Open Source at SF State University

OLPCSF Community Summit 2009

2009-11-09T16:29:12-08:00

"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!

Date: Saturday, Nov 21, 2009 (whole day?)

Location: SFSU Downtown Campus 835 Market St. 5th Floor San Francisco, CA 94103"

Technology-based social ventures: Lessons from the field

2009-11-05T11:00:27-08:00

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

View more documents from Sameer Verma.

OLPC presentations in the SF Bay Area

2009-11-02T13:17:27-08:00

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

2009-10-29T12:45:26-07:00

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."

I say that's a pretty mighty +1 for FOSS.

Technology Based Social Ventures: Lessons from the field

2009-10-29T09:43:20-07:00

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

A special panel on

Technology Based Social Ventures: Lessons from the field

Featuring

Marc Krizack

Executive Director, Whirlwind Wheelchair

Whirlwind Wheelchair is an organization that works to make it possible for every person in the developing world who needs a wheelchair to obtain one that will lead to maximum personal independence and integration into society. Marc Krizack is a social entrepreneur, lawyer and activist for disability rights.

Prof. Gary Selnow

Director, WiRED International

Professor of Communications, SFSU

WiRED International is a non-profit organization that has become a leader in providing education and information to medical schools and to grassroots populations in developing countries. Prof. Gary Selnow, founding director of WiRED international, received the 2004 President’s Medal at SFSU.

Prof. Sameer Verma

Bay Area Coordinator, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

Associate Professor of Information Systems, SFSU

OLPC is an organization dedicated to creating educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop and content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.

Date: Wednesday, Nov. 4th at 7p.m

Location: SCI 210 (Science Building on SFSU campus)

STEPS (Social and Technology Entrepreneurship at SF State) is a new multidisciplinary initiative aimed at fostering scholarship, creative and outreach activity related to understanding the simultaneous creation of social and economic value within our organizations and institutions. For more information about its mission and activities, or to get involved, contact Prof. Sanjay Jain at sanjay@sfsu.edu or Prof. Geoff Desa at gdesa@sfsu.edu

Ubuntu 9.10 - Karmic Koala is here

2009-10-29T09:14:05-07:00

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

Check out the awesomeness. Click below for a tour.

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

2009-08-20T15:47:11-07:00

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.

The team is gaining momentum and is looking into a sensor project spearheaded by Tom Boonsiri.

Minor Project Updates - 12:00noon

Repair Center updates (If you need car chargers, or power cord connectors, contact OLPC-SF Repair Center)

SFSU Lending Library progress report

School server and content libraries.

Other deployments.

Bring your XOs for the usual software upgrades (build 802 aka 8.2.1) if you haven't already done so. - 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm.

Update: Robert Howard will have a Sheeva Plug and a OpenRD client at the meeting (potential school servers?)

When: Saturday, August 22, 2009.

10 am to 2 pm

Where: Room 558 (note room change), SF State Downtown campus (835 Market St., San Francisco,CA, 94103). Note that this location is NOT the main campus. This is the same building as the new Westfield mall that houses Bloomingdale's. Look for the SFSU banner on Market St. between 4th and 5th streets, right next to Walgreens. Take the elevator to the 5th floor.

A huge thank you to San Francisco State University's College of Business Graduate Program for letting us use a room on Saturdays.

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

2009-08-13T09:46:14-07:00

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.

Hadoop is a top level Apache project, being built and used by a community of contributors from all over the world.^[2] Yahoo! has been the largest contributor^[3] to the project and uses Hadoop extensively in its web search and advertising businesses.^[4] IBM and Google have announced a major initiative to use Hadoop to support university courses in distributed computer programming.^[5]

Hadoop was created by Doug Cutting (now a Cloudera employee)^[6], who named it after his child's stuffed elephant. It was originally developed to support distribution for the Nutch search engine project.^[7]

Stuffed elephant. Nice! I wonder if it can be helpful for our Moodle/iLearn install at SF State.

Then there is Tahoe, a p2p like file system, that I came across, courtesy of Jason Stone (thanks, Jason). Tahoe is a p2p style file system that oversamples the data and breaks it up into 10 pieces. These pieces are stored across multiple machines, and in case we lose some of these pieces, the original can be recovered from three out of the ten pieces. This magic is done using a variation of the Reed-Solomon Error Correction method, which is also widely used in CDs. From their website at Allmydata (which is where this project originally comes from):

The "Tahoe" project is a distributed filesystem, which safely stores files on multiple machines to protect against hardware failures. Cryptographic tools are used to ensure integrity and confidentiality, and a decentralized architecture minimizes single points of failure. Files can be accessed through a web interface or native system calls (via FUSE). Fine-grained sharing allows individual files or directories to be delegated by passing short URI-like strings through email. Tahoe grids are easy to set up, and can be used by a handful of friends or by a large company for thousands of customers.

Now, if only I had access to a large number of machines to run this all on...

Open Source Testing tools

2009-07-28T13:41:47-07:00

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

2009-07-16T08:42:29-07:00

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".

Come by this Saturday and meet the school server on 165 cubic millimeters (15 mm × 11 mm × 1 mm).

What: OLPC-SF July 2009 meeting

OLPC-SF will meet on July 18, 2009. Items on the agenda:

Meet and greet - 10:00 am to 10:30 am
Project Updates - 10:30am:

Newbies: How to get involved
Repair Center updates (If you need car chargers, or power cord connectors, contact OLPC-SF Repair Center)
SFSU Lending Library progress report
School server on a XO (XS-on-XO) and content libraries.

Deployments - 11:30am

Bring your XOs for the usual software upgrades (build 802 aka 8.2.1) if you haven't already done so. - 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm. We'll also have yet another new school server in addition to the FIT-PC platform, We'll have the FIT-PC2 platform as well (thanks to Alex)!

When: Saturday, July 18, 2009.

10 am to 2 pm

Where: Room 553, SF State Downtown campus (835 Market St., San Francisco,CA, 94103). Note that this location is NOT the main campus. This is the same building as the new Westfield mall that houses Bloomingdale's. Look for the SFSU banner on Market St. between 4th and 5th streets, right next to Walgreens. Take the elevator to the 5th floor.

A huge thank you to San Francisco State University's College of Business Graduate Program for letting us use a room on Saturdays.

USPS moves to GNU/Linux

2009-07-15T09:00:13-07:00

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...

2009-07-08T16:10:03-07:00

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

2009-07-01T12:33:56-07:00

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

2009-06-27T09:28:01-07:00

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

Open. Connect. Communicate.

View more presentations from Sameer Verma.

Salesforce Nonprofit Starter Pack goes open source

2009-06-17T09:50:54-07:00

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."

Read more at http://blogs.salesforce.com/nonprofit/2009/06/open-s.html The code is up on Google Code at http://code.google.com/p/npsp/ under a new BSD license. A big "Thank you" to Chas Yen for the tip.