WebProNews

Tag: Open Source

  • Source Code Pro: Adobe’s New Fonts For Coders

    Source Code Pro: Adobe’s New Fonts For Coders

    Adobe announced a lot of new Web development tools today at its Create The Web keynote. The company hopes developers and creators will use its newly Edge tools to push the Web forward. Two of the Edge tools announced today were Edge Web Fonts and Typekit, both of which feature open source fonts. Joining the launch of these tools, Adobe is also releasing new open source fonts.

    Adobe announced today the release of its second open source typeface family, Source Code Pro. The new monospaced typeface family was designed by the Paul Hunt and the Adobe Type team. He based his work on the previously released Sources Sans Pro.

    Hunt says that the design of Source Code Pro was inspired by his own desire to have a “coding font that [he] would want to use [himself].” He goes on to say that he had to adapt his design to avoid the problems that usually plague monospace text. Most of the work went into differentiating characters that looked similar to one another. He also worked to make the letters and numbers flow without tiring the eyes of coders.

    Unfortunately, he will not be able to release bitmaps for the new fonts. He felt that it was more prudent to target rendering antialiased rendering environments since so much work is done on devices that feature Retina Displays, Clear Type and other font smoothing options.

    As with all open source projects, the new Source Code Pro fonts are available for free. you can get them right now at Adobe’s SourceForge page. Adobe also encourages developers and designers to clone and fork the project on GitHub. The fonts are also available on various Web portals like Edge Web Fonts, TypeKit and Google Web Fonts.

  • The Linux Foundation Finds A Friend In Twitter

    The Linux Foundation is one of the best non-profits you can support. You may use Windows or OS X for your computer, but they wouldn’t be half as good as they are if it weren’t for Linux. In short – Linux is in everything. The continued success of the Foundation rests upon more major players in the tech community joining.

    TechCrunch reports that Twitter has joined the Linux Foundation. The company is known for being very friendly to the open source community while open sourcing their own software. It’s a natural fit for Twitter to join the foundation and help them spread the good news of Linux across the land.

    “Linux and its ability to be heavily tweaked is fundamental to our technology infrastructure,” said Chris Aniszczyk, Manager of Open Source, Twitter. “By joining The Linux Foundation we can support an organization that is important to us and collaborate with a community that is advancing Linux as fast as we are improving Twitter.”

    Twitter is supported by thousands of Linux servers. Joining the foundation gives them a leg up on the latest developments in the Linux community while simultaneously offering their expertise to other members of the community. It’s a win-win for everybody.

    The formal announcement of Twitter joining the Linux Foundation will be made next week during LinuxCon. Intank and Servergy will be joining Twitter as newly minted members within the Foundation.

    To top it all off, Aniszczyk will be at LinuxCon presenting a talk titled, “The Open Source Technology Behind A Tweet.” It sounds like Twitter and the Linux Foundation are already getting off to a great start. With the help of others within the Linux Foundation, Twitter may even be able to improve upon the already great open source Boostrap project.

  • Twitter Celebrates One Year Of Bootstrap With An Update

    Twitter is one of the friendliest companies in regards to the open source movement. They have open sourced much of the software they use to run Twitter on a day-to-day basis with one of the biggest releases being Bootstrap. It’s now one-year-old and Twitter wants to celebrate.

    It was announced on Monday that Twitter Bootstrap has been updated to version 2.1. The release comes as Bootstrap has proven itself to be very popular in its first year of existence. The new version aims to make it even more popular through ease of use and expanded functionality.

    First things first, the team at Twitter wants to thank the community for making Bootstrap the most popular project on GitHub. It reached that status after only a few months after launch. Since then, the team has been adding new features and bug fixes to code.

    The popularity of Bootstrap can not be understated. Twitter points out that many large organizations like NASA and the White House use Bootstrap to create new products and services. Startups like SoundReady and Jetstrap also used Bootstrap to make a stellar first impression.

    All this has led to Bootstrap 2.1. With the latest release, the team focused on simplicity. To that end, the documentation has been overhauled for those just getting into Bootstrap or Web development. They also created more live examples for those who learn better by seeing instead of reading. For those already using it, the team has patched up over 100 issues while adding new features.

    For a full list of new features, check out the Bootstrap blog. You can grab Bootstrap 2.1 here.

  • 3D Printer Made Even More Awesome With Robot Arm

    3D Printer Made Even More Awesome With Robot Arm

    3D printers are about to enter the mainstream. Everybody will be able to afford one from manufacturers like Makerbot and the like. Of course, like with PC enthusiasts, true joy comes from building your own 3D printer.

