Archive for March, 2007

Open Solutions Alliance: A pleasant surprise

Published by Ross Gardler on March 29, 2007 in Development, Discussion and Community. 1 Comment

When the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) was originally announced I had some significant concerns about their membership structure. Most of these concerns focussed on whether lots of things were to be done behind closed doors.

Today, I visited the OSA site to see if anything visible was happening. I got a very pleasant surprise.

The site has had a major overhaul and is now more than just a marketing channel for the commercial partners in the OSA. It has lots of community areas that anyone, member or not, can access. This is a good sign.

There are indications that the abilities of a non-member will be restricted , for example, I am marked as an “observer” after having gone through the simple registration process, but that’s fair enough. I don’t expect to be able to influence the OSA significantly unless I contribute significantly, my concerns were mainly about the potential for important decisions affecting third party open source projects being made in a private members club, it appears that this will not be the case.

The OSA management is private, but it seems everyone will be welcome to attend and will have a voice. Thus many (although not all) of my concerns are laid to rest.

It’s still very early days for the OSA, there’s very little actually happening there at present, but the early signs are encouraging. I’ll be visiting the site more often from now on.

Neutering the System Bell on Ubuntu Dapper

Published by Stuart Yeates on March 22, 2007 in Discussion and Software. 2 Comments

I’ve been using UNIX/Linux for more than ten years. Over that time I’ve accumulated a huge range of tricks and hacks to make things work, so it was with some frustration that I found that I couldn’t turn off the system bell on my laptop running Ubuntu Dapper. My first approach was to use xset(1), which had worked in the past. It was installed (including the man page “man xset” ) but ineffective. Even as root at boot-time. None of the obvious commands worked. None of the several non-obvious commands worked either.

This morning, while in the “Shock of the Old 6 Conference : Shock of the Social” a Oxford, I decided that if I couldn’t disable the bell (which sounds every time I mis-type an emacs(1) command sequence), I was going to have to switch from emacs to a different text editor.

System -> Preferences -> Sound -> System Beep was the fix. For six months of laptop ownership I’d been looking for a command line solution and it had been in the menus all the time.

Just call me an old-timer.

Randy informs me that on his IBM laptop, the hardware mute button mutes the system bell. On my Dell D620, it mutes audio port but not the system bell. Randy had also found the menu option.

Tag: shock2007

ICANN moves against RegisterFly.com

Published by Stuart Yeates on March 20, 2007 in Legal and Standards. 1 Comment

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which controls such key elements of the Internet as mime types, character sets and the DNS, has taken action against RegisterFly.com, a domain-name registry that appears to be in a protracted financial implosion. In 15 days RegisterFly.com’s customers will have their domain names moved to another register.

ICANN has received been criticised in the past over issues such as internationalisation and governance, but it’s great to see it taking a positive and proactive role in this situation. Hopefully this is the start of a new proactive ICANN, which is in an ideal position to provide leadership on a whole range of technical issues.

The step also sets a new precedent for what happens when Internet companies collapse. In the past most Internet-related companies have been acquired at knock-down prices by their competitors rather than going bankrupt. ICANN’s move effectively strips RegisterFly.com of their primary asset, their customers. The customers’ DNS records (the database records that map a name such as “involve.jisc.ac.uk” to the numerical IP machine address such as “213.133.67.196”) will be transferred to another registrar or registrars, who are presumably spending the next 15 days gearing up for the transfer. ICANN has standardised procedures to allow customers to move either own database records from registrar to another, but RegisterFly.com was not following these procedures (and appears not to have been for some time).

Google releases list of projects participating in Summer of Code

Published by Stuart Yeates on March 15, 2007 in Development and Community. 2 Comments

The Google Summer of Code (SoC) is now an annual event, in which Google pays computer science and software engineering students to work full-time in open source projects over their summer vocation on predefined tasks.

The students get hands-on experience with large-scale software development in the real world and the projects get concentrated work from developers-in-training.

The list of open source projects submitting tasks (confusingly called “projects”) to the 2007 SoC is significantly larger than last year and very diverse. Everything from operating systems (Ubuntu and FreeBSD) and office suites (OpenOffice.org and AbiSource) to media tools (Blender and Audacious) and content management systems (Drupal and Joomla!). Google is not playing favourites either, funding projects with histories of vigorous competition, such as KDE and GNOME, and PostgreSQL project and MySQL.

From an educational point of view Moodle stands out immediately. There are a number of student projects such as “Developing new question types for the quiz” and “Automated grading for Computer Programming Assignments” which seem to be very useful and have wide applicability.

Some of the more geeky tasks make me wish I had the summer off to spend on something like this. GCC is has some interesting C++ tasks and JikesRVM has very attractive looking Java-in-Java and garbage collection tasks.

I suspect that the SoC requires a different sort of organisation from open source projects than they’re used to, but I can also imagine that there are many small open source projects which could usefully be laying the groundwork for SoC 2008: identifying discrete independent tasks, finding individuals willing to mentor young developers, and thinking about the requirements from Google.

Healthy open source Communities

Published by Ross Gardler on March 14, 2007 in Discussion and Community. 0 Comments

Want to learn about healthy open source communities? I strongly recommend you watch this video it’s 55 minutes long, but worth every minute.

What will you learn:

- what a healthy community looks like
- what kind of people you want in a community
- what kind of people you don’t want in a community
- how to keep your community clean