Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Have you ever considered becoming a cartographer? It's not as hard as you might think. I've been trying out OruxMaps, a map viewer for Android that functions two ways. One mode is online with the usual suspects like Google maps, OpenStreetMap, and so on; the second and more intriguing method is offline with maps you've created yourself. Creating your own maps, while not hard, is a project.

Google has open sourced a new compression algorithm called Zopfli that it says is a slower-but-stronger data squasher than the likes of zlib. The product of Googler Lode Vandevenne's 20 per cent time, the day a week Google allows its staff to work on side projects, Zopfli is said to reduce files to sizes 3.7–8.3 per cent smaller than its rivals (PDF). The catch is that it takes one hundred times longer to do so.

If you find yourself spending more time on graphics these days, you're not alone. We're all taking more pictures, creating graphics for visual appeal in online properties and more. For real graphics muscle, it's essential to get familiar with GIMP, one of the very best open source graphics applications. OStatic has covered GIMP on a number of occasions, and the active community that drives the application forward continues to deliver improved versions. In this post, you'll find our latest, updated collection of free resources for getting started with GIMP and becoming an advanced user.

It used to be a bit of an art to strip down Red Hat or CentOS down to the absolute minimum needed for a server install. I’ve ranted at length about how the default install for servers included a full blown Gnome desktop, including games. Thankfully, CentOS 6 has a special iso download, which I feel is built specially for me, called the Minimal install. After installing this image a few times, I’m convinced that every Linux install should be a minimal install.

PhUSE, a non-profit community with the goal of furthering advances in clinical information technology, has opened a repository for open source software and is inviting contributors to submit code and documentation. The goal of the initiative is to create a collection of standard processes and tools to gather and analyse data from clinical trials. The repository will be used by researchers from the fields of medicine, from pharmaceutical and biotech companies, as well as academics and government regulators. The repository is hosted at Google Code and is accepting contributions through the PhUSE Wiki.

After almost exactly a year of development, SpringSource has released Spring for Hadoop 1.0 with the goal of making the development of Hadoop applications easier for users of the distributed application framework. VMware engineer Costin Leau said in the release announcement that the company has often seen developers use the out-of-the-box tools that come with Hadoop in ways that lead to a "poorly structured collection of command line utilities, scripts and pieces of code stitched together." Spring for Hadoop aims to change this by applying the Template API design pattern from Spring to Hadoop.

Jeff Griffiths, the product manager for Mozilla's Add-on SDK, known as Jetpack, has announced that, from Firefox version 21 (which will include SDK 1.14), the SDK will synchronise releases of the SDK with releases of the browser.

Here in the Linux community, most of us enjoy high-level debates about strategies and trends just as much as the next technology enthusiast does. At the end of the day, however, it seems safe to say that what we tend to relish most of all is a good ol' nuts-and-bolts discussion of the tools and tricks of the trade.

Maps touch our lives daily. Whether you are trying to find a nearby point of interest or directions to a faraway land, maps help us find our way. In recent years, maps have moved from paper into the digital world of cartography and open source contributors have been in the trenches gathering data for the masses.

People want access to content. And creative commons allowed me to give them access to my content. One man decides to publish his own book—but there's no road map, no previous information to help him navigate how to do it! How will he sell a copy to people he doesn't already know?

The six-monthly Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS) – held in locations such as Brussels, Orlando in Florida, Budapest, Oakland in California, and Copenhagen – will not be taking place in future, according to an announcement by Community Manager Jono Bacon. The meetings will be replaced by online events held every three months. The real world events which saw Ubuntu and Canonical developers from around the world gather at the start of an Ubuntu release cycle to plan the features of that release, are to be replaced by online gatherings using Google+ Hangouts supported by IRC, Etherpad, "Social Media sharing and links to blueprints and specs".

Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth covering. In this edition: Linux Mint gets its own control centre, IPFire gets an ARM port, an open source game development kit and an open source adventure game engine, Tails 0.17 and identifying document authors with open source software.

The first beta release for Firefox 20 on the desktop introduces per-window Private Browsing, a new user interface for downloads and better handling of crashed plugins. The Android version also gets per-tab Private Browsing and has its system requirements lowered to a minimum of 384MB of RAM and QVGA resolution (320×240 pixels).

As a parent of three (children aged: 10, 7, and 5), I'm eager to share with my kids the values that attracted me to open source and the hacker ethos: sharing and building great things together, taking control of your environment, and embracing technology as a means of expression, rather than as media to be consumed. In other words: How can grown-up hackers ensure that we're growing the next generation of open source hackers?

penGamma is the developer of the first open source analytics and risk management platform for the financial services industry. Its products help companies explore flexible open source alternatives to conventional and costly risk analytics tools. The OpenGamma Platform is a unified system for front office and risk calculations for financial services firms.

After months of me promising Steam would be coming to Linux, the public beta is finally here. The early verdict: it's pretty great! The installer is a simple pre-packaged .deb file for Ubuntu (or Xubuntu in my case), and the user portion of the install looks very much like Windows or Macintosh. In my limited testing, I've found the Steam beta to be at least as stable as Desura. I also was impressed with the large number of my Steam games that have Linux versions ready to download and play.

Red Hat's Secure Boot support is a case of the company wanting to "deep-throat Microsoft", according to a forthright posting from Linus Torvalds on the Linux kernel developer mailing list. Torvald's comments were made in response to plans by a Red Hat developer to extend Linux support for Secure Boot. The comments have given rise to an ongoing discussion, during which several prominent kernel developers have shared their thoughts on Secure Boot support in Linux.

HP is selling its webOS-related assets to South Korean electronics manufacturer LG. The two companies have issued a press release. LG is not, though, planning to use webOS in smartphones or tablets; its interest in the operating system is apparently for use in internet-enabled smart TVs. LG has now purchased the source code, associated documentation, developers and engineers working on webOS and all webOS web sites. LG is not purchasing the patents related to webOS but it will receive licences for all of HP's webOS-related patents, including those patents acquired by HP when it acquired Palm.

With René Obermann of Deutsche Telekom and Cesar Alierta of Telefónica, two major European mobile network operators are backing the new smartphone operating system that is based on HTML5 and JavaScript. US carrier Sprint, Telecom Italia, Portugal Telecom and Norway's Telenor are also on board. The biggest Latin American mobile network provider, America Movil, and China Unicom round out the impressive total of 18 supporters. Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacz summarised what makes Firefox OS so interesting for these carriers: competition in the areas of operating systems and app stores can only be good for a smartphone market that has been controlled by Android and iOS. Kovacz described the Apple and Google duopoly as: "a broken model that must be changed."

I received an interesting message from Angela Kahealani with a challenge: "Here's what I'd like to see in Work the Shell: a full-blown shell script template. It should comply with all standards applicable to CLI programs. It should handle logging, piped input, arguments, traps, tempfiles, configuration files and so on." That's an interesting idea, and it fits neatly into something I've been talking about in the last few columns too: the difference between writing something quick and streamlined and writing bulletproof scripts. So let's jump in!