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Tag: open source

  • Fedora Core 7 Test 4 Released

    FC7 test 4 (6.93) has just been announced, right on schedule, and is now available as a torrent and on (most of) the mirrors.


    Get it while it’s hot and especially before it makes it to the Slashdot, Digg, and many other high profile front pages.

  • OpenMoko is Picking Up Steam


    From the source article, over at the always great LinuxDevices.com:

    FIC has announced an on-sale date for its Neo1973, expected to be the first low-cost, high-volume phone with a user-modifiable Linux-based operating system. Additionally, the OpenMoko project building open-source software for the phone has published a wealth of technical resources. […] The first [release phase was] Feb. 11, with free phones for prominent open source community members. The real sale date will be March 11. That’s when the online store opens, and everyone can buy one direct, for about [US] $350.

    I read about the OpenMoko project the same day the iPhone was announced, and I really think I’m more eager to see a Neo1973 than I am to see Apple’s upcoming solution.

    There are very good photos (1, 2, etc) of the device’s innards on the project’s wiki for the hardware enthusiasts.

  • parseMe 20070213 Update

    It’s time for another quick update to parseMe, my little GPL’ed PHP-based RSS/Atom feed reader for mobile phones and other web-capable devices. Pfew [deep breath], that was quite a mouthful, wasn’t it? 😉

    • It now loads the destination links without images by default, for performance improvements on most sites. Links still go through the Google Mobile gateway.
    • Small screen-related interface improvements for the feed selection form.

    You can find the appropriate links below:

    Hoping you’ll enjoy it as much as I do in the bus, on the way to and from work.

  • /me Like PostgreSQL

    PosgtresSQL ElephantI’ve recently had to take over the role of DBA at work (our previous one left for a job at Google), and I’m trying to make the most of the situation (still have my job to do too) by restructuring the PostgreSQL-powered database at the core of our Web architecture.

    Like so many enterprise projects, it’s grown exponentially, in both size and complexity, over the years and what I’m left in charge of today is less then ideal. Nonetheless it’s been serving us quasi-flawlessly, and I sure am happy my predecessor(s) made the choice to go with PostgreSQL as a database backend. The use of PostgreSQL in an enterprise environment was actually one of the reasons I started working at McGill, back in 2002.

    What I’m doing these days involves modernizing and sanitizing a considerable number of tables, stored procedures and functions. All while staying fully backward compatible so that the countless pieces of software relying on the data can keep on running as if nothing changed. I’m of course modernizing the codebase I have access to so it all takes advantage of the improved data structure. But for the sake of phasing in the upgrade and to not force it on external developers whose schedule I have no control over, replicating the current base is a of the essence.

    This is all proving to be a task our faithful PostgreSQL environment is truly shining at.

    Through the use of temporary tables from queries, case-based views, rules and other assorted options, I am rather quickly and easily able to author scripts that handle the nasty stuff, all wrapped in the safety transactional DBs afford us. They create new tables, populate them from others, tweak the data, drop the old tables once ported, setup views to replace them just-in-time and more, all transparently.

    All of this is of course also possible with many other RDBMS. I’m just dealing with PostgreSQL in this instance, and enjoying (almost) every minute of it! 🙂

  • 3D Desktop Linux on Live CD

    Linux.com posted two articles in as many days about the 3D desktops under Linux now being available for preview as live CDs.

    I’m getting them both as we speak to try them on my MacBook.

  • parseMe 20070111 Update

    Update: 2007-02-13: An upgraded version is now available.

    I have released an upgraded version of my GPL’ed lightweight feed reader for web-enabled devices, parseMe, a couple of days ago.

    I have added a couple of interesting new features:

    • It now integrates with Google Mobile to provide full content browsing of the destination URLs. This is done by using their nifty (x)html parser, which reformats standard web pages for mobile/accessibility browsers.
    • There is now a cookie-based feature that lets users define what their default source and item limit should be when first accessing the app. All cookie manipulation is done via PHP, on the server-side, as to not rely on Javascript, which is rarely available on the targeted browsers.

    You can find the appropriate links below:

    I’m obviously quite a bit biased of course, but it’s still is my favourite mobile app. 🙂 And since I’m not seeing an iPhone (or similar smart phone) in any kind of recent future for me (availability in Canada, price, usage fees, etc), it probably will be for quite a while.

  • Screenshots of Fedora Core 6 in VMWare Fusion Beta

    Please note: this is an early report, and more details will be posted as I have more time to dig deeper into Fusion. Loads of screenshots in the meantime.

    As I mentioned earlier, VMWare Fusion for Mac has had its first beta version released publicly today. My first thought was to try the existing Fedora Core 6 x86 virtual machine I put up for download a few weeks ago, to see if it would run as is on my 2006 Core Duo Macbook.

