Trifus After Dark

Raiders of The Lost Art

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 11:17:00 -0400

Recently, I had the good fortune to be involved in adding an extension to an existing SCORM implementation within one our client installations. The actual implementation was more thorny than originally anticipated (is there one that is not?) and was able to bask once again in the rarefied atmosphere that is SCORM documentation. As always it was an invigorating and transcendent experience but my colleagues brought me back to earth when I proposed a SCORM appreciation day at work…I don’t know what to do with those T-shirts…

But I digress. As delightful as that indulgence was I began to wax nostalgic for the bygone days when men were measured by their ability to create Windows Message Hooks, C++ dominated the (read my) known world and Ajax remained a character fully ensconced in Greek mythology. I was steeped in the ideas and architecture of the Windows API; indeed, it was my bread and butter溶ot to mention my tamales with red sauce. Everyone was familiar with the Internet, per se, as most of us had explored it during school. And by explored I mean grappled with the any one of the various character based email clients (does anyone remember PINE?) and thrilled to the inherent grooviness of the Phone application. For the uninitiated this was a rudimentary form of IM, but essentially limited to a sihave been at the turn of the century. Wait… it was…doh!

Perhaps my living in Tuscon at the time kept me somewhat distanced from the growing tidal wave of webness that would inundate us all with a connectitude our forefathers, our fathers, our older siblings, and, alas, we could scarcely imagine. And, well, we simply did not. There were rumblings about Http and home pages and whatnot, but the conferences we attended were focused like a, well, um, like a pencil thin ray of something really bright and really straight that isn’t at all a laser beam or laser anything. Anyway, they were about the wonderful ecology of COM and DCOM, an entrant into the growing field of Remote Computing. These technologies and there many brethren were poised to fulfill the holy grail of networked computing and were indeed doing so somewhere in some way, as they still do today somewhere in some way, (one of which I will mention below.) The lineage is as follows: DDE preceded OLE preceded COM preceded DCOM. Or it may be that they overlapped a bit, but the idea was basically the same. Simply you could get objects to talk to each other across threads, applications and even machines, and, if you really wanted, you could arrange it so they really didn’t have to know that much about each other.

Within the little cubicle that was my cozy home, COM and DCOM were the obvious choices for both intra and inter computer computing. And being the intrepid adventurer that most of us in the digital world are, I dove into the arcana of object interfaces, data marshaling, IDL specifications, method tables and other half-remembered bits of technical flotsam. This too was a heady time in which even the most explicit documentation required more than a casual perusal to digest fully…at times causing one to burp with gusto. Yet perseverance rewards those who, well, persevere and I was able in a rather short time to throw me down some mack daddy DCOM…at least compilable DCOM. My team and I thought we were off to the races constructing an elaborate bit of software that swam in a pool of effervescent COM. It was elegantly designed and was brimming with these technologies, not dissimilar to the gaming addicts that are a hallmark of our modern world. But all was about to change.

At about this same time I was being recruited to the dark side. In the wee hours of the night in my secret digital laboratory I was dabbling the blasphemy of java (gasp!). It may be hard for some to comprehend the animus that Microsoft held for Sun’s vision of a virtual platform. It seemed a curiosity to I and my colleagues at the time and seemed to be scrupulously and largely ignored by the (presumably serious) programming community. We thought of it as a gentle way to nurture budding programmers and an annoyance allowing amateurs to create spinning buttons in an otherwise useful web page. As I journeyed further into its depths I found it both breezy and obtuse by turns, really the experience one might have learning any new language. Perhaps naturally, I steered my efforts towards RMI initially and later CORBA, two competing RPC technologies that one building with Microsoft tools was arduous if even possible. Thus, I began to use development tools built for java, even further distancing my from my erstwhile peers. In 1999, when I left Tucson (I traded the wonder of Tucson’s landscape for the dazzle of Chicago’s cityscape,) I had traveled as far as I might with merely a book and an interest. I was eager to trade in my copy of Visual C++ for a some guidance in the land of XML, EJB and Servlets. It would be a few years before that transition was fully manifest but I did fall headfirst into wholesale web application building, at first using MS ASP and a litany of client-side javascript. I did embark on a detour into the murky land of BroadVision, about which the less said the better, but after a bit of a career realignment and a nostalgic visit to DDE, I was awash in java-based web application development, a universe I still inhabit. Perhaps more so than with other technologies it has evolved at an ever increasing rate. At least in the web world, ideas are proposed, vetted, and realized in a very short time, some of which are not new so much as formalized. Ajax is a prime example of this, coming just a few year after I had seen seen several homegrown incarnations of the same idea, none of which were useful beyond their singular and proprietary purpose.

As others with far greater faculties than myself have observed, it is fascinating how certain technological strains flourish, renewing themselves with the seasons, some blossom and die, and some, become institutionalized and fossilized in place. Think of Relational Databases which remain largely faithful to Codd’s original paper in 1974. (Anyone out there own Oracle stock?) Another long lived technology, or at least the blueprint, is the AICC and, less so, the SCORM standards, the ideas for which date back those same mid 1990’s when I toiled blissfully assuming the web to be a mindless pastime like any arcade game. And from the LMS ramparts where I stand watch, it looks like they will be for awhile yet. The smart money, actually even the moderately attentive money, is on SCORM to wax ever more dominant in the coming months and years. Yet, as we labor to add elaborate features to the co-dependent siblings Courseware and LMS, we be mindful that history enjoys revolution and it is probable that one day we will see today’s engines purveyors of e-Learning in the same light as most of see Distributed Computing: not gone, but hidden, if not marginalized.

