This time again I got a chance to play with Amazon Services and into more of them. The task was to setup a Live On demand Video Streaming Server using Wowza Media server, Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute, Amazon DevPay and Video Streams from various RSS Feeds.

The fun started with learning to use something called EC2 UI for firefox. Its a cool firefox plugin which gives you access to use EC2 instances from your browser.

For those people who hate putty and the black console this is a life saver. However me being a geek , it was just of matter of getting my hands wet .

To start , you need to create a key file which is a x.509 private key with the extension ” .pem” . Amazon EC2 doesnot use passwords for authentication , but it uses certificates to do the same. So the challenge response mechanism is basically powered by sending a certificate file(.ppk) in putty which is a file signed using your private key (.pem). Amazon has its own copy of the private key which it uses to authenticate the .ppk file.

Check putty’s manuals on how to generate a public key certificate file. i.e (.ppk).

This project gave me unique insights on the wonderfulness of EC2 and the power that Cloud computing possess.

Will surely write more on this in future ! Keep watching..

Learning can be both gruelling and fun provided the kind of importance an educational institute attaches to the learning environment, in addition to the teaching staff, and the course material.

With the advent of technology, age old learning practices of telling a student what to do and how to do it are slowly making way for newer, innovative ways where the pupil is no more just a passive participant but is given the opportunity to immerse in an wholesome learning experience – enter the latest buzz words; LMS (Learning Management System), VLE (Virtual Learning Environment), CMS (Course Management Systems)!!!

All three are more or less synonymous in that they all have a common goal – to make learning as informative as coordinated as enjoyable an experience. Looking at the current buzz generated by the various VLEs, LMSses, us at Globussoft decided to take a look at one of the most popular VLEs amongst the lot – “Moodle”!

But before we dive head first into Moodle let’s get an idea what a VLE basically is. Wikipedia gives the following description:

A virtual learning environment (VLE) is a software system designed to support teaching and learning in an educational setting. A VLE will normally work over the Internet and provide a collection of tools such as those for assessment (particularly of types that can be marked automatically, such as multiple choice), communication, uploading of content, return of students’ work, peer assessment, administration of student groups, collecting and organizing student grades, questionnaires, tracking tools, etc. New features in these systems include wikis, blogs, RSS and 3D virtual learning spaces.

While originally created for distance education, VLEs are now most often used to supplement traditional face to face classroom activities, commonly known as Blended Learning.

These systems usually run on servers, to serve the course to students Multimedia and/or web pages.

Coming back to Moodle, Moodle is an open source VLE whose main goal is to take the best learning practices and convert them to an easily accessible, comprehensible, home environment via the “world wide web”. Although a hugely popular concept in the west, India too is certainly waking up to this revolutionary learning technique. IIT-Mumbai has implemented Moodle; you can have a look at it @ http://moodle.iitb.ac.in/. And to get a feel of the massive Moodle user base you can visit http://moodle.org/sites/.

As earlier mentioned, Moodle is open source, so it’s basically zero-cost software which can simply be downloaded with its source code as a zip file and installed on your system. Its official web site is www.moodle.org, here you need to go to the ‘Downloads’ section and download their latest build for your corresponding operating system as a zip file. Once done, unzip the file, this should create a directory ‘moodle’ and unzip all its files there.

Moodle is primarily developed in LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). However, you may choose to deploy it on a variety of different operating systems (Mac, Linux, and Windows) and with several different database options (MySQL, Postgres, and MSSQL). If you are installing Moodle yourself, you need to ensure that your Apache, PHP and MySQL are properly configured on your server and are up and running. If you are installing it on a hosting service then the above would automatically be taken care of provided your web host supports PHP, which in today’s date most good hosting services do.

For any kind of assistance, moodle.org is the best place to be. Please go to http://docs.moodle.org/en/Installing_Moodle for detailed instructions on the install process and http://docs.moodle.org/en/Finding_and_Selecting_A_Web_Host is another useful link to swing by before the installation.

