I was only able to attend the Thursday and Friday events through to the Steve Wozniak talk. The line up was classically Silicon Valley, from San José Mayor Chuck Reed (whose office indicates that San José has the fastest public WiFi), to John McAfee, with some Scoble and Bushnell thrown in as well.

Thursday’s session was started by a session with Robert Scoble (pictured left and a San José State Alum) and Shel Israel (who took the picture on the left) who discussed their new book, “Age of Context.” They highlighted 5 forces that are in play:

1. Mobile  - Mobile is everything right now
2. Big Data – They noted changes like MongoDB (wasn’t around 6 years ago) and tiny data (think data on your phone)
3. Location – 4Square checkin’s are rising exponentially; your iPhone catalogs your location
4. Sensors – these are being added to all sorts of things from clothing, shoes, and more to of course, your phone
5. Social – note the number of tweets posting hourly

Overall, this was an enlightening talk that helped all present better understand that the world in which we live is growing in connectivity and visibility.

We heard about Bitcoin from a solid panel that included, Gary Kremin,  Chris Larson (OpenCoin), and Adam B. Levine, who notes that Bitcoin in the United States will be one of the slower growth points. Bitcoin is gaining good traction elsewhere in the world. They compared Bitcoin having the potential to win in currency much like how email beat the U.S. Postal Service because email is better in every way that matters. This crew also noted how German banks are supporting infrastructure that will be able to take advantage of Bitcoin. They did note that U.S. banks are slowly making progress on this question.

By the way, “petitions” are all but dead; social media won that one.

There were a number of other really interesting and enlightening talks. I’ll close out with one of the talks I favored with  Steve Wozniak (Apple co-founder) and Nolan Bushnell (pictured right), founder of Atari. They sat on the rostrum with Dan Pulcrano and had an overall fun chat about old times and new things to come. As one attendee noted, it was hard not to look at the crew and imagine Steve Jobs sitting in the empty seat next to the Woz.

I think the one point I favored was a note Woz made about how Apple used to publish schematics for their hardware so that folks could easily make boards if they wanted to. Woz is clear, Apple was open hardware way before it was hip. All in all, this was a fun conversation.

I was not able to stay beyond this talk. I mainly missed all of the great music this conference also included. There were some great local bands like The JurassiC and well known bands including Iggy Pop and the Stooges.

In my opinion, this conference set the tone for C2SV for years to come. I think this conference has an excellent opportunity to be exactly what it seeks to be, the big west coast technology and music / culture conference. Add it to your calendar for next year.

Daniel Hinojosa – Community Manager, SourceForge

The other side of the blending of these two things is that we have some awesome conferences here. Tomorrow I’ll be attending the “Create. Converge. Silicon Valley (C2SV)” conference in San José where there is an excellent slate of some of the Valley’s notables.

Next week brings to San Francisco the Music Tech Summit. This conference is, if possible, even more deeply steeped in technology. The speakers that have attended in the past are right off of some of your favorite record labels. The list of speakers for this list is an eclectic blend from tech and music. I’m truly excited to see what sorts of technologies today’s musicians are are pursuing to meet their artistic needs.

Stay tuned for my reports from the field via Twitter and post event updates here as well.

Technology? Music? It may be love…

Daniel Hinojosa – SourceForge Community Manager

As I had mentioned last week, I went to the Ohio LinuxFest. I was generously rewarded not only by the presentations, but also by the luminary class event as a whole. Friday’s keynote speaker was none other than Jon Hall. Jon spoke about how Linux is used around the world. Two key things I loved about this talk was how Jon Described his interaction with Linus Torvalds and how Jon was able to get Linus a DEC Alpha so that Linus could port Linux to that platform.

As well, I greatly appreciated the tale of how Jon had left a Linux CD behind at the University of the Pacific on Fiji. On his next visit there, Linux ruled the installed environment. There was of course more, but suffice it to say, it was an engaging talk.

On Saturday, Dr. Kirk Marshall McKusick gave a talk on how to manage a project. He used the BSD / FreeBSD projects as the basis for this talk. One of the keys to running a successful project, Dr. McKusick suggests, is getting rid of the deadwood. In the case of the BSD project, he did this by ensuring that there was a core team that changes on a regular basis; members to the core team, who can grant commit privileges and are elected by the committers. It seems an excellent model for project organization.

I saw other presentations that I valued. Of note was the presentation given by Emma Marshall from System 76 about how she works with a team to help get Ubuntu into classrooms. I also learned a little about how Juju is used to help deploy in a server environment by Jorge Castro. I was interviewed by the Sunday Morning Linux Review crew. I show up at about the 58 minute mark.

If you’ve never been to OLF, I recommend you put it on your conference calendar for next year and that you take a friend.