    Meet Dane Kouttron, he built a 3D printer with a twist. He repurposed an IBM 7575 SCARA Robot Arm into a 3D printer. This allows him to create objects much larger than cheaper 3D printers can make. It’s all due to the incredible reach of the robot arm. Objects created with Kouttron’s printer can be sized to a maximum of 25″x12″x6.5″. A commenter on the Vimeo page says that it’s twice the size of the Makerbot’s maximum output.

    Check out the giant 3D printer in action:

    Scara Robot 3D ABS Printer from Dane Kouttron on Vimeo.

    The best part is that you can make this very 3D printer yourself if you have the parts. I’m sure most of you have an old IMB robot arm lying around the house somewhere so it should be an easy build. All joking aside, you can find details on the build, parts and software required for this beauty over at Kouttron’s Web site.

    [h/t: Make] [Image Credit]

  • Pixar Releases Open SubDiv On An Open Source License

    Most people can probably agree that Pixar is one of the most influential animation studios of all time. Their films have been not only critical and commercial hits, but important to the progression of animation technology as well. The technology Pixar uses in their films is some of the most impressive in the business. Now you can use it yourself for free.

    Pixar has decided to open source their Subd evaluation code. It’s called Open SubDiv and it’s “a set of open source libraries that implement high performance subdivision surface evaluation on massively parallel CPU and GPU architectures.” With the release, Pixar hopes to “encourage high performance accurate subdiv drawing by giving away the “good stuff”.”

    This is a huge deal for both Pixar and the development scene as a whole. By making their software open source, Pixar opens the doors to programmers of all backgrounds to help improve it and change the software.

    It’s also big news for hobbyist animators and programmers because Pixar has released the code under the Microsoft Public License. Animators and programmers can release work made with Pixar’s code for non-commercial and commercial use. It wasn’t just enough that Pixar released their code, but they’re letting people make money off of it too.

    The software is currently in beta, but Pixar will keep putting out new updates over time. The source code is available to all at GitHub. I can’t wait to see what amateur animators do with the software. If this release goes over well, they might start to release other software as well.

    [h/t: The Register]

    Many thanks to Vincent for correcting a few errors.

  • Ouya Will Run a Version of the XBMC Media Player

    Despite its runaway popularity on Kickstarter, the Ouya console still has a long way to go if it hopes to compete with the likes of Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. The major consoles have become more than just machines on which to play games. All three of the top consoles support Netflix playback, and Microsoft demonstrated at E3 this year that it sees the Xbox 360 as more of a media center than a game console.

    Of course, one of the strengths of the Ouya is that it will be built on the Android platform. Because of Android’s open design, third-party software developers will, presumably, be able to implement many of the features found on popular consoles. Today it was announced that the Ouya will be getting a media player feature from such a third-party developer.

    Over at the XBMC blog, XBMC community manager Nate Thomas today announced that XBMC has partnered with Ouya to create a version of the XBMC media player that will be featured on the Ouya console. Thomas stated that XBMC’s work with the Android platform should speed up an implementation of the media player for the Ouya.

    Thomas revealed in his blog post that the collaboration between the developers has just begun. Even so, he announced that XBMC will be getting early developer access to Ouya prototypes.

    XBMC is a free and open source media player for Windows, OSX, and Linux. It is designed to organize video collections and perform well on a media center PC. Its support for a huge variety of file and archive types make it popular with users who can’t or don’t want to use proprietary media players such as Windows Media Player.

    (Picture courtesy XBMC)

  • Check Out These Photos Of Near-Space Taken By A Raspberry Pi

    The Raspberry Pi is one of the coolest computing innovations of the last few years. It’s a simple ARM-powered Linux computer that only costs $25, yet can already do so much. The initial goal was to use the Pi as a way for kids to inexpensively learn programming, but enthusiasts have been doing some really impressive things with the hardware.

    Case in point: UK resident and all-around awesome guy Dave Akerman strapped a Raspberry Pi to a weather balloon and sent it into space to take pictures. It only got to near-space at 40km before the balloon burst. Amazingly enough, the Raspberry Pi was just fine and they were able to recover it intact.

