Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- (Marketwired – June 18, 2014) -- TesoraTM, provider of an open and scalable database as a service (DBaaS) platform on OpenStack and the Trove project, today announced results of a survey of North American developer communities that found 15 percent were running private clouds on VMware software closely followed by 11 percent using OpenStack.

An MIT spinoff is Kickstarter-funding its AllJoyn and OpenWRT Linux based “Q” system, which syncs its smart bulbs to mobile music it streams to a stereo. The Q name derives from the system’s Q Station router, “allowing you to both create a Q (queue) of music and send lighting Qs (cues) from the same smartphone app,” says MIT spinoff Belleds Technologies. (And if you also happen to envision hardware hacker hero Q from James Bond, so much the better.)

First and foremost we would like to thank everybody that already supported the Randa Meetings fundraising. We have reached almost 1/3 of the our goal. Please help more and spread the word. If we reach our goal we can have an even more stable Kdenlive, more applications ported to KDE Frameworks 5, further progress on Phonon, a look at Amarok 3, even better KDE educational applications, a finished port of GCompris to Qt and KDE technologies, an updated KDE Book, more work on Gluon and a new and amazing KDE SDK!

When you’re learning to program in a new language or trying to master a new module, experimenting with a familiar and relatively simply project is a very useful exercise to help expand your understanding of the tools you’re using. Our Space Invaders clone is one such example that lends itself perfectly to Python and the Pygame module – it’s a simple game with almost universally understood rules and logic. While the Invaders meander their way down the screen towards you, it’s your job to pick them off while dodging their random fire. When one wave is conquered, another faster, more aggressive wave appears. We’ve tried to use many features of Pygame, which is designed to make the creation of games and interactive applications easier. We’ve extensively used the Sprite class, which saves dozens of lines of extra code in making collision detection simple and updating the screen and its many actors a single-line command.

While the open source community is filled with some of the most talented minds in the world, fresh perspectives from the next generation of developers is essential to the continued pioneering spirit of open source projects. Such an injection of youthful enthusiasm lends new creative blood to the open source community, allowing projects to stay cutting edge and in keeping with current trends. read more

Kaitlin Thaney is the Director of Mozilla’s Science Lab and an open science advocate. Her work in this space began with John Wilbanks building the science wing of Creative Commons (formerly known as “Science Commons”). Their focus was on crafting the infrastructure, policy and advocacy for Open Access and sharing data on the web. She moved to Digital Science, where the focus was on tools and science software, but there was still a gap.

When Kushal Das helped found the Durgapur, India, Linux users group in 2004, he was struggling to find a teacher who could show him the open source ropes. "During that time," Das said in a recent presentation at PyCon 2014, "there was almost no one to tell us what exactly to do with this thing called Linux, other than clicking randomly."

Explore the many benefits of using the Gulp.js task runner in your web projects to help streamline your workflow and optimise your code. The chances are quite high that during any one web project, you have dealt with or written more than one CSS or JavaScript file. These have network overheads when we end up delivering them to the end user and can cause latency and loading issues if they are too large. They may also not be as well optimised as they could be, perhaps leading to console errors or slow performance in general.

Portable apps aren't anything new. There are variations of "single executable apps" for most platforms, and some people swear by keeping their own applications with them for use when away from home. I don't usually do that, as most of what I do is on-line, but there is one exception: security. When I'm asked to help a Windows user figure out what is wrong with his or her computer, I generally take a USB drive and nothing else. I also usually run dd on that Flash drive when I get back home, because Windows can be a breeding ground for nasty infections.

Tesla's decision to open source its patents has piqued the interest of a few of the world's larger car manufacturers. According to the Financial Times, Nissan and BMW are allegedly "keen" to chat with Tesla about possibly working together to develop charging networks that all three manufacturers' vehicles could use. Musk's announcement was a bit of a surprise, with some seeing it as helpful suggestion by the company for pushing the growth of the electric vehicle market to new heights. Others chastised Tesla's announcement, commenting that it was a sign of the company's weakness and a desperate bid to move an industry that, by large, is fairly gasoline-focused. Without such a shift, critics argued, Tesla might not have enough individual oomph to make it in the difficult car market.

