d.: Please tell me about your project, West Point Bridge Designer and Contest, and how or why this came into being in the
first place.

Col. Ressler: This is a team of 3 effort; I work on this with my brother Steve, who is a civil engineer and also a Colonel / Professor at West Point. I am the computer guy and Cathy Bale is our coordinator, doubling as publicist; we all do this part time. This project is designed to interest kids in engineering careers. We hope that this is a good introduction to what engineering is about, in a form that is digestible by kids – ages 13 and up.

We started building this in 1999 as a one-time event for the bicentennial of West Point. West Point was of course created by Thomas Jefferson in 1802 as the nation’s first engineering school because he saw the need for people with skills to map out and build all kinds of infrastructure across a huge land mass. Today, West Point’s programs are still about half Math, Science, & Engineering, a classical liberal education. Since 2002 was a big celebration of the school’s history, we wanted to do something that not only celebrated that, but also highlighted our engineering heritage. We thought, wouldn’t it be cool to have some sort of engineering competition? We looked at things others had done: balsa wood bridges, toothpick bridges, etc. We were looking for interesting ways to celebrate engineering…

With these existing contest formats, you build the bridge and then destroy it to see how strong it was. But that’s not how it works in real life. The joy of creating something that will endure is a big part of the experience. If the bridge breaks, you’ve failed. So we decided to try a virtual contest that would take this into account. My brother had done much work by 1999 on an educational bridge design program in Visual Basic. I had done enough web site development to be pretty sure we could make a national contest work with only the three of us if we had a clever back office operation. Some of the technology I used originally is “ancient” now: perl, Sybase for the database, and custom web services in C for scalability (though the term web services hadn’t yet been coined). It all worked. We had about 20,000 kids participate in the first year. They submitted over 50,000 designs. The system allowed us to review and post scoreboard updates a few times per day. We were congratulating ourselves and moving on to other things. Then, teachers from around the country starting calling and emailing, asking when next year’s contest would start. We decided to do it one more year and have now done that 11 times, 12 contests in all.

We have been living with design decisions we made back in 1999. Until about 2 years ago, this code was closed source as I didn’t have time to make it Open Source. I teach computer science and made a decision to take the code Open Source as a professional exercise to learn the tools get some street cred in the classroom. My first Rails app is a re-implementation of the back end on that platform. I am open to expanding development and the team. I hope continued contribution to the contest can be a retirement activity in a couple of years. For example, a sponsor has come forward to make the Bridge Designer mobile on iPad, etc.

d.: Tell me about the program itself.

Col. R.: The program is a simplified CAD interface; it looks like a drafting board with just 4 tools. The designer can drop joints and connect them with members, which are simulated pieces of steel. The designer’s job is to span a river gap with triangles consisting of joints and members. You can then press a button and see an animation of a truck crossing the bridge. If your bridge works, the truck keeps going over the bridge. You can fly around to see different points of view and also what the driver sees. The program includes color coding that shows the stresses different parts of the bridge are carrying in real time. If you fail to build a viable bridge, the truck breaks it and falls into the river. Once you have a working bridge, the next thing is to note the upper right hand corner of the window shows a dollar figure, which is the cost of that bridge. You need to get this cost down to make a cheaper bridge that succeeds. This is how your rank in the contest is decided. Cheapest bridge wins. The cost model makes decreasing the cost both realistic and difficult, just like true life engineering. Kids who are the best in the world at this are amazing. One usually beats my brother’s best design each year about 15 minutes after the contest starts. He’s a civil engineer. I guess today you’d call this crowd-sourced design optimization.

The biggest contest was about 40,000 kids submitting nearly 80,000 bridges. The back end of the contest infrastructure tracks everything we need to enforce the contest rules – and kids worldwide can keep track of their standing minute by minute. They can see the top 30 teams in the world. There is a process to review scoreboards. Also, anyone can run a local contest with their own scoreboard. Groups from homeschool co-ops up to foreign countries have done this.

d.: As a Colonel in the Army, how did you get here?

Col. R: My brother Steve is also a Colonel in the Army and is the head of civil & mechanical engineering here at West Point; he just retired. I am the head of the electrical engineering and computer science department. I joined the Army through West Point, graduated in 1978, served as engineer officer in field until 1993. I then came here and have been here ever since – about 20 years. Professors at the U.S. Military Academy normally serve out their careers as such until retirement once they are appointed.

d.: Why was taking your project Open Source important?

Col. R.: I believe that there is great potential for the contest by going OSS, to tap enormous expertise in OSS community; I think that we can take the technology to the next level. Social media can help make the contest more collaborative. I want to engage the OSS community to get ideas to implement this.

d.: What possibilities exist?

Col. R.: Going mobile is the next big thing for this project; schools are making iPads available to students. I’m trying to gauge the Android platform (tablets) uptake. I would like to get a mobile tablet version of the Bridge Builder client, then relook at the whole back end infrastructure. I’d like to integrate it better for how kids interact on the Internet and with platforms. Social media is probably an untapped resource. The third thing is to broaden the bridge building scenario. This is a very male oriented task. Boys are stimulated by this challenge. Girls don’t seem to be attracted as much to this particular scenario. We know that research indicates girls are attracted to problems that involve people. We want to broaden the scenario to include a social dimension. I had envisioned incorporating environmental conditions, making scenarios where property must be condemned so that the people in a village have to move… Our project does not have these sorts of elements right now. Adding them may help make this more attractive to women / girls. Right now, there is about a 70/30 mix of boys versus girls in this competition; we would like to see it move closer to 50/50. The technology for the program is now relatively up to date; it’s built on Java and OpenGL. The backend is in Rails for Heroku. This is my first rails project; it may not be pretty, but it’s there and functional.

d.: What cost the most time to solve?

Col. R.: In 1999 there were so many questions about how to do something like this. We had a lot of publicity back then due to the Bicentennial. There weren’t that many big websites, and pre-built infrastructure for high volume web traffic didn’t exist. We designed a web capability that had to work just in case we happened to get 2, 5, or 10 million users; we needed to be prepared to handle that level of traffic. We also had prizes in the 5 figure range, so we had concerns about the legal risks. We wanted to avoid damaging West Point’s reputation at all costs. That was our nightmare. The contest needed to be part of the celebration, not a liability. In the end, there were no significant outages or system failures. The contest has never grown to that point of millions of users, but we’re still ready for that kind of load. We designed everything by assuming we might get 1 in 10 of schools in the U.S. to participate. In the end, this was reasonable. We rolled our own server scheme to grow capacity on the fly. It’s a primitive version of what Heroku today calls “dynos.”

d.: And the next contest?

Col. R.: We don’t have dates yet, but it will be at about the same as last year, in the spring. See http://bridgecontest.usma.edu for the schedule. We will publish on this site any day now. Registration will open and once things start, we have a qualifying round which ends in late March. The semifinals are generally in April and are done using the same internet infrastructure. We recruit a teacher or other volunteer to watch each kid at that level, so there are many folks involved. Then, small groups of finalists comes to West Point in May; the contestants are flown out with their parents and the final round is held in West Point facilities. At the end, we have an awards dinner and ceremony. It’s all a blast.

d.: Out of the past winners, have any gone onto West Point?

Col. R.: To our knowledge, no finalist has attended West Point. But I have done informal surveys and found about 1 in 30 cadets either knew about or participated in the contest. But remember our main goal is to get kids into engineering. Most finalists end up as science or engineering students in college. We have been able to track this to some extent. Cathy Bale is key for this because she forms personal relationships with teachers and contestants. This program has achieved a lot of what we set out to achieve, or we wouldn’t keep doing
it!

Another way to win is locally. Anyone in the world can write Cathy and request a local contest code; this registers them in a local contest, which provides a custom autogenerated scoreboard. There are contests at small group, school, district, cities like Boston and other levels up to states. The West Virginia state bridge contest is one of our favorites run by a great group in their Highways department. Other countries have conducted contests! In all, this has helped build a community of educators who are in our network, which allows us to continue to reach kids year to year.

d.: What else do I need to know?

