Open Source at SF State University - All things open source at San Francisco State University

OLPCSF Community Summit 2009

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:29:12 -0800

"OLPC San Francisco Bay Area Summit 2009 is a OLPC-SF community event designed to primarily foster collaboration amongst deployment teams in the SF Bay Area. We also hope that the event will help in improving the visibility of OLPC and Sugar to a wider group around this area.

The event will be a "Birds of a Feather" type event but largely run as an unconference. Claim your session!

Technology-based social ventures: Lessons from the field

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:00:27 -0800

Slides from my presentation at the "Social and Technology Entrepreneurship at SF State" Initiative. This presentation was about OLPC in general, and SF State's involvement in various activities.

Technology-based Social Ventures: Lessons from the field<

OLPC presentations in the SF Bay Area

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:17:27 -0800

OLPC President and COO, Charles Kane (http://laptop.org/en/utility/people/charles-kane.html) and Paul Commons (OLPCorps) will be in the SF Bay Area this week. There are two events: one on UC Berkeley campus on Thursday, and one on Stanford University campus on Friday. Both events are open. Details are posted online at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_San_Francisco_Bay_Area#Events

DoD clarifies position on Open Source Software

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:45:26 -0700

The US Department of Defense has released a memo stating that open source should be considered alongside commercial software when assessing department needs. The memo also debunks some myths regarding open source software. From the article:

"Open source can be compared directly with commercial software and it offers unique advantages for rapid prototyping and sharing across the military. Those are the key takeaways in a new memorandum now circulating the Pentagon from deputy CIO David Wennergren (right). While it’s not a complete endorsement of open source, it does give people a green light to go get some."

Technology Based Social Ventures: Lessons from the field

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:43:20 -0700

Note: This is an event open to all.

Come learn about how technology driven social entrepreneurship is changing the world – from the experts at SF State

The STEPS Initiative presents

Ubuntu 9.10 - Karmic Koala is here

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:14:05 -0700

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala is out. The demand for ISOs is incredible, so bit torrent is the preferred method. The mirrors are:

Ubuntu 9.10

Even getting to the torrent file via http is incredibly slow. I have a copy of the torrent file (not the ISO) at http://opensource.sfsu.edu/files/ubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386.iso.torrent It should be a lot faster to get the *.torrent on campus :-) I also have a couple of bit torrent downloads running on campus. I'll leave these running in the hopes that if you decide to download Karmic's awesomeness you'll get the bits from within 130.212.0.0/16

South Africa and San Francisco deployments: OLPC-SF meets on 22 August, 2009

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:47:11 -0700

What: OLPC-SF August 2009 meeting

OLPC-SF will meet on August 22, 2009. Items on the agenda:

Meet and greet - 10:00 am to 10:30 am
South Africa deployment update - 10:30am to 11:30am

eSibonisweni primary school / Saint Mark’s school

Location: Kwangwanase, Manguzi KZN
South African contact: Thulani Madondo, Kliptown Youth Programme
Project organizers: Jennifer Getz, Norm Lyons, Stacey Kertsman; San Francisco, CA

Starr King Elementary - 11:30am to 12:00noon.

Stuffed elephants, large lakes, and many many computers...

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 09:46:14 -0700

Can stuffed elephants and large lakes run on many many computers? Read on.

I've been hearing a lot about Hadoop, so I decided to read up on it. Its an interesting project of distributed proportions :-) From the wikipedia page:

Apache Hadoop is a Java software framework that supports data intensive distributed applications, free licensed.^[1] It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Hadoop was inspired by Google's MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers.

Open Source Testing tools

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:41:47 -0700

Just came across http://www.opensourcetesting.org/ which list a whole bunch of FOSS tools used for testing. Here's the list. My favorites are JMeter and Selenium, and both came up in context of some OLPC systems at a meeting today. Selenium looks promising. We use JMeter for testing Moodle on campus. Here's the full list:

My name is Bond. James Bond: OLPC-SF meets on July 18, 2009

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 08:42:29 -0700

As a kid, I loved James Bond movies (I still like the old ones), especially the gadgetry. A shoe compartment, a multi-purpose watch, a micro camera. Needless to say, a lot of money has gone into ThinkGeek purchases Imagine my pleasure when I recently had to introduce the OLPC project to someone (potential funding source for a deployment). I pulled out a 8GB microSD card from a secret zipper in my shirt, placed it squarely on the table, and said "We won't be needing the Internet for now. This little piece of technology holds well over 100 albums and hundreds of books that are freely distributable. It also has a web server, a database server, a collaboration server, backup software, and a bunch more. We won't be needing the Internet to get this deployment off the ground".

USPS moves to GNU/Linux

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:00:13 -0700

As seen on Slashdot:

"The US Postal Service has moved its Cobol package tracking software to HP machines running GNU/Linux. 1,300 servers handle 40 million transactions a day and cost less than the last system, which was based on a Sun Solaris environment." The migration took a year. The USPS isn't spelling how big the savings are, except that they are "significant."

Processing...

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:10:03 -0700

Just found out about "Processing". From their site:

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

EveryBlock's code GPL'd

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:33:56 -0700

Everyblock's code has been released under the GPL. Everyblock is a site that aggregates and geocodes local data -- news, crime, fire, restaurant inspections, and lets users define their interests down to the block-level.From O'Reilly's Radar:

"Django fans, Python geohackers and anyone who wants to build a local data aggregator are going to be thrilled. Adrian was one of the co-creators of Django and was one of the first Google Maps Mashup creators."

Open. Connect. Communicate

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 09:28:01 -0700

Recently, I presented at a workshop on telecommunications, open source and mobility at the First Caribbean Regional International Telecommunications Society Conference in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Key points in this workshop were:

The network's value proposition can be fully realized only if it remains open and unencumbered.
Setting up independent, yet interconnected PBXs using Asterisk: small ones with AstLinux, large ones with Trixbox.
Asterisk and the OLPC project. Setting up local phone networks in villages, schools, communities.

Slides are up at http://www.slideshare.net/sverma/open-connect-network

Salesforce Nonprofit Starter Pack goes open source

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:50:54 -0700

From their site:

"I'm very pleased to announce that the Nonprofit Starter Pack is released today as an open source software project! We've heard feedback from our community of users and partners and decided opening up the code and processes around the Nonprofit Starter Pack was the way to maximize the benefit to the nonprofits we serve. In this post I'll let you know why we're open sourcing, what we hope to accomplish, and how we're going about it. I'll also be asking you to join in our effort to help nonprofits using Salesforce.com be as effective as possible."