Alan’s Link’s    "a.m.berg" AT "chello.nl"

Sakai Courseware Management: The Official Guide

It took almost a year to write, with the help of many, while balancing the pressures of my day job. It is approximately 500 pages long and the content is diverse and worth reading. The Sakai book is out . I am not making any money out of it, but find this a solid experience for my future experiments in writing.

You can find some sample chapters at:

     Papers, magazine articles

  1. Writing a book with the help of the Sakai free software community
  2. A sweet recipe for unit testing
  3. Don't forget the text editor
  4. Four part article on static code reviews - Destroy annoying bugs
  5. Guard the Castle Keep and Foil Angry Mobs with Stress Testing
  6. Software Search Engines
  7. Motivate your team with a few simple tricks
  8. Free software Easter eggs
  9. Linux Journal: Seperate the static from the Dymanic with Tomcat and Apache
  10. Sakai Dutch Article
  11. Beginners guide to database administration tools
  12. No budget learning with free software
  13. Create your online project site, start to finish, with Sakai
  14. Java Memory Management
  15. How to Pick Good Software
  16. Desktop diagramming with Dia and Kivio
  17. You cannot keep a lid on code coverage
  18. MINIX: what is it, and why is it still relevant?
  19. Vega Strike
  20. The free Tron Universe—Armagetron
  21. A Survey of Learning Management Systems
  22. A Survey of Learning Management Systems [Part 2]
  23. Short - GNU/Linux and WiFi
  24. Fresh Duo for Function Testing. JMeter and Selenium
  25. Stress Testing: Take an Open Source Approach (Pages 31-35)
  26. Shining Light on Java Code
  27. Why Use Open Source JSP Tag Libraries?
  28. Building Digital Dashboards with JSP Tag Libraries
  29. Building a Central Logging Service out of Common Parts
  30. Dynamic Content Creation
  31. Servlet-based Google Earth tours
  32. Battle for Wesnoth
  33. Bzflags
  34. Flying high with flight gear
  35. Fun with free software astronomy
  36. Thinking in Extremes with Xplanner
  37. JSTL Gives Web Applications Flexibility [You will need to be a subscriber]
  38. Sys Admin magazinePublished in print, but not online:
         Platform-Independent Stress Testing from the Command Line [June 2006]
  39.      Even ants can be assertive [July 2006]
  40.      YALE CAS and Variants of a Single Sign-On Solution [October 2006]
  41.      Java Web Application First Aid [May 2007]
  42. Using OpenDocument format text in OpenOffice, KOffice and AbiWord
    - Working with Tom Kuipers
  43. Blackboard dataminning
  44. Blackboard provisioning
  45. Smartcards
  46. Student Homepages
  47. Storage consolidation
  48. Single Sign On and Sign Off in a nonhomogeneous Portal front ended environment.
  49. Integration of Campus Wide Information systems using a hub and spoke architecture.
  50. Static code review presentation
  51. Quality Assurance presentation