Col. R.: The American Society of Civil Engineers has been a financial sponsor for a long time. They currently provide most of the financial resources. As a government official, I can’t endorse them or what they do, but it’s a fact that their donations have enabled the
contest to flourish. As you can read on the web site, the 2013 contest offered a $10,000 prize for first place, $5,000 for second. All team members who get to the finals received a laptop computer.

d.: There you go; a big thank you to Colonel Ressler and his brother Colonel Ressler at West Point. Also, from SourceForge, a special thanks to the American Society of Civil Engineers for their support of this most awesome project and contest. Go check it out.

Daniel Hinojosa – SourceForge Community Manager

The TexStudio project has 3 key members who all contributed to the conversation below; they are, Benito van der Zander, Jan Sundermeyer, and Tim Hoffmann.

I hope you take the time to read about this project and some of what they do that has helped them succeed with TeXstudio. I know that I, for one, kind of would have loved to see the Klingon or Elvish names had won… Either way, rock on TeXstudio team.

d.: How did you all come up with the name, TeXStudio?

TXs: That was kind of strange. Originally, the project used to be called TexmakerX as an homage to the editor Texmaker from which Benito forked. But then, to cut a long story short, we were not allowed to use that name anymore, and looked for a new one.

We gathered a bunch of possible names on the mailing list (some alternatives were TeXwizard, TeXingenium, TeXcreator, TeXceredir  (this is elvish), TeXghItlhwI’  (this is klingon) [ed.: emphasis mine], and let the community vote. Finally, TeXstudio won, which was not even one of our suggestions, but the idea of an user.

d.:Tell me about TeXstudio; what made you all decide that this was important to make?

TXs: Benito: Actually, I just wanted to write a novel, not a LaTeX editor. But since Office suites are just horrible for big texts, compared to plain text file formats like LaTeX, that required a LaTeX editor which had to be cross platform, open source and with features like highlighting of spelling mistakes and automatic insertion of LaTeX’s special commands.

I looked around, but it did not seem like there was any LaTeX editor with all those features. Only Texmaker was the closest to reach the goals, so I wrote patches for the missing features and later forked it, when those changes were not merged. Once the project was on SourceForge, Jan and Tim joined, and it just started to grow…

Tim: For me, it was kind of similar. Only, I was looking for a tool to write my PhD thesis and papers, not a novel. Initially, I settled with Texmaker after trying various editors (disregarding TeXstudio, or TeXmakerX as it was called at that time, because it was in a very early state back then). However, it did not completely match my needs. So I started writing bug reports and feature requests, and I submitted some patches. Participating in the Texmaker development turned out to be difficult. Therefore, I finally switched to TeXstudio, where I could contribute my ideas and help making my vision of a good LaTeX editor come true.

d.: When did TeXstudio start as a project on SourceForge?

TXs: The real starting point of TeXstudio is lost in the mist of time. Initially it only existed as a bunch of patches uploaded to a LaTeX forum. Registration on sourceforge and the first SVN commit date back to January 2009.

d.: Do you all have an active TeXstudio Community (if so, where will folks interested in joining find you all- IRC, Forums, etc.)?

TXs: The community provides many ideas and additional stuff like translations. However, they seldom get involved with the actual programming. Most of the actual development is done by the team. It is even getting difficult to catch up with ideas and requests from the community.

The communication is split equally between the mailing list, the forums and bug/feature trackers on SourceForge.

We used to have an ideatorrent as hosted app to gather the wishes of the community, but that died during the project renaming. Luckily, the new SourceForge feature tracker also supports voting.

d.: What role do each of you play in the project?

TXs: We do not really have fixed roles in the core team. The time each of us can spend on the project varies because we all develop in our free time. Strictly separated roles would not fit here. Everyone works on current issues and adds the features he likes. Still, we have some internal communication on the implementation details and larger changes.

That said, everyone has a certain area, in which he works most, usually because he created it.

For example, Benito does most of the general management stuff like writing announcements or interview answers. Some features he updates are the build system that runs the actual LaTeX commands, the interface to the grammar checking library, the crash handler, or low level issues in the qcodeedit editor library.

Jan works on the syntax checking which checks if all LaTeX commands are written correctly, the completer, the SVN support or table alignment. Furthermore he does most of the OSX-related stuff.

Tim maintains the templates for new documents, the update checker, the help system and is busy improving the UI for a smooth user experience and workflow.

Furthermore, there are a couple of translators who work only on the translations.

d.: What tool / facility on SourceForge do you think has been most important for the growth of TeXstudio?

TXs: There is no single most important tool. The important aspect is that all functionality needed for an open source project, like source control, bug/feature tracker, web page hosting, file releases, is integrated on the same site. Because SourceForge provides such an environment, we can focus on actually advancing the project.

Moreover, the general publicity SourceForge provides is also very helpful.

d.: Are you all looking for more contributors?

TXs: We are always open to new contributors. Programmers can join in and implement their ideas as soon as they want. If you don’t know what to code, we’ve got a long list of ideas and feature requests to share.

We’d like to emphasize, that people do not have to program to contribute. We’ve implemented a great deal of features, but documentation is still behind. So, people writing documentation or tutorials are highly welcome. A series of screencasts would be awesome, too, and someone artistic could improve the icon set.

Everybody can help to make TeXstudio even better. If you would like to join, just come and ask!

d.: What’s the next big thing for TeXstudio?

TXs: Since it has become such a big project, we spend a lot of time with maintenance, like answering mails/bug/feature requests. Currently, there is little time for a next big thing. But we’ve still have many ideas:

One big thing that has always been lurking at the horizon is to update the editor library we use. Currently it is all based on qcodeedit 2. The new awesome version qcodeedit 3 is way faster (even editing a 10mb to 100mb text file should work without noticeable delay) and provides semantic information from its syntax highlighting to the application, which would greatly improve/simplify all context sensitive features like syntax checking. Sadly, qcodeedit 3 is still in an alpha stage and the author is very busy. So it will take some time.

The highest voted feature request is currently the wish for git support. This is something we should add, although you can already use the standard git tools.

A real killer feature would be a quasi-continuous background compilation. This allows to have an always up-to-date preview. Accidentally, LaTeX was not designed for such a thing and it will be some serious work to make this happen with reasonable performance.

Benito plans to add a little “AI” one day, which can repeat previous editing operations. Like you make every occurrence of a word X after Y in a paragraph cursive, the AI would repeat it to make all those words in the later paragraphs also cursive. Everyone knows Vi for its macros, such an AI would provide automatic macros, which are even better. (We already have regex search/replace and scripting, which can be used for this cursive example, but that is not really intuitive)

The support for non-(La)TeX files is continuously improved, so TeXstudio will be usable also as a general purpose editor.

d.: Again, congratulations to you and my best for continued success and growth; Qapla’!

Daniel Hinojosa.

WinPenPack project page
WinPenPack website
WinPenPack community FAQ
WinPenPack download

SourceForge: Tell us about WinPenPack. What is it?

