On Dec 10, 2007 7:05 AM, Brian Salter-Duke <<a href="mailto:b_duke@bigpond.net.au">b_duke@bigpond.net.au</a>> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
1. The ability to display molecular models that can be manipulated by the<br>reader. This function is available in an open source application called<br>Jmol. A php extension is available to run in mediawiki and Jmol does run
<br>on, for example, the Jmol Wiki. I have tried to get this added to<br>Wikipedia, where of course it would also be useful, but the technical<br>folks, think the php is not sufficiently free of security concerns. I do<br>
not know php but I am trying to get this issue solved. Unfortunately the<br>author of the Jmol php extension is too busy to do this.<br></blockquote><div><br>If you can provide us with further details, I can get it started on the sandbox wiki we have running on the server.
<br></div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">2. The real innovation of our materials is that they allow the user to
<br>prepare data for a variety of different computational chemistry programs<br>and then run the data, either directly in real time, getting the results<br>back on a web page, or by queueing the job if it is larger and getting
<br>the results back later on a web page or by e-mail. Our materials use a<br>variety of quite complex CGI scripts that handle the materials from html<br>forms and menus and then run the code. While queueing the jobs is<br>
necessary in some cases, this is really only to restrict access to the<br>disk for storing large temporary files. The CGI scripts prevent the user<br>from entering large jobs. In this context "large job" equates to "large
<br>molecule" with the cpu time rising with some some power of the molecular<br>size. For teaching, small molecules only are needed and these take little<br>time. When a job is queued, for example, it leaves a URL link on the
<br>page returned by the CGI script. The user can keep clicking on it until<br>it returns more than a header saying try again later.<br><br>While currently we use both open source and commercial codes, the<br>commercial codes can be replaced by open source ones by writing a few
<br>more CGI scripts.<br><br>This use clearly needs a server that can run these CGI scripts and the<br>programs they call. It does not have to be the server that handles the<br>forms page. For a while we ran one application 3000 km away from the
<br>main server.<br></blockquote><div><br>I've got a 40kg server with triple power supplies, dual CPUs, triple hard drives and dual ear muffs to be able to hear with it all that we might be able to use :) Let me know if this sounds okay and I'll get a flavor of Linux up and running on it.
<br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">I have no idea what the equivalent to CGI scripts is within mediawiki<br>and how we can run forms (the quiz extension may be a start here), but
<br>I'm willing to learn. Whether this is feasable, I do not really know.<br>However, I think that what I am suggesting could have wider use.<br>Wikiversity needs to have pages that are dynamic in ways that wikipedia<br>
does not need. Web based learning has to be more than reading text and<br>looking at pictures on a computer screen. I think this is the greatest<br>challenge for the technical people on wikiversity.<br></blockquote><div><br>
One of the main purposes of the sandbox server was to allow us to break out of the restrictions of MediaWiki. Forms in PHP are dead easy. Even if you don't have a programming background you could learn in half an hour. MediaWiki can have forms, but it requires some highly complex code and a few hacks here and there. We would be developing real applications to facilitate our learning systems, as opposed to this reliance on MediaWiki for what clearly warrants a dedicated application.
<br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">There has been a suggestion that these kinds of computer calculations<br>can be handled by distributed computing using users own PCs, rather like
<br>the SETI project. These could be usefull for very large jobs in some<br>cases on WV, but I do not think they are suitable for my applications<br>where we just need a few seconds (maybe up to 100 secs) on a linux<br>machine. Most of the codes we use are unix based. Distributing computing
<br>is not required and it would delay getting the response to the learner.<br></blockquote><div><br>If it's a few seconds of calculations, why do we need a computer to do it in the first place? Can't students run the algorithms on their own machines? In any case, for a few seconds of calculation the overhead of a distributed task system like SETI is totally out of the question, a server would be best.
<br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">I would welcome suggestions for dealing with this.<br><br>Brian.</blockquote><div>
<br>Let me know what you think of these.<br><br>Draicone <br></div></div>