     Mostly book reviews

2008
  1. Ruby by Example: Concepts and Code by Kevin C. Baird
  2. Professional Plone Development by Martin Aspeli
  3. Java EE 5 Development using GlassFish Application Server by David R. Heffelfinger
  4. Perl by Example, 4th Edition by Ellie Quigley
  5. Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux by Mark G. Sobell
2007
  1. Moodle Teaching Techniques by William H. Rice IV
  2. Attack Detection and Response with iptables, psad, and fwsnort by Michael Rash
  3. Security Data Visualization by Greg Conti
  4. Pro Tomcat 6 by Matthew Moodie
  5. Practical Ruby for System Administration by André Ben Hamou
  6. Virtual Honeypots: From Botnet Tracking to Intrusion Detection by Niels Provos, Thorsten Holz
  7. SQL for MySQL Developers: A Comprehensive Tutorial and Reference by Rick F. van der Lans
  8. Linux Appliance Design by Bob Smith, John Hardin, Graham Phillips, and Bill Pierce
  9. Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A developer's Guide to SEO by Jaimie Sirovich, Cristian Darie
  10. Linux Programming by Example by Arnold Robbins
  11. Qmail Quickstarter by Kyle Wheeler
  12. AJAX: Creating Web Pages with Asynchronous JavaScript and XML by Edmond Woychowsky
  13. Practical Subversion, Second Edition by Daniel Berlin and Garrett Rooney
  14. Pro Open Source Mail: Building an Enterprise Mail Solution by Curtis Smith
  15. Wicked Cool Java by Brian D. Eubanks
  16. Integrating and Extending BIRT by Jason Weathersby, Don French, et al
  17. A Field Guide to Reporting by Diana Peh, Alethea Hannemann, Nola Haque
  18. Agile Java Development with Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse by Anil Hemrajani
  19. Red Hat Fedora Core 6 Unleashed by Andrew Hudson, Paul Hudson
  20. Pro Apache XML by Poornachandra Sarang, Ph.D.
  21. The Definitive Guide to GCC, Second Edition by William von Hagen
  22. Embedded Linux Primer by Christopher Hallinan
  23. Self service Linux by Mark Wilding, Dan Behman

2006
  1. How Linux Works by Brian Ward
  2. Wicked Cool Shell Scripts by Dave Taylor
  3. OpenVPN: Building and Integrating Virtual Private Networks by Markus Feilner
  4. Moodle E-Learning Course Development by William H. Rice IV
  5. AJAX and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications by Christian Darie, Bogdan Brinzarea, Flip Chereches-Tosa
  6. Pro Perl Parsing by Christopher M. Frenz
  7. Pro PHP Security
  8. Pro MySQL
  9. Java 6 Platform Revealed
  10. User Mode Linux
  11. Linux Patch Management
  12. UNIX to Linux Porting by Alfredo Mendoza et. al
  13. Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective
  14. Linux Troubleshooting for System Administrators
  15. Linux® Debugging and Performance Tuning: Tips and Techniques by Steve Best
  16. The Linux® Kernel Primer: A Top-Down Approach for x86 and PowerPC Architectures
  17. Managing and Customizing OpenCMS 6 Websites by Matt Butcher

  18. Sakai European day - Newsletter
  19. An old blog at the freesoftware

      Things I  have done while working at UvA

  • Written a book
  • Quality Assurance
  • Sakai Fellow 2008-2009
  • Smartcards
  • LDAP provisioning
  • Metadirectory
  • Homepages
  • System integration
  • Security
  • uPortal channels
  • Single Sign On and Single Sign Out
  • Blackboard building blocks and authorization
  • Blackboard problem solving, monitoring and scaling out
  • Blackboard provisioning via Oracle Interconnect
  • Search Engines
  • CD Rom
  • Question Server
  • Alumnimail
  • Streaming media, uploading and encoding automation
  • Dataminning
  • Sakai, Blackboard Webservices [Experimental], Sakai tool [Experimental]
  • Automated code reviews, code coverage, profiling
  • CMS (MMBase)
  • Local Gartner portal
  • That strange art called stress testing (Jmeter,ant, eclipse: Uportal, Java applications, SAP)
  • And a number of other things I have forgotten
  • [To be completed]

     A brief history

  • Born in London in 1965
  • Englishman living in Amsterdam since around 92
  • Married with children
    • Father of two energetic and clever half human half eating machines
  • Technical writer
  • Product line development Officer (Course writer!)
  • Teacher
  • Degree two masters and a teaching qualification.
    • Degree - Physics (Essex University)
    • Masters - Microelectronics and Computer Engineering (Surrey University)
    • Masters - Experimental Science (UMIST in Manchester)
    • PostGraduate Certifcate of Education (Bolton near Manchester)
  • I designed and built the original version of the homepage system that this page is being hosted on