    Here’s some of the amazing shots that the Pi was able to snap:

    Raspberry Pi Travels To Space And Back

    Raspberry Pi Travels To Space And Back

    The whole process of sending the Raspberry Pi into near-space is quite fascinating. This is obviously a labor of love on Akerman’s part and the solutions that he thought up to various problems are nothing short of ingenious. Check out his blog for all the details on the first expedition of the Raspberry Pi into space. He also uploaded all the pictures that the Raspberry Pi took on its ascent and descent.

    Here’s a video of the launch:

  • Valve Prepares Steam’d Penguins For Linux Gamers

    We brought you word a few months ago that Valve was bringing their popular digital game delivery service, Steam, to Linux. The news came from Michael Larabel, founder of Phoronix, who had been invited to Valve Headquarters to help along the development of Valve games for Linux. For their part, Valve had been quiet on the matter until now.

    With the humorous title, “Steam’d Penguins,” Valve officially revealed the existence of Steam for Linux. The official Valve Linux blog promises to be a source of information on not only their efforts to port Steam to Linux, but to also discuss open source game development.

    As many assumed, Gabe Newell was the one who kickstarted the idea of porting Steam and the Source engine to Linux. The company was already running Linux-based servers for their Source-based games so it was only a matter of time before they jumped into actual Linux game development. The team began in earnest in 2011 with a team 11 people who are porting Steam and Left 4 Dead to Ubuntu.

    So far, the team has successfully ported Left 4 Dead 2 to Ubuntu. After that success, the team is now focused on three things:

  • getting the Steam client onto Linux with full functionality
  • optimizing a version of L4D2 running at a high frame rate with OpenGL
  • porting additional Valve titles

    • For now, the team has Steam up and running on Ubuntu 12.04 with most major features in tact. They’ll be adding some minor features shortly and then run an internal beta to see how well it works. They also have Left 4 Dead 2 running on Ubuntu 12.04, but it needs a bit more optimization before its ready.

    Once both Steam and Left 4 Dead 2 are ready, Valve will release them simultaneously on Linux. Considering that many indie games on the service already have Linux ports, the Steam store should at least have more than just Left 4 Dead 2 available. After that, the potential for more Linux ports and original Linux projects showing up on Steam is unlimited.

  • Google Wave Lives On (In Another Dead Google Project)

    A team of Google engineers in Atlanta has been working on a collaborative code editor called Collide for the past year. Google pulled the plug on the project, and shut down its Atlanta engineering department, but the project will live on thanks to open sourcing efforts.

    Now former Googler Scott Blum posed to Google+ (Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted a link to the post today):

    Scott Blum

    Scott Blum4 days ago

    Many of you may already know that July 9th is my last day at Google. After nearly 7 years, Google decided to shut down its Atlanta engineering efforts. I start my next job on July 16th (but was asked not to say who I'll be working for until then).

    For the techie people: my last year at Google, many of us in Atlanta worked on a project that was ultimately cancelled, concurrent with the office shutdown. However, on this 4th of July, I'm happy to say that one of the things I'll be celebrating is that we were able to liberate portions of our last year of work as a new open source project. 

    It's called "Collide" (collaborative IDE), and is a web-based collaborative code editor. What we pushed out is extremely stripped down right now, but the most interesting tech stuff around collaborative editing is all there. Long term, we hope it will serve as a catalyst for improving the state of web-based IDEs.

    http://code.google.com/p/collide/

    collide
    Collaborative IDE 272    29 Powered by socialditto

    If you look at the documentation page for Collide, you’ll see that it uses Wave. Google Wave was an ambitious collaborative editing tool that Google also pulled the plug on, but also open sourced. It evolved into its current state: Apache Wave.

    While Google Wave may not have been a successful Google product, it’s nice to see that people are still getting some use out of it.

  • Mozilla Bringing Cheap Smartphones To Developing Countries In 2013

    We’ve known since February that Mozilla was working on a mobile OS for smartphones. The non-profit had a goal of creating cheap smartphones that were targeted at markets in developing countries. Those plans are now more concrete as Mozilla has announced the carriers that will distribute Firefox Mobile OS phones around the world.

    Today, Mozilla announced that seven carriers have thrown their support behind the open source Firefox OS that will be powering cheap smartphones in the near future. Mozilla will be using the Firefox brand for the name of its new OS for brand recognition and to signal its commitment to HTML5. The first companies to offer Firefox phones include Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Telenor.

    TCL Communication Technology and ZTE will be the companies manufacturing the hardware that will power the new phones. The only hardware specs we know so far is that the phones will be equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon processors. Since these are supposed to be cheap phones, my money is on the S4 Play.

