Monthly Archives: June 2008

DITA Open Platform

I am pleased to announce the first milestone of the DITA Open Platform version 1.0.0

http://www.dita-op.org/

This milestone is a test release in order to see if there is interest in the DITA community for what the DITA Open Platform project plans to offer. It is also a mean to collect suggestions and ideas from the community.

The goal of this project is to provide the DITA community with a free and easy-to-deploy DITA oriented production platform. It is targeted at small companies or teams that do not need a complete CMS solution.

This the first open-source project I launch and I hope the DITA community members will find interest in the initiative.

The Human ESB

The Project Manager is a human ESB, a Human Service Bus (HSB).

The HSB receives messages from humans, transforms them, aggregates them, sometime filters them, and forwards them to other humans or HSBs.

And they do that, following the corporate processes.

Like an ESB the HSB is a nodal point in an enterprise organization and, like an ESB, they can be a source of massive system failures.

Image Credits: Nickster 2000

Welcome to Zon!

Sponsored by the Office of the Chinese Language Council International and the Michigan State University, Zon is a browser based “multiplayer, online learning environment designed to teach Chinese language and culture through gameplay”.

I personally don’t like very much this kind of educational games, I always find difficult to engage and loose interest after a few minutes. However, it looks like Zon has some interesting features, like the fact that almost everything can be spoken out.

The player can interact with almost anything, people (players and non-players) and objects, chat, get definitions and cultural or practical information. There are mini-games where you can earn cash. You can trade (and I hope can exercise the fine art of bargaining).

All in all it looks like a good idea but I am not into it, and it is sluggish…