Briefly we can say that winPenPack is an Open Source project that deals with portable software, both natively portable and portabilized by means of X-Launcher, our portable program launcher. These apps can be grouped into suites or can be used also as standalone portable programs, adapting with end users preferences.
With winPenPack, any USB flash drive ceases to be a simple data storage device and becomes a self-contained environment, within which programs and files are homogeneously integrated.
Portable applications included in the winPenPack suites do not require any installation, do not leave their files or settings on the host computer, and can be easily transferred to another computer through any external device, such as a removable hard disk drive or a USB flash drive.
All you have to do is connect a USB flash drive to any free USB port on your host PC, and you will have your collection of pre-configured and ready-to-use programs instantly available, grouped in categories and executable through a user-friendly menu interface similar to the Start Menu, the winPenPack Menu. It will be exactly as if you are working on your own PC, with web browsers, e-mail clients, image and drawing editors, chat clients, multimedia tools, PC maintenance and security tools, school and development tools, and other.
winPenPack philosophy is well summarized by our (very restrictive) definition of “portable software”: a portable program can’t simply be a “no-install” program, but must also be able to save its settings into his own folder (or a user-definable folder), does not write settings or leave other data in user folders (e.g. into c:\Users\TheUserName\AppData\Roaming\ or c:\Documents and Settings\TheUserName) or into the registry, must be able to run from a USB pen drive and can perform path normalizations moving around different PCs (where the pen drive could be installed with different drive letters). Obviously, all of these programs can be executed also from hard drives, greatly simplifying recovery operations of all programs (and their preferred configurations) when reinstalling the operating system.

SourceForge: How long have you been doing this?

Our project started in November 2005. Me and a couple of “web friends” expanded the project and our community grew up very quickly. Since that date, we have issued about 20 new releases and hundreds of Open Source portable applications. Actually, the project is well known in Italy and is growing also abroad. All our collections/suites are regularly distributed also in bundle with some IT magazines. The community of users has grown over the years and has actively contributed to the growth of the whole project. The site currently hosts various projects created and suggested also by forum members, and is also used for bug reporting and users suggestions.

SourceForge: Is development of the platform very active, or is it primarily focused on adding new applications?

Actually the main project has reached a good state of stability and security. Anyway we are always involved on, so we are working on a new update in short time. Current steps are dedicated to improve the usability “on the go” with a new release of X-Launcher. In the main time we are upgrading all current X-Portable releases (that can be downloaded also standalone, not integrated in our suites) with the new version of the X-Launcher.

SourceForge: How many people are actively involved in the development of this project? (you might to tell a bit about your different roles)

Actually, our project involves 6 “officially active” elements and a lot of part-time contributors (translators, testers, and so on). All of them are spending their time completely for free, working on the project out of pure passion. Each member of the staff has a different job in “normal life”, not necessarily connected to the world of computer and information technology. We are also supported by some (few) skilled final users, always ready to help us with their feed-back on our forum.

SourceForge: How do you coordinate the project, and how you decide which application needs to be included next?

Due to the good stability and usability reached by the project, the main activity of the staff is now focused on keeping it daily updated and fine tuned. Our “information interchange method” is 90% our forum in the dedicated area for staff and admins. Anyway we are always tuned to incorporate the requirements coming from our end users and guests. In this case we use our forum to keep information coming from the users mainly in two “suggestion areas”: “Portable Software submission” and “Portabilization Requests”.
To maintain this activity under control and ordered, we also prepared a “how-to” for newcomers, which allows us to quickly evaluate proposals and requests. Our interest, in the viewpoint of development and diffusion of free portable software, aims Open Source software (GPL, LGPL, MPL, MIT, etc..). Since for license reasons changes on Freeware software are not allowed, the request must regard exclusively programs released under Open Source licenses, otherwise it will be moved to “Programs that CAN’T be made portable” forum section.
In our forum we have also a “Development Area”: also in this case only software released under Open Source licenses is eligible for X-Software development. Freeware, Shareware and Commercial software are excluded due to license restrictions that do not allow modifications.

SourceForge: If someone wanted to get involved in your project, 1) what kind of skills would they need and 2) what would need to be done?

Becoming a members of the “Developers” group (if enough skilled), and/or participating in the development of winPenPack components is not so difficult. In any case, first of all any candidate must be a passionate supporter and lover of portable/made portable software. Our doors are always opened for anyone wants to passionately participate by developing portable software based on winPenPack technology (X-Software).
The contribution can be made also in other different ways. Of course, we allow each one to make its contribution in the manner and quantity that it seems most appropriate to his abilities and knowledge. Some possible helps are: constructively participating in forum threads, assisting the Team in supporting the activities of moderation and user support, suggesting new portable programs (as specified in our submission procedure) and/or testing the portability of those currently present, writing new FAQs and/or translating in English the existing ones, transating portions of the site pages, writing tutorials and helping us to extend and improve all documentation, and so on.
Last but not least, we want to remember that winPenPack is completely free software developed by volunteers who offer their work for free, and it will remain so in the future. Anyone do not have to pay us anything for downloading and using winPenPack. However, if someone wants to donate for supporting its maintenance and development, will be really welcome!

SourceForge: How close are you to deliver a new version?

As already said before, actually we are hardly involved to release a new version of X-Launcher with some improvements in terms of usability, to keep all the project always fresh and tuned. In the main time all portable (“X-Software” and natively portable), are updated at last version almost daily or, at least, weekly. Also our suites will be updated in short time with new improvements. But this last activity will take a bit more time, we have a lot of programs to keep tuned with new updates. Some days ago, we have just released a new version of our “winPenpack Net Menu”.

SourceForge: Thanks so much for your time Danilo, and congratulations again.

• Pinguy OS

  Pinguy OS an out-of-the-box working operating system for everyone, not just geeks.

  [ Download Pinguy OS ]

• NAS4Free

  NAS4Free is an embedded Open Source Storage distribution and supports sharing across Windows, Apple, and UNIX-like systems. It includes ZFS, Software RAID (0,1,5), disk encryption, S.M.A.R.T / email reports etc. with following protocols: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, TFTP, AFP, RSYNC, Unison, iSCSI, UPnP, Bittorent (initiator and target), Bridge, CARP (Common Address Redundancy Protocol) and HAST (Highly Available Storage). All this can easy be setup by it’s highly configurable WEB interface. NAS4Free can be installed on Compact Flash/USB/SSD media, Hard disk or booted of from a LiveCD with a usb stick.

  [ Download NAS4Free ]

• NonVisual Desktop Access

  A free and open source screen reader for the Microsoft Windows operating system.

  [ Download NonVisual Desktop Access ]

• Password Safe

  Password Safe is a password database utility. Users can keep their passwords securely encrypted on their computers. A single Safe Combination unlocks them all.

  [ Download Password Safe ]

• winPenPack: Portable Software Collection

  winPenPack is a project that aims at collecting the most frequently used and most popular open source applications made portable, so that they can be executed without installation from any USB Flash Drive or Hard Disk. The winPenPack suites offer a wide range of portable applications like office tools, internet tools, multimedia tools, development tools, security applications and other frequently used utilities. Everything you need, completely free, open source and portable!

  [ Download winPenPack: Portable Software Collection ]

• jEdit

  jEdit is a programmer’s text editor written in Java. It uses the Swing toolkit for the GUI and can be configured as a rather powerful IDE through the use of its plugin architecture.

  [ Download jEdit ]

• boot-repair-disk

  See http://sourceforge.net/p/boot-repair-cd/home/

  [ Download boot-repair-disk ]

• TurnKey Linux

  TurnKey Linux is an opensource project that aims to develop high-quality software appliances that are easy to deploy, easy to use and free. In a nutshell, we believe everything that can be easy, should be easy! http://www.turnkeylinux.org/

  [ Download TurnKey Linux ]

• America’s Army 2.5 Assist

  A GUI client application for Downloading Installing and Playing Americas Army 2.5 on Windows, Mac and Linux with a new custom authorization system. On the server side a Desktop server manager for Windows, Mac and Linux and a Command line dedicated server manager for Windows and Linux. Backend server components include a replacement authorization system using the Battletracker account & stats database and a PunkBuster log streaming server which records players possible cheating activities. aa25assist.sourceforge.net aa25.org forum.aa25.org

  [ Download America's Army 2.5 Assist ]

• MinGW-builds

  Snapshots and releases builds of the MinGW compiler that use CRT & WinAPI from the mingw-w64 project.

