Tag: Liege

One more Open Source software at ULg

ExamsAfter the promotion of Open Access (see Bernard Rentier’s blog) and a history of publications in Open Access journals (see this last article from the Cyclotron Research Center in PLoS), the University of Liege is slowly slowly publishing Open Source software too.

The last free software published is exams, an assessment management system (for on-line exams, …). They chose the GNU GPL 2, apparently without the possibility to upgrade to version 3 (I don’t know if it’s deliberate or not). And you can download the source code here.

What is even more interesting is that they provide a demonstration website if you want to test it in a nearly real setup (as examiners or students ; only in French). And the demonstration system is hosted by a commercial hosting company (OVH), indicating that it could be possible to use this system on very common platforms (only PHP/MySQL are required).

Now, we can dream of other software from the ULg released as free software, a subversion repository and a users/developers community around exams …

P.S.: of course, we already did all that 😉 since we published Gemvid in an Open Access journal (the Journal of Circadian Rhythms) and published it along with a lot of other tools as free software. But I don’t count this as an institutional push towards free software since it was mainly my decision and the development didn’t involved other people.

Mapping cameras in Liege

A lot of publicity is made around CCTV cameras in London (e.g. recently). But surveillance cameras are also invading other cities like Liege. You can be pro or against. The least thing is awareness: citizen should know where they are and how data is used. But nor the Liege city, nor the Liege police websites display a map of cameras. So I decided to create such a map here (in French). Of course, I cannot do everything by myself. If you know the location of some camera, just let me know and I will add them on the map.

Old house for geeks in Liege (Belgium)

My parents-in-law just came for some holidays in Belgium and they choose a nice, old-style house near Liège (Belgium), in Trooz. It’s called “Biche les prés“. It has plenty of rooms, a nice, well-kept garden, it’s clean and situated near a forest, away from the city (20 km from Liège) … and it has a computer with GNU/Linux (RedHat 9 in dual boot with MS-Windows) and an internet connection (modem). Of course, M. Spirlet won’t give you the root password 😉 but, at least, if you left your laptop at work (like I did), you can read your mail with your favorite operating system.