Archive for December, 2006
Top 5 open source apps of 2006
by Justin Silverton
The following are the top 5 open source apps of 2006.
Ruby on Rails is a full-stack framework for developing database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern. From the Ajax in the view, to the request and response in the controller, to the domain model wrapping the database, Rails gives you a pure-Ruby development environment. To go live, all you need to add is a database and a web server.
Rails has become one of the easiest and fastest ways to develop full-fedged web applications.
4) PHP
PHP was written as a set of CGI binaries in the C programming language by the Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, to replace a small set of Perl scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage. Lerdorf initially created PHP to display his résumé and to collect certain data, such as how much traffic his page was receiving. “Personal Home Page Tools” was publicly released on June 8, 1995after Lerdorf combined it with his own Form Interpreter to create PHP/FI. source
Php is now the 5th most popular programming language, below java, c, c++, and Visual Basic.
When most people give examples of successful open source projects, apache is usually one of them. It is now serving millions of websites worldwide (including this one) and should be considered a great example of open source engineering.
2) Ubuntu Linux
With over 8 million users and growing, ubuntu linux has quickly become one of the most popular and easy-to-use linux distributions.
From the website: “Ubuntu is suitable for both desktop and server use. The current Ubuntu release supports PC (Intel x86), 64-bit PC (AMD64), Sun UltraSPARC and T1 Sun Fire T1000 and T2000), PowerPC (Apple iBook, Powerbook, G4 and G5) and OpenPower (Power5) architectures.”
1) Firefox
Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross began working on the Firefox project as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project. They believed that the commercial requirements of Netscape’s sponsorship and developer-driven feature creep compromised the utility of the Mozilla browser To combat what they saw as the Mozilla Suite’s software bloat, they created a pared-down browser, with which they intended to replace the Mozilla Suite. On April 3, 2003, The Mozilla Organization announced that they planned to change their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox and Thunderbird. source
Over the last year, Firefox has become the new ruler in the web browser realm. It is more secure, and in my opinion faster than Internet Explorer and many other browsers.
10 must-have open source gifts
By Justin Silverton
With christmas coming up on Monday, I have decided to come with this list of some last-minute open source gift ideas.
1) Neuros OSD
The First Open Source Linux Embedded Media Center.
Features:
• Watch your favorite TV show or movies anytime, anywhere.
• Digitize your home movies.
• Play movies downloaded from the internet on your TV.
• Hold a slide show of your latest road trip on your TV.
• Capture your video game highlights and email to friends.
Beer is always a good gift..in any form..but why not make it better?
This player features a shuffle mode, basic track navigation, volume control, FAT32 support, fragmented file support, an unlimited number of files on the root directory, and high quality playback. Files at 256Kbps can be played without a hitch. Variable bitrate files are supported with peaks up to 320Kbps.
4) An issue/subscription to free software magazine
The only magazine worldwide that is dedicated to free software as a whole. Each issue contains high quality, in-depth articles that cover a wide variety of free software related topics.
5) Stuffed Tux
6) mvix wireless HD media center
It can do Mpeg-1/2/4, VOB, WMV 9, DivX, and Xvid. It’ll play your MP3’s, WMA’s, AAC’s, Ogg files, or straight-up WAV and AC3. It can do it all from its internal hard drive, an external USB drive, or even stream off of your other computers over the network.
7) InstantMusic Vinyl & Cassette Ripper
Liberate your old media into glorious digital technology with the InstantMusic Vinyl & Cassette Ripper. Simply hook up an old turntable or cassette deck to the InstantMusic and plug it in into an available USB port on your PC. The included software allows you to convert your music to MP3 files, or burn directly to CD. It even smartly detects the gaps between songs to divide that old Journey LP into individual MP3 files perfect for transfer to your newfangled iPod.
9) Book: Hacking the cable modem
It goes inside the device that makes Internet via cable possible and, along the way, reveals secrets of many popular cable modems, including products from Motorola, RCA, WebSTAR, D-Link and more.
