FLOSS Project Planets
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Trade Your CD’s for a iPad
Hey buddy! Over here! I have a deal for you! I hear that you might be looking for a iPad. Well, if you are, do you have the cash? No? Well do you have 600 CD’s or DVD’s you aren’t listening to? Let’s say you give iPodMeister those cd’s and they will send you one!
Seriously, this isn’t a joke. Since 2004, iPodMeister has been trading CD’s and DVD’s for a iPod, iPhone or now a iPad. There are many different rates for getting a free device. Some include free ripping of the music or movie before sending you the device. This all sounds a little questionable to me, but it might be worth a shot! I don’t have the amount of CD’s for a iPad, or even a Nano, but if you have ever tried this service, let us know! Just head on over to iPodMeister.com for more … [visit site to read more]
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Matt Raible: My TSSJS 2010 Presentations and Summary
Yesterday, I did a GWT vs. Flex Smackdown with James Ward. While there wasn't as much trash talking as I'd hoped, I enjoyed delivering it and disputing the greatness of Flex. Below is the presentation that James and I delivered.
The show itself was great this year. It had more attendees than I've seen in a long time. There were a lot of really interesting sessions and and an often humorous Twitter back-channel. I attended quite a few talks and jotted down my notes from several of them. Please see the links below if you're interested in the sessions I attended. You can view all of the presentations from TSSJS 2010 on SlideShare.
- What's Happening in the Java World?
- Software Quality: The Quest for the Holy Grail?
- The Cloud Computing Continuum with Bob McWhirter
- Highly Interactive Software with Java and Flex
- C++, Java and .NET: Lessons Learned from the Internet Age
- Developing Rich Web Service APIs with Java
- What's New in Spring 3.0
Thanks to everyone who came to Vegas and to TheServerSide for an excellent conference.
Edward J. Yoon: Apache Hama is introduced in the BSP Worldwide.
http://www.bsp-worldwide.org/bspww3000.html
via Prof. Rob Bisseling. :)
Dear Edward, I have put a link from http://www.bsp-worldwide.org/bspww3000.html to your page and to the paper. I read it and find it very interesting. I heard a talk by Greg Malewicz from Google (Pregel) who is very enthousiastic about BSP. Suddenly I note a high interest in BSP everywhere. I wish you good luck with your project. best wishes, Rob
Python News: Python 2.6.5 final
The final release for Python 2.6.5 is now available.
Nordic Perl Workshop 2010
Read more of this story at use Perl.
Robert Collins: LibrePlanet – GNU Hackers Meetup
GNU Hackers meetups are a face to face meeting to balance the online collaboration that GNU maintainers and contributors do all the time. These are a recent (since 2007) thing, and are having a positive effect within GNU and the FSF.
The LibrePlanet 2010 GNU Hackers meetup runs concurrent with the first day of LibrePlanet.
We started with some project updates:
- SipWitch – a project to do discovery of SIP endpoints and setup encryption etc. This looks quite interesting, and is looking for contributors.
- Bazaar – I presented an update on where Bazaar is at and what we’re focusing on now and in the future:
- short term: merging and collaboration:
- merge behaviour
- conflict behaviour
- develop a rebase that can combine unrelated branches
- looms to be polished, or pipelines extended – something to manage long-standing patches for distributions, or other environments that need long lived patch sets.
- long term
- continuing optimisation of network and local perf
- meta-branch operations – mirror collections of branches,
- work with many branches at once (many branches in one dir (a-la git, hopefully less confusing)
- easier ‘get up and go’ for new contributors
- now and forever
- keep fostering community growth
- we’re aiming for negative bug growth- get on top and stay there
- short term: merging and collaboration:
Felipe Sanches presented his list of things that should be on the high priority project list:
- accessibility since 1st boot
- reconfigurable hardware development (FPGA tools) – this is particularly relevant for handling e.g. wifi cards that have a FPGA in the card, so we can replace the non-free microcode.
- nonfree firmware issue
–lunch–
John Eaton on Octave. John compared the octave contributors – 30 or so over the years, and never more than 2 at a time. The Proprietary product Matlab that Octave is very similar to has 2000 staff working at the company producing it. Users seem to expect the two products to be equivalent, and are disappointed that Octave is less capable, and that the community is not as able to do the sort of support that a commercial organisation might have done. Octave would like to gain some more developers and be able to educe users more effectively – convert more to become developers.
Rob Myers, the chief GNU webmaster gave a description of his role: The webmasters deal with adding new content, dealing with mail to webmaster@, which can be queries for the GNU project, random questions about CDs, and an endless flood of spam. The webmasters project is run as a free software project – the site is in CVS (yes CVS), visible on Savannah. Templates could be made nicer and perhaps move to a CMS.