• WOT – addons

  Add-ons for the game World Of Tanks. Stiahni si čo chceš… Nahadzujem sem addony pre WOT , vylepši si svoju hru novým zemeriavačom, skinmy, damage panelmi…atď

• PMD

  PMD is a source code analyzer. It finds common programming flaws like unused variables, empty catch blocks, unnecessary object creation, and so forth. It supports Java, JavaScript, XML, XSL. Additionally it includes CPD, the copy-paste-detector. CPD finds duplicated code in Java, C, C++, C#, PHP, Ruby, Fortran, JavaScript.

• ZABBIX

  ZABBIX is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution designed to monitor and track performance and availability of network servers, devices and other IT resources. It supports distributed and WEB monitoring, auto-discovery, and more.

• TV-Browser – A free EPG

  TV-Browser is a java-based TV guide which can be easily extended with lots of plugins. It is designed to look like your paper TV guide.

• pseint

  PSeInt is a pseudo-code interpreter for spanish-speaking programming students. Its main purpose is to be a tool for learning and understanding the basic concepts about programming and applying them with an easy understanding spanish pseudocode.

• MPC-BE

  Media Player Classic – BE is a free and open source audio and video player for Windows. Media Player Classic – BE is based on the original “Media Player Classic” project (Gabest) and “Media Player Classic Home Cinema” project (Casimir666), contains additional features and bug fixes.

• Album Art Downloader

  The Album Art Downloader is a program designed to make life easier for anyone who wishes to find and update their album art for their music collection. The sources for the pictures can be defined by creating plugin scripts.

• ReactOS

  ReactOS is an open source effort to develop a quality operating system that is compatible with applications and drivers written for the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003).

I spoke with Reinhard Pointner via email last week (since he’s 13 time zones over from me!) about the project and his involvement in it.

Rich: What is Filebot? What does it do?

Reinhard: It’s really just about renaming and organising episode and movie files. It’s gonna make sense of pretty much any kind of filename and match it against online databases for additional metadata like episode titles, movie genres etc. Next to that it’ll allow you to download subtitles for your files and create or check SFV files.

Rich: What’s the technology stack?

Reinhard: Java for most of the application base, Swing for the GUI and then Groovy as scripting engine for user scripts. FileBot uses quite a few 3rd party libraries like miglayout, nekohtml, ehcache, jna, mediainfo, 7zip-jbindings etc

Rich: What led you to start the Filebot project?

Reinhard: To scratch a personal itch, as they say. Also there weren’t any proper tools for renaming episodes, downloading subtitle or checking SFV files, just loads of half-baked projects. Someone just had to fix that.

Rich: How is it that six years later there’s still more to do? What’s coming in future versions of Filebot?

There’s always corner-cases with the filename-based auto-detection logic but it’s pretty mature now.
At some point it’d be cool I could build a big database of hashes and metadata so files can be matched to episode or movie data with perfect accuracy.
Subtitle upload has been on the list as well for a long time.

Rich: How can other folks get involved in your project?

Reinhard: Quite easily. Just write tutorials. There’s not a lot information out there, especially not good tutorial for various use-cases.

Also the format expressions for episode/movie naming and user scripts for automation can be written easily by advanced users and provided for other people to just copy and paste.

Again, we need tutorials tutorials tutorials and more tutorials.

Rich: Congratulations again, and good luck with your project!

• Greenshot

  Screenshot tool optimized for productivity. Save a screenshot or a part of the screen to a file within a second. Apply text and shapes to the screenshot. Offers capture of window, region or full screenshot. Supports several image formats. Imprint: http://getgreenshot.org/imprint/

• ZenTao project & scrum tool

  ZenTaoPMS is an open source project management system with product management, project management, bug management, testcase management, doc management, todo management and many other features in one application. ZenTaoPMS is also a scrum tool.

• TeXstudio – A LaTeX Editor

  TeXstudio is a fully featured LaTeX editor. Our goal is to make writing LaTeX documents as easy and comfortable as possible. Some of the outstanding features of TeXstudio are an integrated pdf viewer with (almost) word-level synchronization, live inline preview, advanced syntax-highlighting, live checking of references, citations, latex commands, spelling and grammar. Find out more at our website.

• Battle for Wesnoth

  The Battle for Wesnoth is a n open-source turn-based tactical strategy game with a high fantasy theme, featuring both single-player, and online/hotseat multiplayer combat. Fight a desperate battle to reclaim the throne of Wesnoth, or take hand in any number of other adventures.

• DC++

  This is a project aimed at producing a file sharing client using the ADC protocol. It also supports connecting to the Direct Connect network.

• Hibernate

  Hibernate – Relational Persistence for Idiomatic Java

• FileBot

  FileBot is the ultimate tool for renaming your movies, tv shows or anime and downloading subtitles. It’s smart, streamlined for simplicity and just works. FileBot supports Windows, Linux and Mac, plus there’s a full-featured command-line interface for all sorts of automation.

• Gallery

  A slick, intuitive web based photo gallery. Gallery is easy to install, configure and use. Gallery photo management includes automatic thumbnails, resizing, rotation, and more. Authenticated users and privileged albums make this great for communities

Project support page
Project website
Community site
Download

As you know, a picture is better than a thousand words, and a video is even better! So we’ll start with a video demo of SuperTuxKart 0.8:

Rich: Congratulations on winning the POTM for April, 2013.

Joerg: Thank you! And thanks a lot for having us here

Rich: Tell us about STK. What is it?

Joerg: STK is a kart racing game. It’s mostly a kids friendly game, but a lot of adults are playing it. Its focus is fun game play, not realism.

Rich: How long have you been doing this?

Joerg: I restarted the project around 6 years ago. At this time the original project was basically dead, left in a better looking, but unplayable state. I started to fix things here and there, and suddenly I had restarted the project. Another developer joined me, and we were able to do a very first release. Since then auria has joined the project, and we have made some huge progress with the game.

Rich: How many people are actively involved in the development of this project?

Joerg: At this stage, there are two people doing the actual coding of STK, one person who is implementing and managing our addon server. Then one artist who works mostly on tracks. On top of that there are some coders who submit a patch or two if they find something that they think needs to be improved, and several people from the community doing textures, icons, tracks and karts.

Auria and myself are managing the project now, and doing the actual coding. Stephen is our addon-expert, and samuncle the artist. Additionally we have Arthur doing the blog posts, and helping with the community. And there are translators who make the game available in different languages.

Rich: I’ve noticed, in game projects, that there’s a much broader set of talents involved than in many other projects. Coders, certainly, but also musicians, artists, and usability people. Who else am I missing?

Joerg: Yes, a game needs people with a variety of backgrounds. We heavily rely on testers, but also have people doing the blog posts, tweets (which we only started recently), and helping people getting started. We have a very friendly community, so new comer who want to help out with a thing or two will easily find help there.

Besides musician we also need sound effects, and generally people coming up with ideas. We do a lot of brainstorming in our forums, discussing ideas backwards and forwards till we get something that will really enhance the game.

Rich: What sorts of things do you typically put on Twitter? Tips? Release information?

Joerg: We have only recently started to use twitter, mainly because of the potm voting. We try to keep people up-to-date with development on STK, show off new features before they are available in a release. Artists use it to show tracks they are working on, and coders might inform about other new features that they are working on. ATM it’s a little bit quiet, since the core team is working on the GSoC application, but once this is done, we will keep it more up-to-date.

Rich: So, GSoC? What are you going to have a student work on?

Joerg: GSoC is a project funded by google, in which student are being paid to work on open source project. It’s the first time that we are trying to apply, and if we are accepted, we will have a interesting list of projects to work on. Our overview page is at http:/supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/GSoC_overview, which links to the list of ideas. We are mostly focusing on getting started with network multiplayer, one of the most requested features of STK.

Rich: Sweet

Joerg: There are nine suggested projects in there, and while the full network multiplayer is too much for a GSoC project, important blocks will hopefully be implemented in two projects (if we get selected for GSoC that is). We have a very experienced team of mentors, all of which are professionally working in the IT area, and we even have a professional game engine developer available.

