Open Source at SF State University - Miscellaneous

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!

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

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

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:

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.

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."

openpub - The Open Publication Distribution System

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 10:59:06 -0700

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, the open microblogging platform

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:09:00 -0700

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?

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 23:52:28 -0700

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."

OLPC Photos on DVD - a cure for post-semester blues!

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:37:43 -0700

Why?

Short version:

This project is the result of a desire to see if photo DVDs can indeed be made using only Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and Creative Commons (CC) licenses.

Long version:

At the end of Spring semester, after I turned in all the grades, I started to think about one of my courses - Multimedia business application development (http://www.sfsu.edu/~bulletin/courses/29446.htm). Due to severe budget constraints (meaning no money!!!) and a desire to use new and different things, we have been trying to use only FOSS and CC titles in this course.

I wanted to see if I could use FOSS and CC to complete a real project. For some time now, I have been thinking about creating a looping photo DVD for a whole bunch of OLPC photos from around the world. Personally, I find these inspiring. I find it very energizing to see children using these green windows (no pun intended) to the world to discover, explore, reflect and eventually, learn. Hopefully they will begin where we falter.

I saw this digital photo frame at a store the other day, and thought "Wouldn't it be neat to have a looping slideshow that can be displayed easily at conferences, conventions and expos?". After all, a picture is worth a thousand words! That's a little over 7 full tweets!!! So, putting my plan into action, and trawling through the treasure trove of FOSS and grabbing photos and music from Flickr and ccmixter.org - both CC friendly sites, and a little help from flickrfs, audacity, dvd-slideshow, openoffice, Ubuntu and a near-binging desire to get this done right after Spring semester ended, I now have a shiny 1.6GB DVD iso.Part of it is online at http://www.vimeo.com/5048488

Drupal talk on campus

Mon, 11 May 2009 15:44:29 -0700

Drupal talk today on campus by Kieran Lal of Acquia. See details at http://is.sfsu.edu/drupal-talk

OLPC-SF May meeting: Deploy!

Mon, 11 May 2009 10:21:44 -0700

What: OLPC-SF May 2009 meeting

OLPC-SF will meet on May 16, 2009. Items on the agenda:

Meet and greet - 10:00 am to 10:30 am
OLPC, Fedora and Communities (Larry Cafiero) - 10:30am
Updates - 11:00am:

Newbies: How to get involved (Carol Ruth Silver)
Repair Center updates (Joachim Pedersen)
Lending Libraries (Sameer Verma)

Bryan Berry's interview on FLOSS Weekly

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:01:58 -0700

This is from episode 66 of FLOSS Weekly by hosts: Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte

Bryan Berry, of Open Learning Exchange Nepal, the NGO implementing the OLPC project in Nepal.

Bryan Berry has served as IT manager for US embassies in Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, and Kathmandu. He has been a linux user for six years, and has lived in Asia for the last seven years. He began work on the Open Learning Exchange Nepal project in 2006, and as of June 2007 gained the support of the Nepali government to begin a pilot program of the OLPC project.

He also talks about Boston Brahmins, but I'll let you listen to the podcast. The interview is at http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/twit.cachefly.net/FLOSS-066.mp3