Aubrey Jaffer on cross platform. There is a thing called Water which is meant to replace all the different languages used in web apps – generates html, css, alters the DOM, does what you’d do with javascript. So there is a Water -> backend translator that outputs Java for servers, C# for windows, and so on. (I think, this wasn’t entirely clear). He went on to talk about many of the internals of a thing called Schlep which is used as a compiler to get scheme code running in C/C#/Java so as to make it available to Water backends in different environments.
Matt Lee spoke about GNU FM – GNU FM is a free ‘last.fm’ site. The site is running at http://libre.fm/. 24ish devs, but stalle after 6 months – whats next? Matt has started GNU Social to build a communication framework for GNU projects to talk to each other – e.g. for each GNU FM site to communicate on the back end, with a particular focus on doing social functionality – groups, friendships, personal info. The wiki page needs ideas!
GNU advisory board discussion… too much to capture, but focused GNU wide issues – things like how projects get contributors, contributions, coordination. Teams were a big discussion point, bug trackers – how to coordinate teams followed up of that, and there is s ‘GNU Source Release Collection’ project to do coordinated releases of GNU software that are all known to work together.
Aaron Seigo (aseigo): semi-random thoughts for the day
A couple days ago I downloaded a build of the Plasma Netbook Reference Platform (PNRP?), threw it on a USB key and for the first time ran it on an actual netbook. Up till now I'd been running it either on my laptop or on funky "developer devices" hooked up to a normal monitor. Putting it on one of the first-gen EEE PCs was really eye-opening. The whole form of the user interface makes so much more sense on a smaller screen, and it worked right out of the box quite nicely. There were a few issues here and there, and some new issues related to design came to light as I sat there watching P. use it (he loved it, and is now back to using that rather old netbook now because of the new interface on it). This is exactly what we hoped for when getting PNRP up and running: being able to easily see it in the proper context and get working quickly and effectively on improvements. Since my experiment with P and the old netbook, there have been two new builds and I'm about to update his USB stick to today's version.
Some have also been asking how this relates to the Kubuntu Netbook effort. Kubuntu put out a tech preview of Plasma Netbook and continues to ship a netbook version. Why didn't we go with Kubuntu, then? Well, that question is a loaded one. In particular, it implies that only by sticking exclusively with Kubuntu would Kubuntu's efforts be validated. To me, those efforts stand on their own as being great and valuable and it's still something I encourage and support personally.
The openSUSE Build Service gives us two new things, however. One is a new set of tools that makes the "test, feedback, change, test again" and "try, change, publish alternate" workflows easy beyond belief (and the tools work on all major distributions, including *buntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian..). Plasma Netbook wins and that means our users win, regardless of the distribution they ultimately use it on.
The other thing using OBS gives us is another distribution joining in and getting involved. Instead of Plasma Netbook being theoretically available everywhere but only available in an "out of the box" configuration specifically for netbooks with one distribution (Kubuntu), it's now available "out of the box" for netbooks on openSUSE as well. I hope that number of out-of-the-box-for-netbook distributions continues to grow, and grow faster.
Testing and growth is precisely the reasoning behind the PNRP. It gives people something to play with and improve upon, but it also gives those who would package up Plasma Netbook a gage by which to measure what a Plasma Netbook release should look like (that's why it's called a ("reference"). This will only help to improve Kubuntu Netbook and will lower the cost of entry and raise the chance of success for any other OSV (or OEM) who wants to engage with Plasma Netbook.
Summary: we're working together with as many groups as we can to float everyone's boats higher. It's not a choice between one or the other, especially not when there is a "Help everyone!" option for us to choose.
Take a moment to take the Plasma Netbook Reference Platform for a spin and discover just how easy it is go get that thing on a USB stick and booting on your netbook. The ease of a live CD, the speed (and persistence between boots) of a hard disk install. Huzzah!
We Do More Than Chase Taillights
The community press is fairly awash with stories about Linux on tablets. Why now? The iPad. This is what we're best at it, isn't it: chasing other people's taillights. Ok, that's a bit dour and we are actually really good at creating new stuff too. But when someone else comes out with something great, we steamroll off with amazing momentum to react. The word "react" is an interesting one: it's the combination of "re", which indicates repetition (it can also mean, funnily enough in this context, "backwards"), and "act". While reacting is important in not letting Free software be end-run by the good ideas of others, we also need to be proactive. The prefix "pro" can mean this: "a prefix of priority in space or time having especially a meaning of advancing or projecting forward or outward".
