Open Source Blog

Archive for August, 2009

Sony is quietly pushing forward with a minor revolution, based on open source, across its product divisions.

Since becoming a conglomerate in the 1990s Sony has been managed as a collection of fiefdoms, not a coherent whole. Yet many of those fiefdoms now seem headed in the same direction.

• Sony chose an open source format, EPUB, for its e-book reader.
• Sony-Ericsson is apparently taking command of the open source Symbian movement as Nokia retreats from it.
• Sony Pictures Imageworks is launching an open source program.

Under Akio Morita, who resigned as chairman in 1994 and died in 1999, Sony was a lot like Steve Job’s Apple — iconoclastic, entrepreneurial, proprietary, secretive. These moves indicate the company is now headed in the opposite direction.

It’s easy to say that Howard Stringer, the former CBS head who has been chairman of Sony since 2005, is behind a grand turn toward open source. Interesting if true. But the who is not nearly as important here as the what.

The what seems to be an attempt by Sony to regain market share by embracing open source across the board. Anyone ready to root for the Japanese?

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Filed under: Video, Macintosh, Productivity

Camtasia, one of the best screencasting applications for Windows, just got a highly-anticipated Mac release. Camtasia can easily record audio and video from multiple sources at once, so it’s easy to talk someone through what’s happening onscreen.

The recording of your screen, your Mac’s audio output, sound from your microphone, and video from your iSight can all be easily arranged in the timeline along with any other elements you might want to import. Combine that with a nice effects library and easy sharing, and you’ve got a winning screencast app.

It’s also currently discounted from $150 to $99.

Mac users have been salivating over Camtasia for a couple of years now, mainly because it tops other Mac screen recording software in terms of post-production and editing. The Mac version of Camtasia isn’t exactly the same as the PC version, however.

Aside from the Mac-like UI design, it also has more options for editing the size, position and rotation of your video than its Windows counterpart. The Camtasia team has used their own software to record a screencast of Camtasia, and that’s a good place to start getting familiar with the features. Check it out on their homepage, or sneak a peek at a YouTube walkthrough after the break.

Continue reading Camtasia screencasting software now has a Mac version

Camtasia screencasting software now has a Mac version originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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News that paravirtual drivers for Windows on KVM have been released by Red Hat isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a big deal.

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The Google Static Maps API (our Google Static Maps API Profile) is quite popular with developers looking for a relatively lightweight method of including Google Maps as rapidly-loading images on web sites. If you’re not familiar with this API, it essentially allows you to add a custom Google Map (including markers and paths) as the source for an image element on a web page.

The first version of this API was released approximately two years ago, and now Google has released v2 of the API. According to Pamela Fox, who posted the news on the Google Geo Developers Blog, the new API boasts several new features:

• Paths can be specified as encoded polylines.
• Paths can be filled and rendered as polygons.
• Locations (in center, markers, or path parameters) can now be specified as addresses instead of latitude/longitude coordinates.
• Colors can now be specified as any 24-bit or 32-bit color.

Pamela has put together a “Secret Treasures of Kyoto” mobile-friendly website that showcases some of these features.

Developers should note that the previous version (v1) will be deprecated in the future, although Google has put together an upgrade guide to help with the transition to the new API. Documentation on the new API and a Static Maps v2 wizard (that allows you to test out the new API without programming) are also available.

This is certainly some good news for developers who had been clamoring for the features included in the new API, and we’re sure we’ll see continued implementation for various types of sites and mashups.

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The sun has set on our fifth year of introducing college and university students to Free and Open Source software development, and what a year it’s been! Just under 2000 mentors and 1000 students began working together to improve the code bases of 150 projects, and we’re pleased to let folks know that 85 percent of our student participants have received passing final evaluations, up a full two percent over 2008 and our best success rate to date.

These successful Open Sourcerers are busy preparing code samples for the world’s perusal, and we’ll post an update here when actual source code produced during this year’s Google Summer of Code has been made available on project hosting on Google Code. Of course, there’s no real need to wait for code samples – many of these students have already had their work integrated into their project’s code base, so check out their work by visiting the websites and mailing lists of your favorite participating projects now. We’ll also be publishing more extensive statistics from our program evaluations, along with wrap up reports from some of our participating mentoring organizations, so stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks.

Google Summer of Code Mentors Dimitri Gaskin and Karoly Negyesi
Photo courtesy of Scott Hadfield

Congratulations to all of our students for their achievements this Summer. We certainly hope you will continue helping your project communities with source code, documentation and general enthusiasm long after this Summer has ended. Many thanks also to our community of mentors, without whose time, skill and dedication this program would not be possible.

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

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Money happened. Success happened.

Over the last few years the Wikimedia Foundation has built a board with some serious street cred, climaxing with the appointment of venture capitalist Roger McNamee to its advisory board  in January . Money has been rolling in.

Wikipedia long had to rely on the nickels and dimes of contributors to keep the servers on and the bandwidth bills paid, but now those nickels and dimes are turning into serious change, and it is becoming a darling of the philanthropic establishment.

