Open Source Pixels

It was announced at the Firefix Plus summit today that Firefox will include native Theora and Vorbis support for the HTML 5 media elements. So and will support those codecs built into Firefox itself. Chris Blizzard posted about this earlier. The backend has been committed to the main Mozilla source code and is enabled by default.

Nominations are officially open for the 8th annual Linux Medical News Freedom Award to be presented at the November 8th-12th AMIA Fall conference at the Hilton Washington and Towers, Washington, D.C. Deadline for entries is August 31th, 2008. This is NOT a officially sponsored award or event of AMIA. This award is co-sponsored by the IMIA Open Source Working Group. Free and open source software isn’t ‘magic pixie dust’. There are people making significant personal sacrifices as well as doing difficult work to make medicine’s free software future a reality. This award is intended to honor the individual or project who has accomplished the most towards the goal of improving medical education and practice through free/open source medical software. The award winner is chosen by a panel of judges. Past recipients have been Tim Cook, K.S. Bhaskar — Fidelity Information Services, Inc., Thomas Beale — Ocean Informatics, Fred Trotter — Synseer, MirrorMed and the FreeB project, Joseph Dalmolin of WorldVistA/e-cology, Nancy Anthracite, WorldVistA, Will Ross of Mendocino Informatics, Paul Biondich of the OpenMRS project, Webreach for Mirth, WorldVistA CCHIT certification, Gerry Douglas, MD Malawi RHIO.

The open source community has been awash with announcements recently, including a host of announcements at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). At OSCON, Sun Microsystems on July 23 announced the availability of the Sun Web Stack, an integrated enterprise-quality AMP (Apache/MySQL/Perl or PHP) stack for Solaris and Linux operating systems. Sun also announced that it is open sourcing the core components of the Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 and Sun Java System Web Proxy technologies. Meanwhile, Sun and Joyent Inc. announced a collaboration aimed at accelerating the development and deployment of social applications for Facebook and OpenSocial environments. On the open source desktop front, on July 29, the KDE Community released KDE 4.1, the second feature release of the KDE 4 series.

There are probably lots and lots of lawsuits going on every day in the technology world, and generally, they are quite uninteresting to all of us. Exceptions exist, of course, and the case of Apple and PsyStar is definitely one of them. It’s a lawsuit that could test one of the most debated issues in the world of software: the EULA issue. To refresh your memory: PsyStar started offering Macintosh clones earlier this year, which caused quite the uproar in the Mac community. Apple was silent on the issue at first, but a few weeks ago the company decided to take legal action against PsyStar, claiming PsyStar violated Apple’s copyright and license agreements (EULAs), and motivated others to do the same. While several legal experts agree that Apple’s EULA will stand the test of court in The Netherlands, the situation in the US might be completely different. PsyStar seems prepared for the worst, as they have hired lawyers from Carr & Ferrell LLP, a firm who successfully fought Apple in court over IP issues before. I’m breaking out the popcorn, because this is hopefully going to be a big one.

After fixing a few specific bugs, Haiku now runs on the Asus EeePC - the 701 model, that is. “It is with great pleasure that I’m able to announce that Haiku (rev26666) runs on the Asus EeePC! I own a 701 model, and have sporadically been testing out Haiku revisions on the machine. For months I’ve been unable to boot Haiku, but somewhere along the line, the bug I filed got squashed, and Haiku will boot off the machine’s internal 4gb fixed disk!” Wireless, LAN, and the APM do not work, but sound does thanks to the OSS driver. Installation is a tad bit complicated (it involves booting Haiku in a VM in Windows XP and copying the contents of a nightly build over to a real hardware BFS partition, and adding Haiku to the ntldr), but at least it works.

Red Hat’s new chief executive, Jim Whitehurst, has his eyes on the sky. The former Delta Airlines chief operating officer, who took the reins of the most established open-source software company from Matthew Szulik in January, names cloud computing as a top priority. Loosely speaking, the term refers to computing services available to anyone online rather than custom data centers isolated within corporate confines, but it also dovetails with the general idea of computing services running at massive scale on a more flexible infrastructure. “The clouds will all run Linux,” Whitehurst said in an interview.

While using an AMD Barcelona server to create a portable benchmarking kit, InfoWorld’s Tom Yager discovered something unexpected: “I could incur variances in some benchmark tests ranging from 10 to 60 percent through combined manipulation of the server’s BIOS settings, BIOS version, compiler flags, and OS release.” Yager put this matter to AMD’s performance engineers and was told he was seeing an effect widely known among CPU engineers, but seldom communicated to IT - that the performance envelope of a CPU is cast in silicon, but is sculpted in software. “Long before you lay hands on a server,” Yager writes, “BIOS and OS engineers have reshaped its finely tuned logic in code, sometimes with the real intent of making it faster […] sometimes to homogenize the server to flatten its performance relative to Intel’s.”

I’ve been using OpenBSD 4.2 for a few months now on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), and I’m leaving it on the hard drive for now. It does run better with 144 MB of RAM. I may even upgrade the OS to the current version 4.3. OpenBSD with X is nowhere near as fast as the fastest Linux systems, but the added security and overall quality keeps me using it. However, I’m considering swapping out the hard drive (to retain my OpenBSD installation) and trying Debian again.

Neko is a high-level dynamically typed programming language. It can be used as an embedded scripting language. It has been designed to provide a common runtime for several different languages. Learning and using Neko is very easy. You can easily extend the language with C libraries. You can also write generators from your own language to Neko and then use the Neko Runtime to compile, run, and access existing libraries. Neko is a good way for language designers to focus on design and reuse a fast and well-designed runtime, as well as existing libraries for accessing filesystem, network, databases, XML, etc. It has a compiler and a
virtual machine. The virtual machine is very lightweight and well optimized. The VM can be easily embedded into any application, and your libraries can be accessed using the C foreign function interface.

Cosmo is the OSAF calendar sharing server. With
your favorite calendar program (Chandler, Apple
iCal, Mozilla Sunbird, or any other WebDAV or
CalDAV enabled client), you can share your
calendar with other people by publishing it to
Cosmo. Your shared calendars can be subscribed to
and updated by anyone, even if they don’t have an
account on your server. Cosmo provides Atom feeds
for shared calendars, so you can track updates in
your favorite feed reader and integrate your
calendar into your Web site or blog.