Open Source Pixels

On his blog, Harald Welte writes about work he is doing as part of the gpl-violations.org project. “Right now I’m facing what I’d consider the most outrageous case that I’ve been involved so far: A manufacturer of Linux-based embedded devices (no, I will not name the company) really has the guts to go in front of court and sue another company for modifying the firmware on those devices. More specifically, the only modifications to program code are on the GPL licensed parts of the software. None of the proprietary userspace programs are touched! None of the proprietary programs are ever distributed either.” If the manufacturer were to succeed with its claims, it could jeopardize many different projects that provide alternate code for devices, he says.

In the last couple months I have posted my disgust about two different online education systems that are being used at various colleges around the United States. My dislike for these systems stems from the fact that even though they are web based, they do not adhere to Web Standards. Today I would like to talk about an online education system that is accessible to all students, not just those running Microsoft Windows.

Well, this is an interesting double standard. Remember Apple’s reaction to Palm trying to tap into iTunes? They were pretty pissed, right? Well, it seems that in Apple’s world, it’s not okay to access their services unauthorised, but when Apple needs to do the same to someone else’s services, it’s suddenly not a problem. As it turns out, Apple violated Facebook’s terms of service, knowingly, and willingly.

“Google is celebrating Chrome’s second birthday by releasing a new stable version of its rapidly evolving browser, offering a slightly simpler user interface, an automatic form filler, and the ability to synchronize extensions and form data across machines.”

As you might know Medfloss.org (formerly medfoss.apfelkraut.org) tries to provide a comprehensive and structured overview of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects for the health care domain.

After the initial launch 6 months ago it recently welcomed the 200th project in its repository: the GPL-licensed iDART software – iDART is the abbreviation of “Intelligent Dispensing of Antiretroviral Treatment” and according to its authors addresses many of the challenges faced by public ART dispensing pharmacies in developing countries.

Starting with originally just 120 projects, the medfloss.org database currently holds:

• 206 medical FLOSS projects that can be browsed by application type, enterprise function, standard and additional categories.
• 63 companies and other institutions that are offering professional service for specific FLOSS projects
• 83 references to scientific publications about the utilization of FLOSS in health care
• detailed overview of past and future FLOSS events like the Med-e-Tel 2010 FLOSS-HC track or OSCON Health IT track 2010

… and much more useful information.

When I first started with graphics – I plotted pixels onto the screen by calculating a memory address and then poking the corresponding value. Times have changed since then. My murky history contains gwbasic, STOS, HiSoft Basic (compiled!), VisualBasic (numerous versions) until I found C and AES (on the Atari ST), Win16 (that is Windows 3.1) and even Presentation Manager on OS/2 (in the pre-Warp days).

Organizers of the Southern California Linux Expo 9x have announced that the Call for Papers for SCALE 9x opens Wednesday, Sept. 1, with five speaker tracks. With the continued growth of Open Source software in business, SCALE will address the need for system management knowledge by adding a speaker track focused on system administration. Combined with the two specialized tracks — Beginners and Developers — and the two general interest tracks, SCALE 9x will have content for every attendee.

In the first installment of this article we looked at getting Google’s Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A) downloaded and installed on your Android phone. We examined the basics of writing scripts using Python and even included a short script to set a few of the profile settings. This time we’ll take a look at some of the sample scripts found on the SL4A website and talk about how you might write a script of your own.

The iPad pretty much has the tablet market all to itself at this point, since no serious competitor has yet been released. We’ve been teased to death with the first real competitor, a device from Samsung called the Galaxy Tab. It has been officially unveiled today, and it indeed looks like the first serious competition to the iPad. It runs Android, naturally.

As of Red Hat’s news last week, there are now four competing standards for building so-called open source clouds. It’s shaping up to be quite a battle of the titans. Contenders are: Amazon Web Services via Eucalyptus Systems; Rackspace and OpenStack, Cloud.com and Cloudstack; Red Hat’s DeltaCloud. Companies like Intel, Dell, Citrix, HP, IBM, Cisco are all lining up behind one or more. But some experts says that the ultimate standard may not even have shown itself yet.