The good news is that we are often proactive and there is a lot of interesting work being done in Free software. The concept of "activities" are big topic right now for us in Plasma, to pick just one example, and they aren't to be seen outside of Free software. There are many such examples to pick from, but there's something about our proactive work that fails us. After all, why aren't the MacOS or Windows fanboys railing on about the need for activities on their platform? (Ok, besides the fact that they are still a work in progress on our platform; but I predict when we ship them fully formed, that still won't change the answer.)
These companies do something we don't which we ought to be doing: not only are they proactive as well as reactive in creating technologies, they tell people about what they've done.
If the press, driven by our promotional efforts (across Free software, not specifically/only KDE people), spent the same effort publicizing our proactive efforts as they do our reactive ones it would be wonderfully (or painfully, if you are competing with Free software ;) apparent how well F/OSS does on the innovation front.
Defining Ourselves By Successes
We also need to learn how to define ourselves by our successes and see our failures as interesting, expected and required by-products of the road to those successes. There are people in the community who look at our success in countries around the world and discount it all as being "not relevant" because it isn't in the country they live in, and therefore conclude Free software has failed generally. Similarly when we talk about using KDE (or other F/OSS) software in production usage, instead of defining our successes and positioning ourselves in line with them we too often discount all possible usage of that software because of failures that affect only a portion of the market. This leads to us eliminating ourselves from entire market segments that we are perfect for just because we aren't (yet? :) universally perfect.
This would be akin to Apple telling nobody to buy the iPhone just because they don't feel they, as a company, are a great fit for the enterprise or that due to the lack of multitasking the iPhone is a poor choice for a variety of use cases. Those are both statements of truth, but that communication would do a great disservice to those whom the iPhone does work just fine for by preventing them from trying it. Now, if we made the iPhone we'd make double sure people know it wasn't ready for the biggest of enterprise usage and how our lack of multitasking is a "real issue that makes us not ready for production usage". Yes, we would be able to take the iPhone and destroy its potential success in the market. This in spite of many of the people I know who are "guilty" of this behavior thinking the iPhone is a great product, a feeling they have because they have been made aware of the benefits clearly and because it is a product, faults and all, that is clearly defined by its successes.
Note that Apple does not ignore (all) failings: eventually the iPhone OS will do multitasking. Nor do they try and say that it currently does indeed do multitasking. They aren't saints (I'm not a fan of their use of legal pressure and ultra-secrecy), but we can learn from some of the things they do well. I also love their approach to the enterprise by seeing sales to enterprise customers as "collateral successes". They don't perceive themselves to be a failure because they don't do well in the enterprise, they are a success because sometimes they win even in places they do poorly. Imagine if we had that same healthy viewpoint of F/OSS? There is no excuse not to.
So not only do we have to be proactive (as well as reactive) in creation, we have to be able to define ourselves by our successes and speak openly to the people who are well served by those successes.
Speaking Openly About Our Failings
In my opinion, the best place to speak about our low points is with each other, where "each other" is defined by "the people working on those things". This is how we can identify and fix those issues. I'm not advocating actively hiding them from the public, but talking with each other about them is the best way to see improvements be made.
When we decide that our first action will be to broadcast what we see as problems via, say, our blog we are setting up a very nasty situation, especially if we're talking about someone else's work. We may not have the whole story, and spreading half-facts or even incorrect information does not help anyone.
It reminds me of a story about a guy who was spreading rumors about this other fellow called, for ease of story-telling, Bob. Bob and the rumor monger have a discussion about the rumor and it turns out it was largely a misunderstanding. The guy apologizes for the misunderstanding and expects it to be all better between them from that point forward. Bob says it's more complicated than that, and to illustrate he takes the guy out to a bridge and brings along a feather pillow with him. Atop the bridge Bob tore open the pillow and the feathers blew in every direction on the winds that swept the river valley below. Bob pointed out that while he realized ripping the pillow was not the right thing to do, the feathers were still spread out everywhere and were now beyond his ability to get them back.
When we blog, we're ripping open a feather pillow into the Internet.
Just as important, when we discuss things between team mates in the context of the appropriate mailing lists, irc channels, etc. then we give each other the opportunity to respond without pressure and in context. People, being people, respond much better with greater performance with that kind of approach. If your goal is just to piss people off, then don't do such a logic, reasonable thing. If your goal is to see things improved, then discuss it with the people involved first. Then go blog about it and document the warts, but this time with accuracy and all parties aware of what's coming.
Of course, if you get ignored or the responses returned are indicative of being in need of a wake up call (e.g. there's denial at play) then maybe press the issue by taking it to a wider audience at that point. I've personally called various people to task in the past via my blog, but before doing so I try to ensure that I've first attempted (in some cases for months!) to get the issue dealt with either privately or in the appropriate context. There are times when the unfortunate is necessary.