10) Book: Just For Fun: Linus Torvalds Biography
In this witty and engrossing narrative, Linus Torvalds, the brilliant mastermind behind the latest Internet revolution, in collaboration with writer David Diamond, chronicles his transformation from a pale, skinny Helsinki college kid to an international folk hero. What began as a childhood hobby soon became the astonishing phenomenon known as the LINUX operating system.
badvista.org…bad for open source?
By Justin Silverton
About a week ago, the Free software foundation launched the badvista campaign. It is decribed in their own words as
“a campaign with a twofold mission of exposing the harms inflicted on computer users by the new Microsoft Windows Vista and promoting free software alternatives that respect users’ security and privacy rights.”
“Vista is an upsell masquerading as an upgrade. It is an overall regression when you look at the most important aspect of owning and using a computer: your control over what it does. Obviously MS Windows is already proprietary and very restrictive, and well worth rejecting. But the new ‘features’ in Vista are a Trojan Horse to smuggle in even more restrictions. We’ll be focusing attention on detailing how they work, how to resist them, and why people should care”.
and finally, the main focus and message of this campaign:
“Our campaign will ask the important questions. Can you set yourself or your company free? Can you ever be free from Microsoft? As with our campaign against Digital Restrictions Management, we aim to demonstrate that technologists can be social activists, because we know the harm that Vista will cause”
Although this is a concern, it should not be the main focus of a new campaign from the free software foundation. The main focus should be the benefits of using free and open software, not the reasons against upgrading to the latest and greatest Microsoft Product.
Many companies that would benefit from this look at Microsoft as an example of a successful business. This new campaign may just alienate them even further from using linux and other open source applications/technologies.
If the Free Software Foundation ever wants to be taken seriously, they will need to stop these types of negative campaigns.
phpBB 3..is it worth the wait?
By Justin Silverton
phpBB is a very popular open-source bulletin board application written in php. Recently, a new development version has been released (for testing purposes only), which has many new improvements over the current version (2.X). Today, I decided to install it on one of my development servers to find out if it really is worth the wait.
Requirements
- A webserver or web hosting account running on any major Operating System with support for PHP
- A SQL database system, one of:
- MySQL 3.23 or above (MySQLi supported)
- PostgreSQL 7.3+
- SQLite 2.8.2+
- Firebird 2.0+
- MS SQL Server 2000 or above (directly or via ODBC)
- Oracle
- PHP 4.3.3 or above (supported: 5.0.x & 5.1.x, compatible: 6.0-dev) with support for the database you intend to use.
- These optional presence of the following modules within PHP will provide access to additional features, but they are not required.
- zlib Compression support
- Remote FTP support
- XML support
- Imagemagick support
Installing
Installation was pretty straight forward. With this new version also comes a professional looking installer, which looks much better than previous versions.
Cool new features
A) Jabber communication. Users can now communicate through this open source instant messenging protocol.
B) An unlimited number of subforums can be created
C) Caching. Major performance and caching enhancements have been made which will allow it to support many more users.
D) Mod system improvements. The module system has been re-written from scratch to allow easy install of 3rd party addons/components.
Conclusion
phpBB 3 has many improvements over the previous versions and I will be installing it once it becomes stable. One of the one features I wish would be in the next version, but I did not see on the list is spam protection. It is the one thing that has been plaguing the phpbb community from the beginning.
More information and downloads of this new version can be found here
compressing files in PHP
by Justin Silverton
Zlib compression has been built into php since version 3 and it can be used to compress the output of your php applications (which can significantly decrease the amount of bandwidth of a page), but what you can also do is compress any file accessible from your webserver.
The code
The following are two functions: compress and uncompress, which can compress and uncompress a specified file.
function uncompress($srcName, $dstName) {
$string = implode(”", gzfile($srcName));
$fp = fopen($dstName, “w”);
fwrite($fp, $string, strlen($string));
fclose($fp);
}
function compress($srcName, $dstName)
{
$fp = fopen($srcName, “r”);
$data = fread ($fp, filesize($srcName));
fclose($fp);
$zp = gzopen($dstName, “w9″);
gzwrite($zp, $data);
gzclose($zp);
}
compress(”test.php”,”test.gz”);
uncompress(”test.gz”,”test2.php”);
Source code can be downloaded here
Description of related zlib functions
More information on zlib related functions can be found here