps because this the page the student will keep coming back to. I found a box offering to enroll me, so I clicked on it and was then presented with a "Topic outline", equivalent to about one A4 page of text (which is not too big).

What I found disappointing was that the course gets immediately into the details of Site, User and Course management. The stuff about the philosophy has been left behind and there doesn't;seem to be anything about how or why to prepare a course.

Interestingly there were 975 people enrolled in the course, 14 of whom had used it in the last 24 hours and four of who were in Canberra (including me). I noticed that participants had Blog entries to introduce themselves, so I created one. The Blog function uses a web based editor, much the same as ones used for other Blogs. This worked fine, even on my slow (64 kbps) wireless link.

While providing a Blog and user profile is useful in getting the students to get to know each other, there is also a danger they will say too much. Participants in courses need to keep in mind that they cannot entirely trust their fellow students and should not reveal too much.

The demo course has a "news" forum. This had nothing in it, but would be typically used for course announcements. There are also "Learning forums" for group discussions . The forums can have RSS feeds, making it easier for the students to keep up with developments. In the past I have found such on-line forums a bit overwhelming. Moodle has options such as allowing each student only one discussion topic, to stem the flood.

Open Source Smartphone

There has been a lot of press coverage of the Apple iPhone smartphone. I was going to set an assignment this semester for my web design students to do web pages for a mobile phone. But the iPhone is a very closed proprietary system and an alternative open source device may be available, the FIC Neo1973 Smartphone.

One of the world's largest computer and consumer electronics manufacturers will ship a completely open, Linux-based, GPS-equipped, quad-band GSM/GPRS phone direct, worldwide, for $350 or less, in Q1, 2007. First International Computing's (FIC's) "Neo1973" or FIC-GTA001, is the first phone based on the open-source "OpenMoKo" platform.
From: Cheap, hackable Linux smartphone due soon, Nov. 07, 2006

As a mobile web device there isn't really much to distinguish the iPhone from other smart phones and the same techniques can be used for designing web pages for mobile devices. Apart from the smart phone I thought it might be worth looking at two other device developments: the Microsoft Ford Sync which is an in-car computer and the Nintendo Wii games console, which now has a web browser.

The Neo1973 is a GSM phone (2.5G) and would at first glance seem a bit old fashioned compared to high speed 3g phones. But I am yet to see a useful 3G use for a phone. The Neo1973 does have GPS making location based applications possible. So, for example, I might get the students to do an electronic guide to Beijing to help people to find their way around during the 2008 Olympics. I was invited to give a presentation to the Beijing Olympic Committee about their web design in 2003. After the conference I bicycled around Beijing city seeing the sights and could have done with an electronic travel guide .

The tourist could first look at the information on their PC or games console (such as a Nintendo Wii ) then in a car using the dash board screen and finally on foot (or bicycle) with the smart phone. Rather than produce four new electronic travel guides for the PC, game, car and phone, the one adaptable web system could be used. Rather than creating new information for the system it could be a mash-up of available web data. This could information from people in the city.

XHTML Basic 1.1 is less basic but is it better?

The W3C defined "XHTML Basic" as a cut down version of HTML, for low power and hand-held devices , including mobile phones, iTV, PDAs, coke machines and car dashboards. A new Working Draft of XHTML Basic 1.1 was released 5 July 2006. I used XHTML Basic 1.0 for teaching web design for general, mobile and accessible devices.

XHTML Basic 1.0 includes web headings, paragraphs, lists, links, basic forms, tables and images. It leaves out frames and styles defined inside the document (you had to use external style sheets). This makes it much easier to stop web designers learning bad habits. Instead of just saying "don't spread formatting information throughout your document, put it in a style sheet", a syntax driven editor will enforce this rule with XHTML Basic. If the designer uses a non-conforming tool, their web pages will not validate when tested.

This is okay for teaching, but XHTML Basic left out some useful stuff for the real world. I use the "Target" attribute to do web pages for group presentations. When you click on an external link, this opens a second window on the browser. It works very well on in an Access Grid room, with multiple screens: the main presentation stays open on one screen and you can open referenced document on another. But XHTML Basic 1.0 doesn't have the target attribute.

Also having to use external style sheets becomes annoying. You have to define a style sheet just to change one little part of a web page.

Revision, 1.1 of XHTML Basic the W3C have added these features back, along with:

• XHTML Forms (defined in [XHTMLMOD])
• Intrinsic Events (defined in [XHTMLMOD])
• The value attribute for the li element (defined in [XHTMLMOD])
• The inputmode attribute
  

Of course, it will be some time before tools support XHTML Basic 1.1 and there are some grumbles about it leaving the path of purity.

There is also a new "Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 - Basic Guidelines", 2 November 2006, to help with doing web pages for phones, TVs and PDAs.