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

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

• ubuntu-9.10-alternate-amd64.iso.torrent
• ubuntu-9.10-alternate-i386.iso.torrent
• ubuntu-9.10-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent
• ubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386.iso.torrent
• ubuntu-9.10-server-amd64.iso.torrent
• ubuntu-9.10-server-i386.iso.torrent
• New: IPv6 only torrents for users of IPv6 (learn more about IPv6)

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

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.

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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:

• Abbot Java GUI Test Framework
• Anteater
• Apodora
• Arbiter
• Autonet
• AutoTestFlash
• Avignon
• Blerby Test Runner
• Canoo WebTest
• Concordion
• Crosscheck
• csvdiff
• CubicTest
• Cucumber
• DBFeeder
• DbFit
• DejaGnu
• Dogtail
• Doit: Simple Web Application Testing
• Eclipse TPTP
• EMOS Framework
• Enterprise Web Test
• Expect
• Frankenstein
• GITAK
• GNU/Linux Desktop Testing Project
• Harness
• httest
• IdMUnit
• Imprimatur
• ItIN - Infopath testing in .Net
• ITP
• ItsNat, Natural AJAX
• ivalidator
• Jacobie
• Jameleon
• jDiffChaser
• Jemmy
• JFunc: JUnit Functional Testing Extension
• JSystem
• jWebUnit
• Latka
• Linux Test Project
• LogiTest
• LReport
• MActor
• Marathon
• MaxQ
• miTester for SIP
• Mockito
• MozUnit
• OLVER - Open Linux VERification
• Om
• Om
• org.tigris.mbt
• PAMIE
• Pounder
• pywinauto
• QAT (Quality Assurance Tests)
• QMTest
• Rasta
• Robot Framework
• Sahi
• Samie
• Sauce Labs: cloud-based Selenium service
• Scalable Test Platform
• Selenium
• SharpRobo
• soapui
• Software Automation Framework Support
• Software Testing Automation Framework (STAF)
• Solex
• SWAT (Simple Web Automation Toolkit)
• SWTBot
• Systin
• tclwebtest
• TestGen4Web
• TestPlan
• TextTest
• Tomato
• Toster - The Object-oriented Sofware Testing Environment
• Watij
• WatiN
• Watir
• Web Form Flooder
• WebDriver
• WebInject
• WebTst
• WET
• Win32::IEAutomation
• XML Test Suite

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."

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.

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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."

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Passing along an interesting project link  http://code.google.com/p/openpub/wiki/OPDS. From their site:

"This document describes the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) an application of the Atom Syndication Format intended to enable content creators and distributors to distribute digital books via a simple catalog format. This format is designed works interoperably across multiple desktop and device software programs for acquiring and consuming eBooks ("Reading Systems"). The focus of this document is to outline the requirements for preparing catalogs for use by compatible Reading Systems; formal compliance requirements for Reading Systems will be documented elsewhere. This application of Atom was initially defined and implemented by Lexcycle for the Stanza application."

It answers the long-standing question of what format to use when creating content for computer-based or computer-mediated learning environments.

Laconica is a FOSS microblogging platform. 

Laconica (pronounced "luh-KAWN-ih-kuh") is a Free and Open Source microblogging platform. It helps people in a community, company or group to exchange short (140 character) messages over the Web. Users can choose which people to "follow" and receive only their friends' or colleagues' status messages. It provides a similar service to sites like Twitter, Jaiku, and Plurk.

Want to try Laconica without installing anything?> Try identi.ca

How small can a Linux distro be? Very small. We've had distros that fit on a 1.44 MB floppy and are used for routers. For a desktop/GUI type distro though, the smallest I've seen is DSL - Damn Small Linux. I found another one a little while ago. Tiny Core Linux:

"Tiny Core Linux is a very small (10 MB) minimal Linux Desktop. It is based on Linux 2.6 kernel, Busybox, Tiny X, Fltk, and Jwm. The core runs entirely in ram and boots very quickly."