Daniel Hinojosa, SourceForge Community Manager

OSS4B is an international conference that promotes the usage and the adoption of open source software in both business and mission critical environments.

I’ll be giving a talk on Open Source Sustainability, sharing some findings from an upcoming report of the PROSE project, an EU-funded initiative aimed at promoting Open Source in European Projects.

See you there!

d.

Hi folks,

I’ll be at Ohio LinuxFest this weekend. I’m looking forward to what I hear is an excellent conference as well as attending the sessions and meeting many of you. If you see me walking by, stop me and introduce yourself!

d.

While this tool is an excellent way for a team to pick a place to go to lunch, this module could easily be used for “ranked choice” voting like what Alameda County in California uses.

To learn more about this Perl module, check out the PrefVote.org page.

Daniel Hinojosa.

Here are my picks to help you get through the school year:

Best flash card pick:

Mnemosyne Project

Flashcards are a tried and true tool to help you learn everything from math facts to science and language definitions to foreign languages. And Mnemosyne helps you learn faster and retain longer by optimizing how frequently cards are shown from the deck.

You can easily create your own flashcard decks and share with your teacher for distribution to the whole class.

Best offline reference pick:

Kiwix – Wikipedia offline 

   Wikipedia is great. It can be used for Social Studies homework, when you need to find the longest river in North America, and for science research. Kiwix extends access to that greatness offline, letting you use Wikipedia data when you’re in the car, working places that have no Internet access, or even using your laptop to finish homework when the power is out. As Wikipedia continues its march toward complete world knowledge, Kiwix gives you powerful options to pare down which pieces of information you want to carry portably and offline. Budget some time to try this out and download data before you need it.

Best unit conversion pick:

JConvert

Whether you’re converting imperial to metric to avoid space vessel calamities, or just bantering about nibbles and yottabytes, a dedicated unit conversion tool can be handy when accuracy counts (like when doing homework). JConvert fits the bill, covering units including acceleration, mass, angles, areas, and data size. Also, it’s Java-based, so you can just download the .jar and double-click to start it up.

Best office suite pick:

Apache OpenOffice 

If you need a Word processor, spreadsheet, presentation slides and more in one easy package (and who doesn’t?), then you have to check out Apache OpenOffice. Compatible with data formats from other popular office suites, you can work in .odt and export to .doc or PDF. The PDF Import Extension allows you to import and modify PDF documents too! This is truly must-have software for everyone.

Best drawing tool pick:

Inkscape 

Channel your inner artist or engineer with Inkscape, a vector graphics editor. Inkscape uses the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format and allows for export to many formats, including PDF and AutoCAD.

Best e-reader pick:

CoolReader 

You want an e-reader that is easy on the eyes, and Cool Reader fits the bill perfectly. Font, font size, page layout and background are easily tunable. With a great e-reader, you can tap into the wealth of e-books available freely from the likes of Project Gutenberg.

I hope you have a great semester and that these apps help you succeed!  Your feedback is always welcome. I’d love to hear from you.

I also want to give a shout out to the folks helping all of us life-long learners — TED, Khan Academy, and local ham radio operators.  Keep up the great work.

Daniel Hinojosa

SourceForge Community Manager

Daniel Hinojosa.

In case you missed it and are into handset development, the Motorola team has posted the kernel for their Moto X phone on SourceForge.

Daniel Hinojosa.

A quick summary of the improvements:

1. We’ve added content, and made numerous changes to better serve the needs of template providers and handle the growth of end-users. For example, new Templates are now published to the new aootemplates Twitter account, make sure to follow it to stay up-to-date.

2. The look & feel has been updated to match the new AOO 4 aesthetic.

3. Search has been improved and it now provides the autocomplete functionality, see the example below:

I’m also set to attend the Bay LISA Users Group Meeting tomorrow night. I’ll of course be dressed differently, the bald will remain the same.

I’m having a great time meeting so many folks in the OSS community. It’s amazing how many folks are involved in contributing to OSS development.

Daniel Hinojosa.

On Friday, I’m heading to the Santa Clara Hyatt Regency hotel for the Bricks By The Bay Conference (http://www.baylug.org/upcoming.cgi?201308-bricksbythebay). This is going to be an exciting conference to see what up and coming coders are getting into.

If you are at either of these events, catch up with me so we can connect!

Daniel Hinojosa.

Cameron Eagans (@cweagans) and Tim Plunkett (@timplunkett) both gave an excellent presentation on upcoming changes in Drupal 8.

In case you are looking for an OSS project to help with, the Drupal team has some need; they use PHP on the server-side, and HTML5/CSS/Javascript on the client side. Drupal runs on MySQL/MariaDB/Percona/other MySQL-like servers. Drupal will also support SQLite and PostgreSQL.