Hopefully this will be very good for the students participating, in that they get some real life coding experience, but also for STK.

Rich: The way that you talk about the project, it sounds almost like a professional venture. How do you find time to have this much passion about it?

Joerg: I do nearly all of my work on the train to and back from work, which is nearly 2 hours a day. Then I’ll add some time in the evening and/or weekend. It is certainly very encouraging to receive acknowledgement, be it in form of POTM, or seeing that STK is used in research projects like Microsoft’s IllumiRoom and others, or even to see that STK was used in a TV show

Many parents are happy to have STK, since it’s free and kids friendly, and allows them play togehter with their kids.

Rich: TV show? Do tell.
Joerg: Around 4.5 years ago we were approached by the producers of “Friday Night Lights“. They needed a video game to be shown in one episode, and the professional companies didn’t want their games to be used (it was in the context of underage drinking).

So they came to us, and we were happy to get STK on TV this way

Rich: That’s so cool.

Joerg: Yes, it’s those little success stories that make work on STK so rewarding.

STK has been ported to a ‘one switch’ version which can be played by people suffering from motion impairment, which, imho, shows the strength of open source development

Rich: If someone wanted to get involved in this project, other than playing it, what opportunities are there?

Auria: we can get help from people from a variety of backgrounds. Non-coders can first help with translations, and documentation. Then we have a great need of modellers who know Blender well to help improve or make new tracks
Auria: programmers are also of course very much welcome. We have a good list of much-requested features to code, that we could certainly get help with

Rich: What language(s) is the project developed in?

Auria: The core of the game is developped in C++. Some libraries used include Bullet for physics, Irrlicht for graphics, and OpenAL for audio. Beyond C++ there are also blender extensions written in python, and the addons website (which will hopefully evolve into a multiplayer lobby someday) written in PHP.

Rich: What’s planned for the future? Anything exciting to look forward to in the next release?

Joerg: The most exciting feature is native support for wiimote. We are currently working on some portability issues, but hope to get the solved for the next release. We will have two new game modes – a soccer mode for split screen play, and a ‘Find the Easter Bunnies’ more targeted for kids

Online multiplayer is probably the most important outstanding feature of STK, but it will take some time before we will have this ready. It is currently plannd to become 0.9, but we will have more releases in the 0.8 series to gradually introduce features for that:

Adding a lobby, in-game voting for addons, online highscores, playing against ghost recorded by other people, a tutorial and achievements. Hopefully part of this will be done as part of GSoC.

Rich: Thanks so much for your time, and congratulations again.

Joerg: Thanks so much for having us!

Rich: SourceForge is delighted to announce that the March project of the month is Postbooks. Postbooks is an ERP and I’m speaking with Ned Lilly, who is the CEO of xTuple, the company behind this project, to talk about what that means, and where the project is going.

If you’d like to have your project featured on the SourceForge podcast, just drop me a note and we’ll schedule something.

If the embedded audio player below doesn’t work for you, you can download the audio in mp3 or ogg formats.

You can subscribe to this, and future podcasts, in iTunes or elsewhere, at http://feeds.feedburner.com/sourceforge/podcasts, and it’s also listed in the iTunes store.

Congratulations on winning the project of the month.

Ned: Thanks. We’re excited about it.

Rich: The vote was much closer than we’ve seen in years past – I guess you followed that.

Ned: Yeah, it really was like a race. I was picturing the TuxKart guys in their little graphics going up and down. Hopefully they’ll have another bite at the apple, because it sounds like there was a larger number of votes than you often see.

Rich: Let’s talk about Postbooks. For people that aren’t really familiar with it, can you give us an overview of what it is, what it does, and in what kind of business somebody would want to use it.

Ned: Postbooks is a full featured ERP, Accounting, and CRM application that we developed, ourselves, from scratch. xTuple, the company, has been around for about eleven years, and Postbooks has been on SourceForge, free and Open Source, for … since the summer of ’07, so, five and half years. It’s had a good steady stream of popularity. We’ve got a good community of … last guess, probably 30,000 active users. In a nutshell – I said ERP, Accounting, and CRM, so it’s the next step up from a desktop accounting package like Quickbooks or Peachtree, but it scales up to full featured ERP that competes with Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, and the R3 product. And we’ve had people move to our ERP from just about any package you’ve heard of. Postbooks is he core, and it’s licensed under the CPAL license, which is successor to the Mozilla Plus Attribution.

It’s been great. Ever since we’ve had a steadily growing community.

Rich: I guess at some level ever company needs something like this. Is this primarily aimed at the enterprise, or is this something that could be used in non profits? Who are your users?

Ned: That’s a great question. Our roots are in inventory based businesses, so, in manufacturing, distribution, there’s a lot of good tools for that kind of stuff in the product, but we’ve got plenty of people that don’t carry any inventory that are some type of services. We use it ourselves to run xTuple, and it’s not like we’ve got a warehouse full of floppy disks or anything. In addition to all of the standard ERP stuff you’d expect, in the way of inventory manufacturing distribution, there’s time and expense management that’s tightly integrated with the accounting. Anybody that’s got a professional services capability in their business can automate a lot of that. Non-profits are an interesting area for us because we have project … there’s integrated project tracking management as well, and then we have an add-on called project accounting which allows you to do financial reporting by project, and track that kind of stuff. That’s pretty similar to the fund accounting that a lot of non-profits are organized around.

One of the fundamental ideas behind Postbooks is that accounting is accounting – It’s not like there have been fifty new and exciting ways to build a general ledger introduced in the past thirty years. You’ve got your debits and you’ve got your credits, pretty much. It’s a good candidate for Open Source because there’s a horizontal core of common functionality that any business would, could, and should use. And then we’ve got the fully integrated CRM as well. That’s something you see in a lot of low-end ERP and accounting packages.

Rich: Tell me about the relationship between your company and the community side of things. What parts of your business are not Open Source? How does that work for you guys.

Ned: Postbooks is sort of the core of the product. The two key technologies are the Postgres database on the server side and the GUI client is built with QT, the C++ framework. Those are the two core technologies. The GUI client that you download from SourceForge, depending on what database it’s talking to, could be Postbooks, or it could be one of our commercially licensed editions that adds bigger company functionality. The GUI client is exactly the same. Building out from the core of Postbooks, we have what we call the standard edition, which has some more distribution type functionality for companies that have multiple warehouses and are doing some planning, and lot and serial control, and that kind of stuff across multiple warehouses. We have a manufacturing edition, which adds some some manufacturing specific functionality. And then we have an enterprise edition which is everything with the kitchen sink. A couple of other packages people have build over the years. The difference between those editions is just additional tables and whatnot being created via script in the postgres database. We have an updater tool that you can also download from SourceForge, which does both updating you from one release to another – updating your database – as well as upgrading from one edition to another. The key there is that it’s the same code base, and that any contributions – any enhancements that anybody makes to one version of the product have the potential to flow through all of them.

Rich: On the community side, do most of the contributions to the product come from within your company, or from the community? And to add on to end of that, if I want to become involved in your community, where can I plug in?

Ned: Since we sort of originated the project, it’s more the model where one company started it and is the big fish in the pond. We do have an active community of contributors as well as users and participants in various forms – bug tracking and so forth. We’ve got a great deal of developer-oriented documentation on the website that goes into how you can get involved in developing both the core and we have a capacity for scripted add-on packages. QT has a variant of Javascript that allows for modifying screens in a GUI application. And we have a package management system for rounding up all those changes that you might make to individual screens and scripts and functionalities and bring them into one package. The one great example that is a guy in New Zealand who jumped into a conversation about fixed assets on our website, and people start talking about does this functionality exist somewhere, and someone else says no, it doesn’t exist in xTuple but here’s how I’ve seen it in other packages, and they start this design conversation in the forums, and it evolves into a spec document and this guy coded it up as a package. He actually ended up building a concentric circles model like we do for our products. There’s a core fixed assets module that you download for free. And then he’s got additional functionality that for a couple of hundred bucks you can add depreciation schedules and integration with the general ledger and that kind of stuff. It’s neat to see the free/open source community model and the ability for community members to have some economic gain in this too.