I would like it to be known that these thoughts that I have shown are exclusively my own, yes indeed all my own.

My perspective is certainly one among many and I welcome corrections or additions.

Jonathan Gray Director, Software Development Trifus

Narcissism 2.0

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 10:08:00 -0500

Narcissism 2.0

e-Learning Specifications are STILL an issue!

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 10:24:00 -0500

There is some great discussion over at Tony Karrer’s e-Learning blog about LMS/Courseware interoperability. We basically built our business on the fact that this issue existed and it’s amazing that this issue still exists in 2008.

There are many approaches to solving integration problems. Some of the best ones are discussed in the previously mentioned blog post. The best solution, however, is that vendors need to be willing to talk to one another for the good of their mutual customers. When we all talk, everybody wins.

If your first life was like your Second Life. Found via The...

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 18:33:00 -0500

If your first life was like your Second Life.
Found via The Internet Time Blog.

Trifus in Second Life

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 11:33:00 -0500

Okay, so I was late for my first virtual meeting in Second Life. Does that mean I am virtually passive aggressive? This get together was through Dirk Tussing’s Learning Leader’s group http://www.learningexecutive.com and was hosted by the folks at Centrax. This is Ed Prentiss’s company that does a lot of good e-Learning and e-Marketing design work. They must be doing well, come to find out they own their own island in Second Life!

Before we talk about the meeting, I need to give some autobiographical context to my experience with with games and simulations. I was there at the beginning with pong and blew my allowance at the arcade playing Galaga and Missile Commander. I was never very good at video games but I loved playing them. Castle Wolfenstein, Doom, Half Life; I played them all. Then along came kids, a house to maintain, and too many startups and I fell off the train.

So I was a complete newbie to Second Life when I signed up for the virtual networking event. I went and tried to get familiar the night before - after a long day at work, a game of chutes and ladders with my son, and a big bowl of pasta I slumped on. Okay, so I didn’t get very well prepped. Luckily, my colleague Adam gave me a primer and it was pretty easy to get the basic movements down for walking and gesturing, etc. Changing your appearance is a little more esoteric. I didn’t want to look really cookie cutter and lame so I found the menu to adjust my appearance. You just click on yourself and pick “Appearance” from the round menu and start exploring. It definitely plays into American narcissism. I was finally able to get normal size ears and get those six-pack abs I always wanted. You guessed it, everyone looks good in their Second Life. And judging from the complexity of some of the “Regulars” hairdos and outfits, some people are spending a lot of time there.

I met up with my colleague Adam and the other meeting attendees at a convenience store on Centrax Island, a really cool virtual environment the 3D designers at Centrax created. I met some interesting people there though I am not sure who they really were because their Second Life names appeared above them. We also flew to a floating “Star Wars-esque” platform in the sky. Yes, I said we flew. You can fly in Second Life. It connects viscerally with that dream of flying we have all had. I did crash a few times (think Greatest American Hero) until I learned to use the PgDn key to float down.

I was enjoying the tour of the sky platform but a guy walked up to me, probably to network. In an instant, my first person shooter instincts took over and I shoved him off the sky platform. Needless to say that ended our future networking opportunities. Later, in the tour, my colleague Adam showed me a virtual sweater he created in Photoshop that featured our Trifus logo. This was great. Virtual tchotchkes! He gave me one and after learning about getting gifts from others and then searching my inventory, and then a little more techno-intricacy, I was proudly sporting my Trifus sweater. Adam ended up giving out a couple extra sweaters to attendees. Good virtual marketing Adam!

As far as e-Learning applications, I could see it being a great 3D role playing tool particularly for people in retail or medical where they need to move around and have positive, proactive communications with customers or patients. This was just a light Second Life intro, as you may have read, there is a whole economic model based on Linden dollars. You can buy land, build buildings, have a career, get married. Wait, that’s my current crazy real life. Why would anyone want two crazy lives? Some people have more disposable time than I do.

Adam gave me one final tip near the end of the tour. When modifying your appearance, your underwear is supposed to go underneath your pants; not on top. Thanks again Adam.

Thomas J. Reilly
CEO
Trifus

Last week we took part in a Virtual Peer-Networking Gathering...

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 16:37:21 -0500

Last week we took part in a Virtual Peer-Networking Gathering in Second Life, a Executive Learning Exchange hosted by our friends at Centrax. This is a picture of our group.

First Post!

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 17:00:00 -0400

It’s true. The long-overdue, official Trifus blog has launched. “Trifus After Dark” has arrived.

We will use this blog to keep you, the community, informally connected to what’s happening at Trifus and to serve as our own soap box so we can comment on industry news, the general state of the training & development world, and on what our friends in the industry are up to.

We’ll keep things here simple and informal. If you’d like to chime in, drop us a line at info@trifus.com, and let us know what you’re thinking. Or, just publish a comment on your own blog and link back to us. We’ll find you!

Thanks for reading. We hope you enjoy this dialog and look forward to hearing from you!

Adam Zamora
Director, Professional Services
Trifus