In KDE, this is very rarely the case.
Hans Chen (Mogger): New Klassroom course: Krazy fixes 2
A new course is now open for participation over at the KDE Community Forums. This time the students will use a KDE utility called Krazy Code Checker to improve the code quality of a KDE application of choice, mentored by our own administrator (and System Settings maintainer) bcooksley.
The course requires basic C++ knowledge and a KDE development platform (kdelibs) >= 4.4 (self-compiled or distribution packages). If you want to get a feel of how it’s like, you can take a look at the previous krazy course.
Interested? Head over to the forums and read the course description. If you want to participate, post a reply with the subject you want to work on. Have fun!
David Watson: 7 Day Photo Challenge - Day 7
Well here it is, the last shot in the challenge. I've quite enjoyed it this week, I post a follow-up over the weekend with some more thoughts but for now the last image...
There is a module for that!: Dynamic transitions with the Workflow module
Workflows are a basic building block of business applications. While the Workflow module provides a good base to start building workflows in Drupal, it has not kept up with the rise in complexity we've been witnessing in the capacity of Drupal to build Web applications with minimum coding.
Central to a workflow is the notion of state transition: when does a "Job Bid" node move from state "Proposed" to state "Accepted" or "Rejected"? Who can trigger this transition?
Filip Van Raemdonck: Indeed it is
Here's to another company with a sense of humour.
Granted, this is actually a former Sun webspace, so it wasn't Oracle that put the PostgreSQL “most advanced” badge on there.
But Sun did own the MySQL brand, before.
Roozbeh Shafiee: NEDA for Next Release of Chakra
probably you know chakra project ! a distrolet based on archlinux , after about 2 mounth working on artwork of chakra (of course not non-stop) today i finished it and it is ready to use for next release of chakra project… NEDA theme is contain Wallpaper , KDM , KSplash , Plasma theme , also im working on plymouth theme for more integration of all part of chakra together.
plasma theme is new in chakra and in previous releases we used default kde plasma theme . this theme is based on Dark Air and we changed it a bit , like white font instead black font and some widgets replaced and etc…
this is a preview of chakra with NEDA theme and artwork and more screenshots will publish here (in this blog) later , today is Norooz (persian new year) and im going to vacation
Comcast Bandwidth Usage Meter
Christoph Egger: Open Game Art did it right
Open Game Art is a newly started site for exchanging free Artwork. While one can easily get the impression that there are loads of such sites around, Open Game Art is one of the very few that actually is done right.
As a Member of the Debian Games Team and the Unknown Horizons Project I was way too often in the need for good artwork searching around the web. I've also already reported once about my trouble.
There are quite some sites like Free Sounds around offering free artwork -- but only free as in beer as the saying goes, not as in speech which of course is really unhelpfull for FOSS projects. And even most of the sites that have free content often only tell you the license on some special pice of arts details page.
Open Game Art is quite different from that. All the license you may choose as a contributor are free (both in Debian and in FSF terms) and the license is available through a search filter so you can find stuff that fits you project's licensing policy. This list, and that's another thing I really like about that site, is the availability of choice among common licenses including, next to the copyleft class of licenses a fair share of more liberal licenses like my personal favourite, the zlib License.
And because such a site is just as good as it's amount and quality of data I've started sharing some recordings. I'm currently really new to audio recording so I guess it'll take some time for me to become really good. I'm considering putting some of my experiences and stuff I've learned here.
Aaron Seigo (aseigo): 5 days and counting!
As is noted on the timeline page, the Plasma Javascript Jam Session is just 5 days away from being open for subsmissions! From the 24th on there is a one week window (ok, plus one day ;) for your submissions to come rolling on in to javascriptjam at kde.org. I can't wait to see the results! :)
Matt Raible: What's New in Spring 3.0
The most important thing for the future of Java is productivity and cloud computing. The focus at SpringSource is heavily on productivity and not just on improving the Spring codebase. If you look at the comparisons out there between Rails and Spring, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. The philosophy with Spring has always been the developer is always right. However, if you look at something like Rails, you'll see it's far more prescriptive. That layer of opinionated frameworks is important in that it improves your productivity greatly.
SpringSource is putting a lot of emphasis on improving developer productivity with two opinionated frameworks: Grails and Spring Roo. To show how productive developers can be, Rod started to build a web app with Spring Roo. As part of this demo, he mentioned we'd see many of the new features of Spring 3: RestTemplate, @Value and Spring EL.