Rich: What’s the future? Where are you going with the project? What are the exciting things on the horizon?

Ned: I mentioned that we’re moving over to Git. The reason for that, or the work that we’re doing there is all related to a new mobile web client that’s kind of exciting that we’re developing. It will live alongside the QT client. We actually just released the first pice of it in December. It’s an all Javascript/HTML5 framework called Enyo, which came out of the HP acquisition of Palm. It’s really slick. It’s still the same Postgres database on the back end. The QT client connects directly to the Postgres database. Instead of doing that, we have a middle tier now. The Node.js server manages the data source. We built a model layer with Backbone.js, and then Enyo on top of it for the front end. And the really cool thing is the two clients are completely interoperable, so you can have your accounting and manufacturing types back at the home office using the GUI client, and then the sales people out on the road with their iPads, or their Zunes or they Galaxys, or whatever. We looked for a very long time for the mobile equivalent of QT when it became clear that QT wasn’t going to do that any time soon. We really are very happy with Eyno. It’s fantastic. We’re big fans. And I think we’re going to end up, as was the case with QT, having one of the most substantial enterprise applications built with this tool set.

Rich: Thanks so much for your time. Congratulations again.

Ned: Thanks, Rich, appreciate it. And thanks for everything you guys do managing SourceForge. It’s an incredible resource and we’ve been happy participants for years, and we wish you all the best.

I recently spoke with Emmanuel Engelhart, one of the developers on the project.

Rich: Congratulations on winning the SourceForge Project of the Month for
February.

Emannuel: Thank you for hosting Kiwix development tools and promoting free software.

Rich: Start by telling us what Kiwix is. How would someone use this?

Emmanuel: Kiwix allows to read Wikipedia offline. In addition, using the highly efficient ZIM file format (http://www.openzim.org), Kiwix can read any HTML content offline. In order to enjoy Wikipedia offline, you need to download Kiwix and a ZIM file of Wikipedia (from the Kiwix web-site or directly from the Kiwix internal library).

Then you can surf in Wikipedia as if you were online. Kiwix provides almost everything you will need:

• Case and diacritics insensitive full text search engine
• Bookmarks & Notes
• ZIM based HTTP server
• PDF/HTML export
• Localized in more than 80 languages
• Search suggestions
• Tabs navigation
• Integrated content manager/downloader

Rich: How did you come to start this project?

Emmanuel: Why lock up Wikipedia to Wikipedia.org? The contents of Wikipedia should be available for everyone! Even without Internet access. This is why we have launched the Kiwix project.

Rich: Can you give us some examples of your project being used in the real world?

Emmanuel: Our users are spread all over the world: sailors on the oceans, poor students thirsty for knowledge, globetrotters almost living in planes, world’s citizens suffering from censorship or free minded prisoners. For all these people, Kiwix provides a simple and practical solution to ponder about the world.

Kiwix is used,for example, by the Wikimedia France Afripedia project, and also by
Wikimedia Kenya. And in India.

Spreading work is done by Wikimedia people and by third parties like NGOs. A lot of individuals also download Wikipedia offline once and then share it with their friends and relatives. We have had around 100.000 downloads in January.

Rich: Release more and more up-to-date content is our top priority. We continuously increase our ZIM file throughput by improving our ZIM generation toolchain. We will also soon start to release offline version of other Wikimedia projects.

To make Kiwix work on smartphones is our second priority. We hope to release a first version of kiwix-mobile for Android in April.

Regarding the far future, we will try to be one of the best open-source e-book readers. We think we have a cutting-edge file format with ZIM which is perfectly complementary with the actual EPUB standard. We will do our best to offer the best user experience with both in the future.

Rich: If someone wanted to get involved in your community, what could they do? Are you looking for developers? Translators? Users? Testers?

Emmanuel: Actually, the most important work to do, can be done by everyone: this is promoting and sharing Wikipedia offline with Kiwix. We have remarked that most of the people, although they would really need it, think it is impossible to have the whole Wikipedia with pictures on a USB stick. That’s why we need people to setup projects and spread it.

But, we have also plenty of work otherwise, for example:

• We would love to have a new javascript developer able to add the EPUB support using Monocle
• We always need new translators for the user interface
• We are working currently on a solution for plug computers called kiwix-plug; and there is a lot to do for people having GNU/Linux admin skills:
• We need a C++ expert to help us improving tools to manipulate ZIM file, we need especially a solution to make ZIM incremental updates.
• Of course need we testers, join us at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/kiwix-testing
• We need a bug master to manage all the tickets on the bug tracker

If you are interested, simply join us on Freenode IRC #kiwix channel.

The candidates are listed below. Go vote at http://twtpoll.com/ragr0e

• Cube 2: Sauerbraten (game engine & FPS)

  3D game engine (more powerful redesign of the Cube engine) and FPS game

• PostBooks ERP, accounting, CRM by xTuple

  Free open source ERP, accounting, CRM package for small to midsized businesses. Runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows (built with open source Qt framework). Business logic resides in PostgreSQL database. Rich API for connecting to third-party apps.

• SuperTuxKart

  SuperTuxKart is a kart racing game featuring Tux and friends. It is a fun-racer game, focusing on fun and ease of play.

• PokerTH

  PokerTH is a poker game written in C++/Qt. You can play the popular Texas Hold’em poker variant against up to nine computer-opponents or play internet games with people all over the world. This poker engine is available for Linux, Windows and Mac

• DVDStyler

  DVDStyler is a cross-platform free DVD authoring application for the creation of professional-looking DVDs. It allows not only burning of video files on DVD that can be played on standalone DVD player, but also creation of individually designed DVD menus

• GnuCash

  GnuCash is a personal and small-business finance manager with a check-book like register GUI to enter and track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. GnuCash is designed to be simple and easy to use but still based on formal accounting principles.

• simutrans

  Simutrans is a transport simulation game. Planes, ships, trains, trams, trucks, busses, or monorails are at your disposal. But factories have contracts and passengers will only travel to their own destinations. Many graphic sets (paks) are available.

• Skim PDF Reader and Note-taker for OS X

  Read and annotate scientific papers in PDF. Stop printing and start skimming. Skim requires Mac OSX 10.5 or higher.

• KDiff3

  KDiff3 is a graphical text difference analyzer for up to 3 input files, provides character-by-character analysis and a text merge tool with integrated editor. It can also compare and merge directories. Platform-independant.

• Open Broadcaster Software

  Open Broadcaster Software is free and open source software for the purposes of streaming live media content to the internet or to video files.

• Kiwix

  Wikipedia offline & more

• Waterfox

  Waterfox is a high performance browser based on the Mozilla Firefox source code. Made specifically for 64-Bit systems, Waterfox has one thing in mind: speed.

• WinDS PRO

  WinDS PRO (también abreviado como WinDS) es un Pack de Emuladores (colección de emuladores) para emular Game Boy, Super Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance y Nintendo DS; todas ellas Consolas portátiles creadas por Nintendo.

• wxWidgets

  wxWidgets is a free open source framework for development of cross platform GUI applications in C++ and many other languages via its different bindings (Python, Perl, Ruby, D, …).

• Redo Backup and Recovery

  Easy rescue system with GUI tools for full system backup, bare metal recovery, partition editing, recovering deleted files, data protection, web browsing, and more. Uses partclone (like Clonezilla) with a UI like Ghost or Acronis. Runs from CD/USB.

• Arch Bang

  ArchBang is a simple GNU/Linux distribution which provides you with a lightweight Arch Linux system combined with the OpenBox window manager. Suitable for both desktop and portable systems – It is fast, stable, and always up to date.

