OpenStax College Android App Released

A new Android app that features the OpenStax College books was released on May 2nd.  The features include

• Viewing released books
• Saving Books or Pages to your Bookmarks
• Take notes while reading
• Export your notes to a text file or share them.
• Share a Book or Page

The app is open source and the code is in Github. You can install the app from the Google Play store.

The app can be used to access these books

• College Physics
• Introduction to Sociology
• Biology
• Concepts of Biology
• Anatomy and Physiology
• Introductory Statistics
• Principles of Economics
• Principles of Microeconomics
• Principles of Macroeconomics

From a technical point of view, the app is based off of the existing OpenStax CNX Android app.  As part of our name change, the mobile version of our site was modified to work better with the Android app.  The result is a simplified look of the content (see screenshot).

If you use the app, we would love to hear feedback either as a rating of the app or by contacting us at android at cnx.org.

OpenStax CNX Featured On Floss Weekly Podcast

Two OpenStax team members were featured guests on the Floss Weekly podcast this morning.  Floss Weekly covers open source software for the TWIT podcast network.  Kathi Fletcher and Ross Reedstrom told the history of the project along with a discussion of the work we are currently doing on OpenStax CNX. The podcast is available to view or download from TWIT.

New Name and New Editor Demo

In case you missed the announcement at the Connexions Conference this week, Connexions has been renamed to OpenStax CNX!  We have also renamed this blog to OpenStax CNX Developer Blog. You can visit us at openstaxcnx.org. The renaming give us a unique presence on the web and helps us build a family of OpenStax sites to provide open options for education.  Our other sites are available from openstax.org.

At the 2014 conference, we released a beta version of our new editor. It can be found at demo.cnx.org. Log in using your CNX, Facebook, Twitter or Google accounts and give the new editor a try.  We would love to hear your feedback as we continue to work on it.  It is definitely beta software so expect to find bugs.  We will continue to update it we get ready for the public release at the end of June.

This blog has been dormant for the past few months which is not good.  Our plan is to start posting regularly again since we have lots of cool code happening in the OpenStax College textbooks and in the rewrite of OpenStax CNX.

Connexions Conference Sprints

We are holding 2 days of Sprints on April 24 and 25 following the 2013 Connexions Conference which is on April 23.  The sprints are an opportunity for you to work directly with the Connexions team, contribute your time and effort to Connexions and to have fun.  You don't need to attend both days.  Show up and leave as you like.  We have tasks for all skill levels and you don't need to be a programmer. 

The list of tasks is on Trello. 

 Just click on a card (white box) to see the details of each task.  If you are attending the conference, we hope you will stay for the Sprints.  If you are in Houston, but not attending the conference, you are welcome to join us at the Sprints.

Jenkins forces reinstall of server images on Rackspace

This is much more DevOps than Dev, but it is important as well ! One difficulty we have doing remote development with a team spread over at least a million cities (I haven't actually counted) is that the local development LAN for Bob is frankly inaccessible for Alice and Charlie. Maintaining n-1 VPN links is just going to drive us all mad.

So the simple solution is to rent a couple of cloud servers and host the development builds on there. The cost is pretty minimal, and it seemed good - until I realised that Jenkins, our friendly Continuous Integration Butler, was unable to re-install a cloud server from an image. Or rather it *could* - but Jenkins did not know when the server was rebuilt, and the server itself, which could signal jenkins, would have no state, so could not signal jenkins with *why* it had been rebuilt. So, Pantry Bell (https://github.com/lifeisstillgood/pantrybell). We simply run a webserver, that when called (perhaps from one Jenkins job) will force a re-imaging of a Rackspace server. This has a simple callback in rc.local (wget http://jenkins.frozone.mikadosoftware.com/pantrybell//`hostname`) So - a server forces a rebuild, on successful rebuild, the server calls home, and then the "real" jenkins job can be triggered using the Jenkins API calls. Amazingly enough it works, has trivial security, no REST compliance but it works

OpenStack and Rackspace

OpenStack and Rackspace

I suspect that if you find this as exciting as I do, one or both of us need to go out looking for a life. However, OpenStack is nearly here, and Connexions is in the Early Access Program. WooHoo.

OpenStack is in the frankly hilariously named Essex release, and is a collaboration between NASA (yes!) and Rackspace (and now 150 other companies) all of whom bascially want some of Jeff Bezos’ AWS lunch.

Now, I am currently trying to get Jenkins to nicely play with my cloud servers (see Pantry Bell) and it will use the pythonic nova Real Soon Now.

But the real pull is that we will be using rackspace to integrate all the different components involved in the new system, early as possible. The system currently builds the repository and the (old) editor, and I am working on bringing in the new Aloha editor and the webview asap. The sooner we see everything working together the sooner we shall find those great moments of code serendipity.

We have an opportunity as a bunch of Open Source developers to use the first real F/OSS cloud based offering and even influence a little part of its development. I am excited to see where it will go, and excited to see if it can provide measurable benefits to Connexions, either in development simplicity or sysadmin time savings. Interesting Times are ahead.

The Usual Suspects

Starting Blogging !

This is the first of hopefully a regular series of blogs from the developers behind Connexions.

Connexions

Connexions provides free (beer and speech) educational resources to students and teachers around the world. It has developed over ten years a eco-system of authoring tools, repository and means to serve the textbooks, exercises, snippets of knowledge to 2 million people a month.

And they are building a major update of that code.

And its all Open Source - and being developed right in front of your eyes. (Mail us if you want to join in.)

And thats what we are doing here ...

The people¶

(If your gravatar is not here, please let me know the right email address to use)

Jessica Burnett		Paul Brian		Ed Woodward
Philip Schatz		Michael Mulich		Marvin Reimer
Ross Reedstrom

Google Summer of Code Students

Debajyoti Datta		Saket Choudray		Alasdair Corbett
Yanchai Ye

The code:

https://github.com/Connexions

The plan

I am hoping we can link to the specs, and have the developers involved in each component post about their updates or changes on a regular basis.

We shall see, as the old man said.