    The really exciting thing about the Firefox Mobile OS is that it’s built on Mozilla’s Boot to Gecko project. It will allow HTML5 applications to access all the power the phone has to offer. On Android and iOS, applications must be built natively to have access to that same power. Mozilla will also be building all of the essential phone capabilities (calling, messaging, games) on HTML5.

    “The introduction of the open mobile OS continues the Mozilla mission to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web for users and developers. As billions of users are expected to come online for the first time in the coming years, it is important to deliver a compelling smartphone experience that anyone can use,” said Gary Kovacs, CEO, Mozilla. “The large number of operators and manufacturers now supporting this effort will bring additional resources and diversity to our global offerings.”

    You can expect to see the first Firefox Mobile OS-powered devices hitting the market in 2013. Unfortunately, they will only be available in Brazil at first, but they will definitely spread beyond South America. Remember, this is Mozilla’s goal to help get more people connected to the Web through cheap devices. The devices will probably not be super popular in developed countries where iOS and Android already have a presence, but I would love to get my hands on one nonetheless.

    With that being said, I’m sure it will launch at some point in the U.S. The scalability of Firefox Mobile OS means that it can run on just about any hardware as it’s based entirely in HTML5. We might see some really powerful smartphones hitting the U.S. market completely powered by the Web by the end of 2013.

  • Facebook’s Ringmark Goes Completely Open Source

    HTML5 and Open Source software are the future. Even if the old guard of software development don’t want to admit, it’s an inevitability. Facebook has helped move us along towards the future of Web and the power of the mobile Web with its Ringmark tool. Now the social network is giving Ringmark to the people.

    Facebook announced yesterday that they would be completely open sourcing the Ringmark tool. Previously, Ringmark had some of its core functionality, including its tests, go open source, but the entire software suite is now open source. Interesting developers can get the code on github right now. The rest of us can laugh at how our browsers still can’t pass the ring one test on rng.io.

    Speaking of not being able to pass the ring one test, Facebook has changed up the actual test to add in a benchmark for drawing performance. A browser that wants to pass the ring one test must be able to animate 50 sprites at 30 frames per second. A browser that wants to pass the ring two test must be able to animate 100 sprites at 30 FPS.

    One of the major problem areas right now lies in mobile browsers. They just aren’t fast enough to handle a lot of HTML5 games. Facebook, in their ongoing work with mobile, realizes this and will be implementing more tests in Ringmark soon to better test mobile browsers. Going open source also lets developers use Ringmark themselves and test for their own needs on mobile platforms.

    IDC also published an infographic last month that looks at how HTML5 is evolving the mobile platform. Facebook’s Coremob community along with Ringmark has contributed to the number of HTML5 mobile developers that are pushing the Web as the next big platform.

    Browse more Technology infographics.

  • NASA And VA To Host Second Open Source Summit

    Last year, NASA, the U.S. State Department and the Veteran Affairs Innovation Initiative held an open source summit to advance the use of open source software in government. They are announcing that registration is now open for the second annual summit! The purpose of the summit is to get leaders form the public and private sectors as well as software developers to discuss development, release, and use of open source software.

    At this years conference there will be many topics being discussed including the current and future state of the government open source community, how-to insights for open source projects in government, real-world projects and their successes and challenges, and government procurement of open source software.

    As the role of open source in government expands and matures, the relationship between technology, policy and culture will be increasingly important.

    Open source brings numerous benefits to government projects that involve software. Included in this is increased software quality, reduced development costs, faster development cycles and reduced barriers to public-private collaboration through new opportunities to commercialize technology.

    The hope is that this inherently transparent, participatory, and collaborative approach will revolutionize the way software is created, improved and used. If this policy can be adopted then it has the possibility to reduce costs in government by billions over the long haul.

  • What the Next Wave of Online Video Holds

    Do you remember when online video first began to take off? In its infancy, it was very simplistic and mostly consisted of marketing promotions. If you fast-forward to today, online video is a completely different story. Now, it is of very high value that is comparable to the quality of TV and movie content.

    Jeff Whatcott, Chief Marketing Officer at Brightcove While it’s exciting to see how technology has advanced and improved the online video experience, the changes have also brought many complexities. According to Jeff Whatcott, the Chief Marketing Officer at Brightcove, online video needs to be delivered in HD, it needs to be monetized through either paid models or better forms of advertising, and it needs to be protected.