• SCons – a Software Construction tool

  SCons is a software construction tool (build tool, substitute for Make) implemented in Python, based on the winning design in the Software Carpentry build tool competition (in turn based on the Cons build tool).

• AjaXplorer

  Simply share documents and folders with your teams, Administrate your box with an Entreprise grade console (rights, groups, plug ins), Access documents with a Web Gui, Smartphones and tablet apps (iOS, Android), Sync folders on your computer (public beta, PC, Mac, Linux, Web, Tablets).

DOSBox emulates a full x86 pc with sound and DOS. Its main use is to run old DOS games on platforms which don’t have DOS (Windows 7 / Windows Vista / Windows 2000 / Windows XP / Linux / FreeBSD / Mac OS X)

We did the interview a little differently this time, as the developers wanted to do the interview on IRC.

Rich: First, congratulations on being awarded Project of the Month, and being the first project *ever* to have that honor twice.

Qbix: guess we must be doing something right then

Rich:

Harekiet: hehe nice, how long has that been going on now?

Rich: Since 2002.

Rich: Why is there still a demand for a DOS emulator these days?

Qbix: Good question. The charms of old games maybe

Harekiet: I’ve been kinda wondering about that as well, must mostly just be nostalgia with people that played dos games, can’t really see any kids playing them. And the occasional company that still runs their ancient stuff

Qbix: Although, some of the support requests are (based on their use of language) at least of younger ones.

Rich: And apparently some 35,000 other people every week, too.

Qbix: I would think that everybody who wanted to play a game, would have downloaded dosbox by now

Rich: I know that’s why I started using DOSBox, probably 10 years ago.

Rich: Take us back to the beginning. How did you get started doing this?

Harekiet: Well that would be my doing mostly since I was playing emulated console roms and I always wanted to see how dos games could look with some of the graphic enhancement filters they used in those. And that was at the time windows 2000 came along and dos support in windows was on the decline rapidly

Qbix: And we relied on VDMSound

Rich: Is there still more to do? Is development still active, or is it primarily end-user support these days?

Qbix: Well, development is slow, but still there.

Harekiet: And to really add new features you kinda get annoyed at some of the design choices made at the time and really think it might be better to just write a new emulator from scratch

Qbix: True, so mostly we’re just improving compatibility at the moment.

Qbix: Although, some long requested features will probably be in the next version. But the new emulator from scratch idea is very tempting, with the knowledge that we have now on how to do it better

Rich: Does that seem like a serious possibility now, or is that just an idea at this point?

Harekiet: Yeah, it’s mostly just an idea

Harekiet: If you can really bring up the energy for it, especially if you consider other emulators like qemu that provide better pc emulation but could be tweaked for better dos support, so many possibilities

Qbix: Yeah, starting anew will take a lot of resources and energy

Rich: Is there any interest in adding support for other platforms like Android? Does that even make any sense?

Qbix: It’s actually already there, but not by us, at least not at the moment

Harekiet: It’s been ported to ios and android by others

Rich: How large is the actual developer community? Is it just the two of you, or do you have other major contributors.

Qbix: we have more than just us

Harekiet: Well we used to have another active developer but he gave up on it and there’s some active people making patches

Harekiet: But I’d say Qbix is most active with it
Qbix: yeah there is h-a-l-9000 who is an official dev and a few people who make patches on regular basis

Rich: Have you ever had any legal challenges about what you’re doing?

Qbix: Well, we are used a lot by companies, and some of them don’t have an idea what the GPL means, just that dosbox is free and works.

Harekiet: And we’ve held off on the mt32 emulator since it would require the roland roms. Although i don’t really think it would cause that much trouble, thought scummvm had it added as well

Qbix: Yes, and by making it a seperate driver, more projects can benefit. The mt32 emu has made a lot of progress lately – starts to sound as good as my real mt32. But we try to stay clear from legal problems.

Rich: So, nobody suing you because of emulating their stuff?

Qbix: nope

Rich: Oh, good.

Qbix: All our legal stuff is trying to get companies to stick the GPL.

Rich: If someone wanted to get involved in your project, 1) what kind of skills would they need and 2) what would need to be done?

Harekiet: That’s always quite a troublesome question, you get mails of people asking that

Qbix: Everybody who wants to get involved basically first needs to debug games that don’t work and fix them

Harekiet: It’s not like dosbox has proper documentation and if they can figure out how dosbox works that’s probably a good start

Qbix: Yeah, that is the idea of them fixing games – getting familiar with dosbox and all the things it emulates. So many specs… all the hardware, BIOS, video BIOS, DOS, XMS, EMS, MSCDEX and lots of other standards

Harekiet: I’d rather want that they spend their time making some wine for windows properly, some weird early windows games that don’t run in xp anymore. Or windows 7 for that matter

Rich: Well, thanks so much for taking time to talk with me. And congratulations again.

Qbix: Thanks for hosting us all these years!

Harekiet: What’s the total bandwith wasted?

Rich: 24,256,320 downloads

Harekiet: 3.6*10^13 bytes my calc says assuming 1.4mb per download. 33 Tb? that seems a bit excessive

Rich: Thanks again for your time.

Harekiet: okay

Qbix: okay. Thanks!

• 0 A.D.

  0 A.D. (pronounced “zero ey-dee”) is a cross-platform real-time strategy (RTS) game of ancient warfare. It’s a historically-based war/economy game that allows players to relive or rewrite the history of ancient civilizations, each depicted at their peak of economic growth and military prowess.

• 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.

• XOOPS Web Application Platform

  XOOPS is one of world’s leading open source CMS and portal systems, written in PHP for the MySQL database. Its object orientation makes it an ideal tool for developing small or large community websites, intra company and corporate portals, weblogs and much more. Founded in 2001 by group of international software developers, XOOPS quickly become one of world’s leading Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS). Known and loved for its ease of use and countless powerful modules, XOOPS received numerous International Awards and Recognitions, including being the Top 5 finalist of the 2008, 2009, and 2010 CMS Awards by Packt Publishing. In January 2009 it received the 2008 China Open Source Software Contest Award and in October 2010 the “Best Technology Award” from Northeast Asia OSS Forum.

• HyperSQL Database Engine (HSQLDB)

  HSQLDB is a relational database engine written in Java, with a JDBC driver, conforming to ANSI SQL:2008. A small, fast, multithreaded engine and server with memory and disk tables, LOBs, transaction isolation, multiversion concurrency and ACID.

• Liferay Portal

  Liferay Portal is the world’s leading enterprise open source portal framework, offering integrated Web publishing and content management, an enterprise service bus and service-oriented architecture, and compatibility with all major IT infrastructure.

• Luminance HDR

  Luminance HDR is a complete suite for HDR imaging workflow. It provides a wide range of functionalities, both during the fusion and the tonemapping stage. Its graphical user interface, based on Qt4, runs on a multitude of platform, like Microsoft Windows (32 and 64 bit), Mac OS X 10.6 and above and several Linux distribution. Input images can be supplied in multiple formats, from JPEG to RAW files. In the same way, output can be saved in many different formats as well, from JPEG to TIFF (both 8 bit and 16 bit per channel), enabling all the power of your post processing tools.

• PeaZip

  PeaZip is a free Zip files utility, providing an unified, natively portable, cross-platform file and archive manager GUI for many Open Source technologies like 7-Zip, FreeArc, PAQ, UPX. Create: 7Z, ARC, BZ2, GZ, *PAQ, PEA, QUAD/BALZ, TAR, UPX, WIM, XZ, ZIP files Extract 150+ archive types: ACE, ARJ, CAB, DMG, ISO, LHA, RAR, UDF, ZIPX and more Features of PeaZip includes extract, create and convert multiple archives at once, create self-extracting archives, split/join files, strong encryption with two factor authentication, encrypted password manager, secure deletion, find duplicate files, calculate hashes, export job definition as script.