On its own the Foundation raised $6.2 million worth in 2008. (Full disclosure. I threw in a few of them. About $50 if I recall correctly.) Such early money is indeed like yeast. It lets the dough rise. So here is $300,000 from the Ford Foundation. And $500,000 from the Hewletts.

The influx of money and talent has allowed Wikimedia to get its head up out of the day-to-day and focus on the longer term. Plus, with 3,000,000 articles and counting (just in English) the absolute growth rate is slowing.

It’s not, as The New York Times snarked, that “as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable.” It’s more like a couple that owns its house and has come into some money. Out with the garage sale cabinets, let’s make a serious Ikea run.

No one is making big money here. But some digital plumbers and electricians and framers and painters are getting some work, turning the resource into something that will stand the test of time.

The first bit of renovation will come on one of the most controversial and bug-ridden parts of the house, living people. The aim is to put a process together that can end the back-and-forth between friends and enemies on your Wikipedia page.

Or mine.

I had a personal run-in with a Wikibully. Someone who didn’t care for me tore my reputation on Wikipedia to shreds. I finally rewrote the whole thing to my own liking. Recently the whole article was taken down.

But here’s the good part.

All the official actions related to the page are, for the first time, transparent and identified as to who did what. This person took the page down first, this one restored it, this one took it down again. Processes are being built by which such decisions can be managed and defended. What was arbitrary is becoming arbited.

That’s important because Wikipedia is becoming more than a source of articles on Japanese anime. As I found in rewriting my 2002 book on Moore’s Law recently, Wikipedia is our best hope of fighting link rot. It’s a source you know you can link to, an address that is unlikely to disappear, or go behind a paid firewall.

Like the Internet itself, like open source itself, Wikipedia is growing up. This is something to be celebrated. Regardless of what happens to your personal page.

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Filed under: Windows, Open Source

The inner geek in all of us is constantly curious about what exactly is going on under the hood of our computer; the trusty ol’ Task Manager is usually pretty good at letting us keep an eye on things. Sometimes, however, said inner geek needs a little bit more control over their not-always-well-oiled machine.

Process Hacker is an open source application that incorporates all of Task Manager’s features while adding a plethora of other functions, charts, and options. Included in Process Hacker’s features are things such as a tree view to see where active processes came from, detailed graphs displaying each process’s resource usage and statistics, and (my personal favorite) over a dozen different ways to kill a process.

Sysinternals fans may notice that Process Hacker is very similar to Mark Russinovich’s Process Explorer utility. The two utilities trade off a few features; Process Explorer is a little more developer-oriented, where Process Hacker is geared somewhat more toward the average power user.

The download link on Process Hacker’s home page is broken, but you can download it directly from their project page on SourceForge.

Process Hacker is Task Manager on steroids originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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InfoWorld has a great series of articles and blog posts on Apple’s upcoming Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) release, expected Aug. 28. Most readers are probably already familiar with some of the major features, such as Microsoft Exchange support and faster backups.

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The Sunlight Foundation is wrapping up its second Apps for America contest, and it wants your help picking a winner. Amongst the three finalists are a government notice archive, data masher and what Sunlight’s director calls “EveryBlock for federal data,” referring to the site recently acquired by MSNBC.com.

This contest came with a challenge to expose the contents of Data.gov, the initiative to increase public access to government datasets.

GovPulse.us provides access to a database of articles from the Federal Register, the journal of the federal government (more at our GovPluse profile).

Using GovPulse, you can use filters to decide what is important to you. For example, view by department, location or date. The site’s homepage provides a list of notices available for comment, highlighting those that have just opened and those that are about to close. Civic engagement has never been so easy.

DataMasher brings basic mathematics to data. Choose two from over fifty datasets, then add, subtract, multiply or divide to get new values.

For example, one user took the current population by state, divided by the number of representatives per state and came up with the people per representative. Denny Rehlberg may be the hardest-working man in congress, as he has to single-handedly represent Montana’s nearly 1 million people.

This We Know lets you get local and explore government data about your community. Enter your city or zip code and get a list of facts (this app is our Mashup of the Day today).

Click an individual item and be taken to a breakdown of the data. Even better, from there you can go straight to the source in data.gov.

For more on these finalists and to vote, see Sunlight’s post. Or, check out all 47 entries in the contest, or the winners from the first contest.

And if you’re looking to win next time, Programmable Web keeps a list of current mashup contests.

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Every year several hundreds of Debian contributors from around the world get together at DebConf in a different city to share a week (or more!) of work, friendship and fun.

The 10th annual Debian Developers Conference just ended a few days ago in the beautiful medieval city of Cáceres in Spain with Debian Project Leader Steve McIntyre concluding: “This has been one of the most productive conferences we have ever held. Our developers and teams achieved a great deal during this short period, and this will surely have a big impact on the upcoming release of ‘Squeeze’.”

Among the many notable talks were the release goals and plans for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 “Squeeze” as well as the new timed freezes release policy, and the Project Leader’s keynote about working further towards Debian’s motto of being the “universal operating system”.

In all, over 130 different sessions took place during the conference, ranging from formal talks to numerous spontaneously scheduled meetings. For most of these sessions, live video streams were made available over the internet as well as recordings: http://debconf9.debconf.org/video.

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