Assuming that the required environment is set, simply type the corresponding URL leading to your moodle directory in the browser’s address bar; it would be something like http://www.something.com/moodle/. If Moodle is not already installed on your server you should be automatically redirected to Moodle’s install script http://www.something.com/moodle/install.php which should begin the installation process. Also note that, before beginning the installation you need to have created an empty database along with a user that has all rights to that database. It would be wise to create a special user just for the moodle database and he/she should not be given any rights to any other databases of the DBMS. If a hacker discovered the moodle user/wd combination and if that user had rights to other databases as well then all those databases would be jeopardized.

If everything is fine, you should see the below screen:

Keying in the appropriate text and/or selecting the required options on each screen and clicking ‘Next’ should take you through a serious of easy, self explanatory steps. It would be advisable to read up the info displayed on each page before hastily moving on to the next screen.

One of the major steps in the whole installation is “setting up of the database”, once this step is done with you are shown the Admin screen. Here you will need to fill in details of your Moodle site administrator.

After the Admin screen, you come to the Moodle Front Page settings screen. The front page is the index page or the entry page of your Moodle site.

Finally, after completion of this step you will be redirected to the admin page of your site. By default you will be logged in as admin. Below is a snapshot of the admin front page.

On the left you can see a number of links, which, you as the admin can use to do various tasks such as creating courses, creating users and assigning them to the courses, giving them the appropriate rights, backing up data, changing the site’s appearance, applying security settings and much more. A little navigation should come handy getting acquainted to the framework.

That completes the installation! If you are interested, this (http://www.joomlagiants.com/demosites/moodledemo/moodle/) is our attempt at dabbling with Moodle, do have a look!

So, what are you waiting for? Introduce yourself to the new avatar of virtual learning, TODAY!! And if you are not a student, that’s ok too, it’s always nice to look at something new and interesting once in a while!!

After seeing its great success on US and UK and seeing its popularity in GAF and other freelance sites , we finally decided to get rolling with development. The best thing with Globussoft is that , being in this field for past 3 years , we have developed a lot of reusable components, which we reuse in most of our web projects.

This greatly reduces the turnaround time for all web applications that we develop. And this also helps us in delivering a robust , stable and high performance application to all our clients.

So we set out to study swoopo first. What exactly is Swoopo?

Swoopo is more like a real auction than eBay.  Each bid raises the price by a set amount (usually about 15 cents) and the auction is extended by 10, 15, or 20 seconds with each bid.  Here’s the catch, it costs you $1 for each bid you place and you must purchase bids ahead of time.  That also adds an element of risk.  You might try 5, 10, 20, 100 bids to win an item and get… nothing!  The payoff is tempting though.  A $125 Wii that you bid on 50 times still only costs $175 total.  Pretty good considering it’s hard to find a Wii system on the shelves for the retail $250.  There are also some gimmik auctions were the final price is waived or the final price is set and the final bid amount doesn’t matter.  How does that work?  Keep reading.

What an ingenious way for Swoopo to make money.  Consider the previous example of a Wii for $125.  Assuming a start price of $10. There had to be 767 bids at .15 increments to get the price to $125.  That means Swoopo raked in $767 ($1 per bid placed x 767) + $125 final price = $892 for a $250 video game console!
The system isn’t terribly fair either, because they have such a thing as a bid butler, which you can set to automatically place bids for you. Sounds good in theory, but if somebody else puts a bid butler on as well, the two butlers just battle it out until one or the other has spent all their bids, and it ends up costing both people a fortune.
It’s not a scam though, and it IS possible to win, but it’s just very difficult, and there’s not really any skill involved to be honest.
Swoopo is NOT a place to find a random deal.  However, if you are specifically looking to purchase one of the items offered on the site, it might be worth a look.

So all in all I call it a great business model to fool emotional fools who feel they are the best outta there and they can outsmart anyone bidding out there.

Wanna try your luck at swoopo? Try it out!

Developing Something like Swoopo?

So if you are looking for developing something like Swoopo do get in touch with us , our contact details are available at Globussoft.net . We can discuss the product script costing and also show you the current stage of development. If you have a great idea which can turn down Swoope inside out, you are most welcome to share it with us and see your dream turn to a reality.

The development is going on in following languages/technologies -

For Linux adoring companies -

Php/Mysql, Globus Framework 2.4, Ajax

For Microsoft Fanatics

Asp.net 3.5 – MVC, Ajax Tool Kit.