A “Steamboy” handheld gaming console teased in a video appears to be the first portable Steam Machine to emerge for Valve’s Linux-based Steam OS platform. A Steamboy Project site registered under a Steamboy Machine copyright posted a teaser video of what looks to be the first handheld console form-factor Steam Machine (see farther below). The video shows a handheld device with a screen in the middle that resembles a cross between the now-delayed Valve Steam Controller and a Sony PlayStation Vita device.

Years ago, in a graduate computer science course, I was tasked with implementing an algorithm for "variational image segmentation by motion detection." The algorithm was, as they say, a doozy. Tersely described over the course of half a dozen papers, it had dozens of subroutines, which when implemented grew to span thousands of lines of MATLAB code. But there was one subroutine, mysteriously called the "numerical upgrading" routine, whose description was mysteriously absent from the scientific record. Without this small but vital routine, the whole marvelous image segmenting machine just sputtered and ground to a halt. Crash! Panic! Woe.

“Pushing that button was one of the more impactful clicks of my career,” says Microsoft’s C# lead architect Anders Hejlsberg. The click in question was made on stage at Microsoft’s Build conference in April, and its effect was to publish the .NET Compiler platform, codenamed Roslyn, as open source under the Apache 2.0 licence.

LXer Feature: 15-Jun-2014

Hello everyone, we have a lot of cool stuff in the Roundup this week including and interview with Linus Torvalds, a little known and very little (as in 30 kilobytes) OS called Contiki, Cent OS7 is on the way, ARM developer Sean Cross's Linux rig as well as HP's in house Linux OS and has Heartbleed got us overreacting to all OS bugs in general? Enjoy!

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Umbrello adds find text in tree view, current diagram and all diagrams feature KDE Telepathy can share images over common image sharing networks Sflphone-kde adds security evaluation framework with GUI Punctuation data is accessible to Jovie Initial import of Application Menu aka (Homerun) Kicker In IMAP-Resource, refactoring of retrieveitemstask introduces multiple improvements Kexi is on the way to Qt5: Forms ported to Qt4's scroll area. Read the rest of the Digest here. Dot Categories: Developer

Codethink demonstrated its Baserock Linux stack running the new Linux 3.15 kernel and an open source graphics driver stack on Nvidia’s Jetson TK1 SBC. Codethink ported Baserock with the new Linux kernel to the Jetson in 24 hours to promote its Linux stack’s workflow tools while also showing off the capabilities of Nvidia’s open source Linux development board. “This shows what’s possible with the right people working on a fully open source software stack with Baserock,” stated Paul Sherwood, CEO of Manchester, UK-based Codethink. “Linux 3.15 was released late Sunday in California. We got our board on Monday. James started the work on Tuesday. By Wednesday we had a fully working system, with wayland and weston running EGL clients using totally open technologies.”

Mozilla said that Spreadtrum’s $25 Firefox OS phone will soon be carried by Intex and Spice in India, and it also signed up Taiwan-based Chunghwa Telecom. It seems only fitting that the country that brought us the $25 tablet should also be the first to try out the $25 smartphone. While Datawind’s Android-based Aakash 2 (UbiSlate) actually sold for $38, Indian government subsidization dropped that closer to $25 for schoolchildren. It remains to be seen whether Spreadtrum will enjoy similar discounts from Indian carriers Intex and Spice to keep its budget Firefox OS phone at the promised $25. Perhaps tellingly, there was no $25 price mentioned in Mozilla’s latest announcement.

The scientific journal, Nature Methods, has made a transformation. From closed to open, the journal now embraces open science practices with the purpose of enabling true reproducible research. This is an account of how this transformation came to be.

When I wrote about Usenet and Sickbeard a while back, I got many e-mails that I had broken the first rule of Usenet: don't talk about Usenet. I'm a sucker for freedom though, and I can't help but share when cool programs are available. This month, I switched from Sickbeard to NZBDrone for managing my television shows.

Build Linux distros, dual boot, virtualise, securely browse in private, make Raspberry Pi games and more with Linux & Open Source Genius Guide Vol. 5