    As a result, the game has changed drastically for media companies and all other publishers of content. They have to consider all the elements that Whatcott mentioned in addition to the challenge of delivering their content across multiple devices and in multiple formats.

    “Having all those different screens that you need to deliver content to creates incredible technical complexity for these organizations,” said Whatcott.

    These companies then must tackle the decision of whether to build an internal infrastructure to handle these processes or to outsource them to services such as Brightcove. Although an internal system allows for more control, the downside is the time and resources involved in developing it. Outsourcing, on the other hand, is often preferred since organizations can jump right into their efforts.

    “Rather than starting from just a blank sheet of paper and a long list of questions, they start with a code that’s actually already been written [and] that already integrates in with the right systems and the right ways,” said Whatcott.

    Going forward into the next wave of online video, Whatcott believes even more changes will take place. As he explained to us, fragmentation will increase as many more devices are introduced. Apple is reportedly scheduled to announce a new Apple TV platform later this year. If the trend continues as it did with the iPhone and iPad, such an announcement could produce a completely new way of thinking, which could drastically change the user experience and future technologies.

    Whatcott also believes we will begin to see more content coming online that is licensable and accessible even for those consumers who do not have a cable subscription.

    “There’s a whole new generation coming up with having never had a cable bill… or not preferring to consume their content through cable, and we see more and more companies wanting to service the desire of that class of people,” he explained.

    Although not directly related to video, Whatcott went on to say that apps would continue to play a big role going forward. Although there are questions about their sustainability, he said apps are here to stay.

    Despite the challenges that these developing areas will bring, many opportunities exist as well. Whatcott points out that organizations will not only be able to build upon their existing technologies, but they will also be able to develop new concepts.

    In other news regarding Brightcove, the company has had a very successful year after going public in February. In its first quarter earnings, the company reported $19.9 million in revenue. Whatcott told us that the company is “very excited” about its progress and that it would continue to focus on building its business.

    Whatcott also offered this advice to Facebook in light its recent IPO: “Everything around the IPO and funding, although there’s a lot of excitement around this, it really doesn’t change your relationship with customers – you just need to execute well.”

  • Linux Kernel Version 3.4 Now Available

    Linux Kernel Version 3.4 Now Available

    It’s always strikes me with awe whenever a new version of the Linux kernel is released. The hours of work that developers put into this product is just kind of mind blowing especially when you consider that a lot of the work is done by volunteers. With the newest release, Linux is once again moving forward at a pace unmatched by its open source peers.

    Linux 3.4 features a few updates to Btrfs. The first is the availability of a new data recovery tool called btrfs-restore. It’s worth pointing out that it doesn’t repair damaged filesystems, but rather attempts to pull files from damaged filesystems and copy them to a safe location. Btrfs can also support metadata blocks bigger than 4KB again. It can support blocks up to 64KB, but it’s recommended that you stick with 16 or 32KB blocks.

    Other general improvements for Btrfs come in the form of performance and error handling. The performance has been improved thanks to not only the increased metadata block sizes, but also a reworked Linux page cache and reduced CPU usage. Previous versions of Linux featured code functions that couldn’t handle certain unexpected conditions. During such an event, previous versions would just kill the system. In Linux 3.4, it’s been updated to handle these situations by shutting down current transactions and the filespace moving into read-only mode as is tradition.

    What has me personally excited is support for the new wave of video cards. The new version of Linux now has early support for the Nvidia GeForce 600 series. On top of that, the new GPUs (Radeon 7000 series) and APUs (Trinity) from AMD are now supported. The new release also adds experimental support for Intel GMA500 Medfield graphics.

    Support for new GPUs is especially good news since Valve has now committed to bringing Steam and their games to the Linux platform. EA has also brought some free-to-play games to Linux. More and more developers are seeing the value in developing for Linux and we may soon see a day where not only indie developers release Linux versions of titles, but major publishers do as well.

    One of the more interesting updates is the addition of a new X32 ABI. It allows users to run programs in 64-bit mode with the memory requirements of a 32-bit ABI. It was created because traditional 64-bit programs run in 64 bits of space. This causes performance slowdown, but switching back to 32-bit denies access to all the great features of 64-bit. The new ABI should make Linux users’ lives much easier.

    Other general improvements include x86 CPU driver autoprobing, a verifiable boot path, support for external read-only devices as origin source of a thin provisioned LVM volume, a new ‘Yama” security module, and read only support for QNX6 filesystems.

