Open Source Pixels

The European Commission has decided to open an antitrust investigation into allegations that Google has abused a dominant position in online search, in violation of European Union rules. The Commission will investigate whether Google has abused a dominant market position in online search by allegedly lowering the ranking of unpaid search results of competing services which are specialized in providing users with specific online content such as price comparisons (so-called vertical search services) and by according preferential placement to the results of its own vertical search services in order to shut out competing services.

Now this is interesting. My brand-new MacBook Air 11.6″ is at my local Apple retailer because either the SATA part of the logic board or the SSD died mysteriously, and here we have Apple blocking PhotoFast from selling their faster, more spacious replacement drives.

IEEE Spectrum discovers
the joy of hackable devices using the Canon Hack Development Kit.
“Most camera traps use an infrared motion detector, but a
CHDK-enhanced camera can itself detect motion. Van Barel’s script gives you
control of such things as the delay between the motion and the shot and
whether the focus is fixed or variable. Without any tuning at all of the
script’s parameters, I was able to get some fascinating photos of birds
cavorting around the family bird feeder. Others have used similar scripts
to produce some stunning photographs of lightning.“

Splashtop has released a new version of its instant-on OS that is based on the Chromium browser and could shorten PC boot times to just a few seconds. The latest version of the Splashtop OS, now in beta, is a lightweight version of Linux that allows users to surf the Web, access online applications or check e-mail almost instantly after switching on a PC.

“ZFS will be supported in Debian Squeeze using the official installer. This means that Debian Squeeze will be one of the first GNU distributions to support ZFS. In fact, even though ZFS support didn’t make it to Debian-Installer beta1 by the time it was released, it is now available in the netboot images (this happens because netboot images fetch newer installer components from the internet).”

The version 10.11 of the Genode OS construction framework has been released. Driven by the requirements for the recently published Live CD, the new version features an execution environment for drivers of the gPXE project, an on-demand-paged ISO9660 file system, alpha-blending support for the GUI server, a new virtual network bridge, and a http-based block driver. Enjoy the release notes for the full story.

CorneliOS is an easy-to-use and cross-browser "Web Desktop Environment", "Web Operating System", or "Web Office" that comes with a set of cool applications. It includes a Content Management System (CMS) so that you can easily set up and manage your own website as well as a Database Management System that allows you to rapidly build any kind of database application.

Changes: This release offers a large number of CIOS Perl framework improvements including app engine enhancements, translation tool and internationalization enhancements, Edu PDF API updates and bugfixes, as well as community blog management and app administration bugfixes.

Tags: Internet, Information Management

Licenses: GPL

TCPDF is a PHP class for generating PDF documents
without requiring external extensions. TCPDF
supports all ISO page formats and custom page
formats, custom margins and units of measure,
UTF-8 Unicode, RTL languages, HTML, barcodes,
TrueTypeUnicode, TrueType, OpenType, Type1, and
CID-0 fonts, images, graphic functions, clipping,
bookmarks, JavaScript, forms, page compression, digital signatures, and encryption.

Changes: This version includes a bugfix for SVG.

Tags: Software Development, Libraries, php classes, Text Processing

Licenses: LGPL

Yamon is a very simple program designed to check
whether a server is up and running and to send an
alert to a human when something appears to be
broken. It can also perform some basic
troubleshooting to venture a guess as to why
things aren’t working properly.

Changes: This release adds support for recording historic data using rrdtool and running tests based on arbitrary Unix commands. The white-box data collector now exposes memory utilization on Linux. A few minor bugs were also fixed.

Tags: Monitoring, Networking

Licenses: Perl

OCRKit uses OCR to recognize the text in a graphic, which is particular useful for PDFs received via email, created by DTP, office applications, or images obtained from a scanner, copier, or digital still camera.

Changes: Support has been added for eleven more OCR languages, improved overall recognition, and layout retention for pure text, HTML, and RTF output. Miscellaneous small fixes and improvements.

Release Tags: Major, Stable

Tags: OCR

Licenses: Other