Rod used STS to write the application and built a Twitter client. After creating a new project using File -> New Roo Project, a Roo Shell tab shows up at the bottom. Typing "hint" tells you what you should do write away. The initial message is "Roo requires the installation of a JPA provider and associated database." The initial command is "persistence setup --provider HIBERNATE --database HYPERSONIC_IN_MEMORY". After running this, a bunch of log messages are shown on the console, most of them indicating that pom.xml has been modified.
The first file that Rod shows is src/main/resources/META-INF/spring/applicationContext.xml. It's the only XML file you'll need in your application and includes a PropertyPlaceHolderConfigurer, a context:component-scan for finding annotations and a transaction manager.
After typing "hint" again, Roo indicates that Rod should create entities. He does this by running "ent --class ~.domain.Term --testAutomatically". A Term class (with a bunch of annotations) is created, as well as a number of *.aj files and an integration test. Most of the files don't have anything in them but annotations. The integration test uses @RooIntegrationTest(entity=Term.class) on its class to fire up a Spring container in the test and do dependency injection (if necessary). From there, Rod demonstrated that he could easily modify the test to verify the database existed.
private SimpleJdbcTemplate jt; @Autowired public void init(DataSource ds) { this.jt = new SimpleJdbcTemplate(ds); } @Test public void testDb() { jt.queryForInt("SELECT COUNT(0) FROM TERM"); }Interestingly, after running the test, you could see a whole bunch of tests being run, not just the one that was in the class itself. From there, he modified the Term class to add two new properties: name and searchTerms. He also used JSR 303's @NotNull annotation to make the fields required.
@Entity @RooJavaBean @RooToString @RooEntity public class Term { @NotNull private String name; @NotNull private String searchTerms; }Next, Rod added a new test and showed that the setters for these properties were automatically created and he never had to write getters and setters. This is done by aspects that are generated beside your Java files. Roo is smart enough that if you write toString() methods in your Java code, it will delete the aspect that normally generates the toString() method.
To add fields to an entity from the command lie, you can run commands like "field string --fieldName text --notNull" and "field number --type java.lang.Long --fieldName twitterId --notNull". The Roo Shell is also capable of establishing relationships between entities.
After successfully modifying his Entities, Rod started creating code to talk to Twitter's API. He used RestTemplate to do this and spent a good 5 minutes trying to get Eclipse to import the class properly. The best part of this demo was watching him do what most developers do: searching Google for RestTemplate to get the package name to import.
After awkward silence and some fumbling, he opened an existing project (that had the dependencies properly configured) and used Java Config to configure beans for the project. This was done with a @Configuration annotation on the class, @Value annotations on properties (that read from a properties file) and @Bean annotations for the beans to expose. The first time Rod tried to run the test it failed because a twitter.properties file didn't exist. After creating it, he successfully ran the test and successfully searched Twitter's API.
The nice thing about @Configuration is the classes are automatically picked up and you don't need to configure any XML to recognize them. Also, in your Java classes, you don't have to use @Autowired to get @Bean references injected.
After this, Rod attempted to show a web interface of the application. He started the built-in SpringSource tc Server and proceeded to show us Tomcat's 404 page. Unfortunately, Tomcat seemed to startup OK (no errors in the logs), but obviously something didn't work well. For the next few silent moments, we watched him try to delete web.xml from Eclipse. Unfortunately, this didn't work and we weren't able to see the scaffolding the entities that Rod created.
At this point, Rod opened a completed version of the app and was able to show it to us in a browser. You could hear the murmur of the crowd as everyone realized he was about to show the the Twitter search results for #tssjs. Most of the tweets displayed were from folks commenting about how some things didn't work in the demo.
In summary, there's some really cool things in Spring 3: @Configuration, @Value, task scheduling with @Scheduled and one-way methods with @Async.
Final points of SpringSource and VMWare: they're committed to Java and middleware. Their big focus is providing an integrated experience from productivity to cloud. There's other languages that are further along than Java and SpringSource is trying to fix that. One thing they're working on is a private Java cloud that companies can use and leverage as a VMWare appliance.
I think there's a lot of great things in Spring 3 and most users of Roo seem to be happy with it. It's unfortunate that the Demo Gods frowned upon Rod, but it was cool to see him do the "no presentation" approach.
Julien Blache: pommed v1.32: maintenance release
I’ve just released pommed v1.32, a minor maintenance release for the 12″ PowerBook G4.
I’ve just realized that I did not post an announce for pommed v1.31 a while back, which was also a maintenance release, adding support for the MacBookPro5,4 (15″ June 2009) and the latest wireless keyboard.
Greg Turnquist: Sometimes it’s the little features that lead us to choose a library