    To see more of the specifics with this latest release, check out the release notes for version 3.4. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed with this latest release.

    [h/t: LKML via Softpedia]

  • Goobuntu: When Google Makes Its Own Ubuntu

    Goobuntu: When Google Makes Its Own Ubuntu

    Before Linux started to invade every facet of our lives while displaying its majesty to the everyday user, it was an operating system that developers swore by. They still do and that’s why Ubuntu and other derivatives are used throughout the workplace of programmers big and small. One of the biggest is Google and they even have their own custom version of Ubuntu called Goobuntu.

    Matt Cutts directed us to a talk by Google developer Thomas Bushnell at the Ubuntu Developer Conference. Ubuntu Vibes reports that Bushnell went over the Goobuntu operating system and how Google is using the Ubuntu operating system.

    It probably comes as no surprise, but a lot of people at Google use Ubuntu. This is what led to the creation of Goobuntu, their own personalized version of the operating system. It’s not so different from regular Ubuntu as Bushnell says the UI is essentially the same. The difference comes in the form of changes to security authentication and other background operations that make their version more stable and secure.

    Goobuntu is based on the LTS releases of Ubuntu and is upgraded every release. This upgrade process can take up to four months and could even cost them anywhere around $1 million if something were to go wrong. It’s nice to see a company taking upgrades so seriously, even if the potential cost is quite high.

    It also appears that many Google employees can’t wait until they get to upgrade to the new LTS release – Precise. Google won’t be upgrading until next year, but Googlers are already suggesting changes with the next upgrade like using xmonad instead of Gnome 3.

    While we knew Google and other developers used Linux Ubuntu, it’s still nice to see such an active core community based around it at a major company like Google. As made obvious during Hangouts and other meetings, we see a lot of Google employees on Macbooks or Chromebooks. I’m sure they go back to using Ubuntu on their work desktops.

    As Linux becomes bigger and bigger, companies are going to want to be proficient with the operating system. You don’t have to make your own version of Ubuntu like Google has, but it’s a good idea to start working with the operating system now. As found in a study earlier this year, more and more jobs require prospective employees to be fluent with Linux, and by extension Ubuntu.

    Here’s the video of Bushnell’s talk. It’s a fascinating look into how Google appropriates Ubuntu for their own needs. Linux fans are going to want to check it out.

  • Twitter Details Google Summer Of Code Participation

    Google’s Summer of Code program is about to get started and Twitter couldn’t be more stoked. This is the first time that Twitter has joined in the program to mentor students and help them learn more about programming.

    Google’s Summer of Code focuses on open source technology which is a great fit for Twitter. Not only are they now a sponsor of the Apache Foundation, but they have been open sourcing a lot of the software used to power the inner workings of Twitter. Working with a company as well-known as Twitter must be pretty awesome and we wish them the best.

    Twitter chose three students to help them develop code over the summer. All three students will be working on various open source projects that Twitter is developing. Besides the students getting an invaluable education, Twitter gets free help with their code since Google pays the students who participate in the program.

    The first student, Federico Brubacher, has been programming since he was 6. If that’s not impressive enough, he is also on his way to finishing up his MS in computer science at ORT Uruguay. During his time with Twitter, he will be “building scalable, online machine learning algorithms on top of Storm.” Storm is the software that powers Twitter’s Analytics platform.

    The second student, Kirill Lashuk, is currently studying math and computer science at Belarusian State University in Minsk. For his summer project, he will be adding more localization capabilities to TwitterCLDR. TwitterCLDR “uses Unicode’s Common Locale Data Repository to format certain types of text into their localized equivalents.”

    The third and final student, Ruben Oanta, is also on his way to finishing up his MS in computer science at DePaul University. His job will be adding MySQL support to Finagle, a “protocol-agnostic library that abstracts the complicated details of asynchronous RPC communication.”

    It looks like Twitter has some fantastic students working on some really important stuff. It’s nice to see a company giving students proper jobs in programming. Twitter is a friend to the open source movement so here’s hoping they instill that same love for open source in the next generation of programmers.

  • DuckDuckHack Encourages The Creation Of Instant Answers

    DuckDuckGo has always been, to me at least, one of the unsung heroes of the open source movement. While Google is lapping up all the search traffic with Bing and Yahoo! desperately trying to keep up, DuckDuckGo is just cruising along being its own thing without worrying about the competition. It’s the spirit that’s leading to DuckDuckHack.