    Having experience with both VMWare on other platforms and Parallels Desktop on the Mac, I was eager to see how the two compared. Having moved VMs between OS platforms with VMWare, I really wanted to know if the Mac would indeed be treated equally.

    So since I’m busy packing for a holiday trip, and only have little time for it, I thought I’d post screenshots of how it all went. Hint: it’s all good. 🙂 You can go ahead and download my VM image, and give it a shot for yourself.

    I’m only going to embed a few screenshots below, so the page stays light, but here is a complete archive: FC6_in_VMWare_Fusion_Beta-SCREENSHOTS-20061222.zip (71 screenshots. SHA1SUM: 0e468e48e8727ff842258e720b323960f19b92ad)

  • Lightweight Feed Reader for Web-Enabled Devices

    screenshotUpdate: 2007-06-02: An upgraded version is now available.

    If like me you commute to and from work by public transit, you might also enjoy spending some of that time catching up with the latest news. Newspapers still seem popular, but they aren’t the most up-to-date and are quite impractical in a crowd. TV phones and podcasts are very neat, but they all imply audio or video and are therefore not always the easiest way to scan through the info, at least in my opinion.

    For quite some time now, what I found really fits my needs best is a simple web-based RSS/Atom feed reader that I can access from my mobile phone’s browser. So I wrote one, of course. Or more accurately, I recently rewrote my old one using the SimpleXML feature built in PHP 5+.

    The 12 requirements I set myself were:

    • K.I.S.S.: viewing tool is likely to be a small screen device, screen reader, etc.
    • Use only PHP, XML, XHTML and CSS (no DB, Javascript […] this time).
    • Typing-free user interface, selection-only user input.
    • Output standard XHTML for maximum accessibility and portability.
    • Have stylesheets for different viewing environment (handheld, screen, etc).
    • Use local caching for the remote feeds, with a 30 minutes refresh interval.
    • Clean and limit in size the entries’ descriptions to only provide an excerpt if the feed publishes all of the article’s content, instead of a synopsis.
    • Have a paging feature to keep the output very light for low memory devices.
    • Offer multiple pre-defined source selections.
    • Let users choose the number of items per page.
    • Be secure in regards to user input, caching, etc.
    • And all this in less than 500 lines, including detailed comments.

    With all this in mind, I came up with a little utility I call parseMe, which you can freely download below. Not a very creative name by any stretch, but a short one, which helps when thumb-typing the url on a phone numerical keyboard.

    • Online demo: See this mobile feed reader in action.
    • Downloads: Latest and historical packages.
    • SHA1SUM: SHA1 sum for the above files.
    • INSTALL: Basic installation instructions to get you going.
    • COPYING: Software license, GPL.
    • AUTHORS: Credits file.

    There is not enough there for me to make it a full blown project, so feel free to do with it what you want. All the code is released under the GPL. The bundled feed icon is the current standard one, as provided by feedicons.com.

    parseMe requires PHP 5+, a web server and a writable filesystem for caching. I have, so far, tested it under Apache 2+ on Fedora Core 5/6 and Ubuntu 6.10, as well as Apache 1.3.33 on Mac OS X (using PHP 5 from entropy.ch). It might also just run as is on Windows, using the various PHP and Web server options on that platform. Same goes for other platforms supported by PHP 5.

    There you go, enjoy. And if you don’t have a web account to run your own copy of the app, feel free to access the above demo from your mobile devices, but you’ll probably find the default feed list quite limited very fast.

    And for the record, if you are looking for more mobile browsing destinations, Google is starting to have quite a few nice products. The following links go to the mobile versions of the Google tools:

    Unfortunately, my phone can’t remember my Google account info, as implemented in their login form, so having to sign-in every time still makes running my own little typing-free and customizable app that much more convenient for me. 🙂

  • Pre-Order a PS3 with Linux Installed

    TerraSoft is now taking pre-orders for Sony PlayStation 3 with Yellow Dog Linux 5 pre-installed. YDL5 is based on Fedora Core 5.

    If you already have the new console, you can also just order the new YDL5 distro on DVD, or download it via TerraSoft’s YDL.net Enhanced. Both options have support options.

    You can also wait a few more days and download it during the week of December 25, or take the more experimental road, and do it the other way.

  • Screencast: Installing Ubuntu 6.10 Desktop

    In the spirit of my other Linux install screencasts (1, 2), I took a lot of screenshots while installing Ubuntu 6.10 Desktop on my 12″ iBook G3, and made this 2+ minutes video out of them.

    It hopes to demonstrate how easy it can really be to install Linux, and to demystify some of the FUD around this great platform. Show it to your family and friends during the Holidays, and we might just end up with a few more Linux users in the new year! 🙂