If you are interested, check out some details here:

Here a quick summary of all improvements:

1. The whole platform has been upgraded to the latest version of Drupal and to a web 2.0ish style. We’ve added more content, and made a numerous changes to better serve the needs of extension developers and handle the growth of end-users.. For example, new Extensions releases are now published on social media, make sure to follow the brand new aooextensions Twitter account to stay up-to-date.

2. Finally Extensions authors have full control over comments and spam.

3. The look & feel has been updated and aligned with the new AOO 4 aesthetic.

4. Search has been improved and it now provides the autocomplete functionality, see the example below:

5. Auto-update for Extensions has been reactivated and the landing page for Extensions updates has been redesigned, see an example post-update page.

6. A new feature allows devs to report AOO 4.0 compatibility for their extensions, and by default everything has been set to ‘unknown’. Developers should edit their existing releases to report whether they are compatible with AOO 4.0.

We have an API available to check extensions compatibility for an existing AOO 3.4.1 installation. Note that to take full advantage of this new feature we need to create a new Extension to check extensions compatibility or changes.

Last but not least, today we also went live with an early beta version of Templates website, now featuring the auto-complete search and the AOO 4.0 look & feel.

We’ll soon include all the same 2.0ish enhancements you see at Extensions, then we’ll migrate all content and accounts as we just did for Extensions.

• Helal Linux

  Helal Linux is an Ubuntu based distribution , it is main goal is to provide a modern ,cool, and a stable Linux OS with a pre-installed system settings and software,supporting both Arabic and Muslim users with many new features. In Helal we have our own programs , tweaks , repository , appearance , and our own fixes for bug that you may find in Ubuntu, we want to give users an easy Linux distribution that is ready to use just after install. Helal is a free Linux distribution ,and its also an open-source software, this project started in Syrian Arab Republic in 2010 by a 12 years old boy called “M. Hanny Sabbagh” who is now 15 , by time, more people invested in development. The word “Helal” is an Arabic word meaning “Crescent” and translated literati from Arabic to English, it has nothing to do with “Halal” which is a something that you can do in Islam. If you have a Question , go to the forum: http://helallinux.com/forums

  [ Download Helal Linux ]

• Octave Forge

  GNU Octave is a programming language for numerical computations. Octave Forge is a place for development of its packages; from bioinformatics and fuzzy logic to mechanics and instrument control.

  [ Download Octave Forge ]

• LIBPNG: PNG reference library

  Reference library for supporting the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format.

  [ Download LIBPNG: PNG reference library ]

• fre:ac – free audio converter

  fre:ac is a free audio converter and CD ripper for various formats and encoders. It features MP3, MP4/M4A, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, and Bonk format support, integrates freedb/CDDB, CDText and ID3v2 tagging and is available in several languages.

  [ Download fre:ac - free audio converter ]

• Elastix

  Elastix is an appliance software that integrates the best tools available for Asterisk-based PBXs into a easy-to-use interface. It also adds its own set of utilities to make it the best software package available for open source telephony.

  [ Download Elastix ]

• Vienna

  Vienna is an open source Mac OSX RSS reader with support for RSS/Atom feeds, article storage and management via a SQLite database, written in Objective-C and Cocoa. Development now happens on GitHub: https://github.com/ViennaRSS/vienna-rss

  [ Download Vienna ]

• ]project-open[ - Project Server

  ]project-open[ is Web based enterprise project management application with a focus on finance and collaboration. It’s main purpose is to coordinate the work of project managers, project members and stake holders across multiple projects. Target organizations are companies or corporate departments that need to track finances, tasks, and resources for a large number of concurrently running projects. ]project-open[ consists of about 200 modules for resource management, time sheet management, HR, CRM, ITSM, collaboration and financials. ]po[ is built on top of OpenACS.org, an open-source Web platform featuring role-base permissions, workflows, dynamically extensible objects and full-text search.

  [ Download ]project-open[ - Project Server ]

• SystemRescueCd

  SystemRescueCd is a Linux system rescue disk available as a bootable CD-ROM or USB stick for administrating or repairing your system and data after a crash. It aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the hard disk partitions. It comes with a lot of software such as disk management tools (parted, partimage, fsarchiver, filesystem tools, …), network administration programs and simple text editors . It can be used for both Linux and windows computers, and on desktops as well as servers. This rescue system requires no installation as it can be booted from a CD/DVD drive, and USB stick, or from the network using PXE. But it can be installed on the hard disk if you wish. It comes with up to date kernels to provide support for recent hardware and also for all important file systems (ext2/ext3/ext4, xfs, btrfs, ntfs, reiserfs, vfat), as well as network filesystems (samba and nfs).

  [ Download SystemRescueCd ]