    Now I’m sure you can gather what DuckDuckHack means. Gabriel Weinberg, founder of the open source search engine, wants people to create what he calls “instant answer plugins” for DuckDuckGo. The idea is that the search results would benefit from these add-ons in the form of “instant answers.” It’s not the same as Google Instant, it’s actually a bit more ambitious.

    Weinberg says that there are some searches that just frustrate people. You just keep searching and searching for that one topic and nothing relevant comes up. So what if somebody created a plug-in for that topic that made sure the most relevant topics were brought to the front? It is the very spirit of open source – if it’s not a feature, make it a feature.

    It’s an ambitious project and one that has a lot of potential. I want to say that it’s kind of like Google’s Search Plus Your World in terms of delivering the most relevant results. The only difference is that DuckDuckGo’s approach puts the search results in the hands of the users instead of what Google’s algorithms think you want.

    There are four plugins compatible with DuckDuckGo at the moment. Goodies is for finding calculations and cheat sheets, Spice is for finding external API calls, Fathead is for finding keyword databases and Longtail is for finding full-text data. They are all in alpha, but Weinberg said that they are being “rapidly cleaned up.”

    Here are some of our favorite plugins that are currently available for DuckDuckGo based on the four plug-ins. The first is the Twitter plugin that pulls up a user’s Twitter handle complete with bio and latest Tweet.

    DuckDuckHack Instant Answers

    The other great plugin is the xkcd add-on that allows you to search for xkcd plus the number of the comic to bring up that specific comic as the first search result.

    DuckDuckHack Instant Answers

    If you find yourself compelled to start making awesome plugins for a search engine that really should be used more often, you can get started with the initial documentation. It’s all open source so go nuts. Be daring and experiment. Oh, also get back to me once somebody creates a plugin that finds the perfect recipe each time for whatever dish the user is searching for. I’ve been searching for the perfect potato salad recipe for years and I’ve found it to be one elusive dish.

    As you can see, this is all pretty cool. While other search engines have been using instant answers for a while now to return relevant searches for sports and other major events, there has been nothing this targeted yet. Putting the power of search in the hands of the user is a powerful thing indeed.

  • Facebook Updates Ringmark, Changes Coming To Coremob

    When someone says open source, the first company to pop in your mind is probably not Facebook. That would be a disservice to the company though as they are pushing open source just like the rest of them. The company started the Coremob W3C Community Group to push Web standards and they open sourced RIngmark, the company’s browser test suite for building apps on the mobile Web.

    The company open sourced Ringmark back at the beginning of April and they are already making loads of progress. They have changed the main page of Ringmark to now make it easier for developers to understand. When looking at the test results, it should be clear what use cases correlate with the tests.

    The bigger change coming to Ringmark is that it’s now integrated into Browserscope. This allows developers to see where each browser stands in regards to the three rings of Ringmark. The benefit here is that a new browser is added to the Web site’s stats every time a new browser hits up Ringmark.

    As for Facebook’s Coremob community, Robin Berjon, the co-chair of Coremob, will start to review the tests that Facebook has submitted. Once all the tests have been processed and added to Coremob’s Github, Ringmark will run off of these tests for its standards.

    Coremob will also continue to contribute to the development of Ringmark. Community suggestions like version numbers and moving certain standards to certain test rings have all come from community engagement. Continuing this kind of engagement will shape the future of the mobile Web, at least as far as Facebook is concerned.

    If you don’t really understand any of this, but still want to have an impact on the future of the mobile Web or just the Web in general, hit up rng.io in your browser. This will run the Ringmark test and send the results of your browser to Coremob. I ran the test on all three of my mobile browsers – Android, Firefox mobile and Opera Mini – and found that the default Android browser was the most advanced of the bunch in terms of adopting Web standards.

  • Linux Is Getting Valve’s Steam Platform Soon

    It’s a fun little joke to say that Mac doesn’t get any games, but we know that to be totally untrue. More and more developers are making sure their games can run on OS X ever since Apple switched to Intel processors. If anything, poor Linux users are the ones who never get any good games. Besides the few games built for Linux with the Humble Bundle, etc; there’s not much of an official distribution platform for games on Linux.

    That’s where our story begins today. Michael Larabel, founder of Phoronix, claimed to have been invited out to Valve’s headquarters in Washington. The reason? To start development of Steam and the Source Engine for Linux. When the story broke on Larabel’s Twitter account last night, he promised pictures and an article detailing the news.

    He didn’t get the story out last night as promised, but said it would come out sometime today. Turns out that he did keep his promise today with the story going up this morning. It details Larabel’s trip and discussions with Valve’s Gabe Newell. It’s even said that Newell is personally involved with the Linux development now which is why it’s only now that the news is coming into the spotlight.

    What should be noted at this point and is to be the most exciting part of this news is that Valve isn’t taking any shortcuts with the port. Previous attempts to bring games to Linux end up using the Wine library to port Windows games to Linux. Valve is building new code from the ground up for Steam and Source.

    Bringing Source to Linux is by far the most exciting part of the news. It could open up an entirely new wave of Linux game development. It’s the kind of thing that Linux fans could only dream of up until now and it seems to be really happening.

    The burning question now is when will Valve release the Linux client? Larabel says that we should expect it within the next few months, but most likely in a beta form. He also makes mention of Valve time so don’t get too frustrated if it takes longer than a few months to get off the ground.

    Still, this is exciting news and only shows that Valve is one of the ultimate good guys in game development. Everybody has seemingly forgotten the Linux platform so it’s good to see Valve taking up the torch.

    [h/t: The Verge]

    [Lead image: L4D2 running natively on Linux courtesy of Phoronix]

  • LinkedIn Open-Sources its iPhone Navigation Code

    LinkedIn, the popular business and career networking social network, announced that it would be releasing the navigation code from its simplified iPhone app as an open source library. Sudeep Yegnashankaran, a mobile software “imagineer” for LinkedIn, made the announcement in a LinkedIn Engineering blog post. Using the library, called LIExposeController, developers can “easily create multiple, visually distinct areas in their apps for ease of flow for their users.”

    LIExposeController is available now at GitHub, and works for both iPhone and iPad apps. The library is a new container view controller class similar to UINavigationController and UITabBarController. In his blog post Yegnashankaran wrote a little about what the code has to offer developers:

    With this new experience, users can easily switch between different areas of the app in a visually pleasing way. We have gotten a lot of great feedback for this brand new navigation scheme, with a lot of our users calling it “easy to navigate” and “fun.” We chose this model over a standard tab bar because we wanted something more visual and tactile, giving users more context for the different areas of the app.

    The LinkedIn iPhone app

    The code does not use the new container controller APIs in the iOS 5 SDK in order to continue support for iOS 4 devices. However, LinkedIn is encouraging developers to fork the code and submit contributions, so that functionality could soon be implemented.

    Will you try out LinkedIn’s navigation system on your new app? Are you sticking to the tried-and-true tab bar navigation? Let us know in the comments section below.

  • GlobaLeaks: The Open Source Whistleblower Software

    Since the rise of WikiLeaks, there have been many sites that rose up to be the next document leaking platform. They have all seen various degrees of success, but a new service might just be worth it.

    GlobaLeaks is an open source whistleblower platform with a very specific goal in mind – to provide an open source framework that can be utilized by those who want to expose what they see as wrong. This means that they’re aren’t going to be the one who leaks the documents, but rather provide the tools for the potential whistleblowers or organizations to leak the documents.

    How is this all going to work? Any media, corporation or public agency can use the tools provided by GlobaLeaks to set up a whisteblowing application on their Web site or any other platform. It’s especially useful for the media who, with this service, can now collect whistleblowing reports while keeping the source anonymous. Think of it as the tip box you see at media Web sites but with an added extra layer of security. It also has the bonus of organizing all the documents into one easy to access place.

    The software angle that GlobaLeaks goes after is what sets them apart from everybody else in the field. Other services manage or collect leaks to distribute across the media. Anybody can use the GlobaLeaks software to set up their own site. If it takes off, it could help create an entirely new culture of leaks and whistleblowing activity on the Internet. It also removes the creators from any responsibility since they just provide the software. It’s up to the user to use it how they will.

    For those who may be somewhat distrusting of the service, worry not. When you upload materials using GlobaLeaks, it creates a unique URL that is only for you. Your leaks are not part of any service or platform, it’s wholly unique to you. This makes every leak completely anonymous and separate from each other. In a way, it’s a more sophisticated version of AnonPaste.

    As this is an open source project, they welcome any and all developers to make contributions to the project. You can access all of source code on Github. Become acquainted with the software to see if it would help you in any way. Being able to create your own leaks platform is a pretty enticing prospect, but it does come with a lot of responsibility. Potential creators would be wise to keep that in mind.

    [h/t: Reddit]