• Boost C++ Libraries

  Boost provides free portable peer-reviewed C++ libraries. The emphasis is on portable libraries which work well with the C++ Standard Library. See http://www.boost.org

• Scribus

  Scribus is an open-source program that brings professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows. Scribus supports professional features, such as CMYK color, spot color, separations, ICC color and robust commercial grade PDF.

It’s hard to believe that the end of 2012 is just a few days away. It’s been a great year for SourceForge. More about that later. Let’s start with this month:

JStock is the Project of the Month

JStock is a free stock market software for 26 countries. It provides stock watchlist, intraday stock price snapshot, stock indicator editor, stock indicator scanner and portfolio management. Free SMS/email alert supported.

Earlier this month we spoke with Yan Chen Cheok, the lead developer on this project. You can listen, or read, to find out more about JStock, at http://sourceforge.net/blog/potm-201212/. And, if you’re interested in the stock market, you can use JStock to help you become a smarter investor.

Please vote for the January Project of the Month. You’ll find the list of candidates, and a link to the vote, at http://sourceforge.net/blog/potm-vote-201301/. (You’ll need to be signed in to Twitter to vote, as a preventative measure against robo-voting.) Note: Vote is closed. Stay tuned for the January POTM announcement.

SourceForge is hiring

SourceForge, and our sister sites Slashdot and Freecode, are looking for some additions to our team. We’re looking for a Systems Programmer/Analyst, who will work on the team that oversees production and development systems, databases, systems integration, infrastructure, and networks for the Geeknet Media sites (Slashdot, SourceForge, Freecode) and associated services. You’ll find details of this position at http://bit.ly/SwenWE.

We’re also looking for a Senior Systems Administrator in the Chicago, IL area. You can find more details on that position at http://bit.ly/TMypNj.

Finally, we’re looking for a Front End Engineer for our Dexter, MI office. The details of that position are at http://bit.ly/TlCJBo.

If you’re interested in any of these positions, please click the red “Click Here to Apply” button on that site.

Games for The Holidays

If you’re a video game buff, new games for the holidays are always a winner. And if they’re free, that’s even better. Last year around this time, we did a blog entry (https://sourceforge.net/blog/games-for-the-holidays/) about free games, and since then we’ve done a number of features about the many games on SourceForge. We even tried to create a comprehensive list – https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/community-docs/SourceForge%20Games/ – which is still very much a work in process.

Platform Updates

Our team of engineers is constantly pushing out updates to the developer platform. However, we’ve done a rather poor job in the past of telling you what they’re up to, which is an injustice both to them and to you.

We’ve started a new series of blog posts, which you’ll find at http://sourceforge.net/blog/tag/updates/, where we’ll tell you what they’ve pushed out. We don’t cover everything, because much of it, although important, is behind-the-scenes stuff you won’t necessarily see. But we’ll cover the changes that we think will affect your daily use of the site, or which fix problems that many of you are likely to have seen.

We tend to operate in two-week sprints, but we also do minor pushes in between the major ones, so the frequency of these posts will vary from week to week. We hope that you find them helpful in keeping up with the progress of our platform.

Two recent additions include the 5-star ratings feature (http://sourceforge.net/blog/five-star-reviews-coming-to-your-project) and the addition of your Twitter handle to your project summary page (http://sourceforge.net/blog/your-projects-twitter-stream/). We think that both of these features will enhance your attachment to your community.

You can also see what we’ll be working on next (see the Milestone list on the left) and vote on tickets for upcoming milestones, at http://sourceforge.net/p/allura/tickets/.

Help Wanted

Every now and then, every project needs a little help. We have a forum at https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/helpwanted/ where you can post your needs, or your desire to help.

Here’s some projects that are looking for developers or designers to help them out.

Sqliteman is looking for someone to adopt the project. Sqliteman is a sqlite3 GUI frontend for developers and db users, written in C++ and QT4. If you’re interested, respond to the article at https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/helpwanted/programmers/thread/9ef2c155/

Aurora Game Manager is looking for a creative developer and a PC gamer to jump in on the effort. They describe more of what they’re looking for at https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/helpwanted/programmers/thread/3c17f54e/ Aurora is written using Java Swing.

XOOPS is looking for PHP developers, and for designers. XOOPS is a PHP CMS which was recently the SourceForge project of the month. You can follow up on the post at https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/helpwanted/programmers/thread/80250c4a/ if you’re interested.

The Vega Strike project is looking for artists to design 3D cockpit interiors. That request can be seen at https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/helpwanted/artists/thread/22208746/ and you can follow up on that post.

And, as importantly, there’s another forum for developers in search of a project. If your project is looking for new talent, have a look at the developer profiles posted at https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/helpwanted/developers/ and see if one of them is what you’re looking for.

Projects of the Month – a year in review

We’ve had some really great Projects of the Month this year, with very closely contested votes many months. At http://sourceforge.net/blog/2012-projects-of-the-month/ we review all of the featured projects for 2012, including the current project of the month, JStock.

Top Growth Projects

We’re always on the lookout for projects that might be doing interesting things, and a surge in downloads is one of many metrics that we look at to identify them. Here’s the projects that had the greatest growth in the last month.

Stellarium: A realistic, real-time 3D simulation of the night sky. http://sourceforge.net/projects/stellarium

Moodle: Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a Free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. http://sourceforge.net/projects/moodle

Eclipse and Java Video Tutorials: Free video screencam tutorials for Eclipse and Java. Includes “Eclipse and Java for Total Beginners”, “Using the Eclipse Workbench”, “Introducing Persistence”, and “Using the Debugger”. Intended for beginning and intermediate users and programmer http://sourceforge.net/projects/eclipsetutorial

Lazarus: Rapid applications development tool and libraries for FPC http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus

West Point Bridge Designer and Contest: A national virtual bridge engineering contest for kids of all ages. http://sourceforge.net/projects/wpbdc

Zenoss Core – Enterprise IT Monitoring: Zenoss Core is an enterprise network and systems management application written in Python. Zenoss provides an integrated product for monitoring availability, performance, events and configuration across layers and across platforms. http://sourceforge.net/projects/zenoss

MO Virtual Router: Virtual Wi-Fi For Windows 8 http://sourceforge.net/projects/movirtualrouter

Kiwix: Wikipedia offline & more http://sourceforge.net/projects/kiwix

AkelPad: A simple notepad-like text editor with many features. It is designed to be a small and fast. http://sourceforge.net/projects/akelpad

tuntaposx: Unix-style tun and tap virtual network interfaces for Mac OS X. http://sourceforge.net/projects/tuntaposx

PosteRazor – Make your own poster!: Want to print a poster? PosteRazor cuts an image file into pieces and you can print them on your printer and glue them together to a poster. Easy FLTK based user interface. Uses FreeImage for image loading. Creates PDFs as output. http://sourceforge.net/projects/posterazor

xplanner-plus: XPlanner+ is a web-based project planning and tracking tool. http://sourceforge.net/projects/xplanner-plus

ShellEd: ShellEd is a superb shell script editor for Eclipse. The benefits of this plugin are the integration of man page information for content assist/hover help and the ability to run your project’s shell scripts without leaving Eclipse. Check it out! http://sourceforge.net/projects/shelled

Sims3 Tools: Tools using the s3pi library and other related works – package editor (with simple objk, vpxy and language string editors and a DDS file tool), object cloner and sims3pack packer/unpacker. Runs on Windows, MacOS and Linux. http://sourceforge.net/projects/sims3tools

RapidMiner — Data Mining, ETL, OLAP, BI: No 1 in Business Analytics: Data Mining, Predictive Analytics, ETL, Reporting, Dashboards in One Tool. 1000+ methods: data mining, business intelligence, ETL, data mining, data analysis + Weka + R, forecasting, visualization, business intelligence. http://sourceforge.net/projects/rapidminer

Arch Bang: ArchBang is a simple GNU/Linux distribution which provides you with a lightweight Arch Linux system combined with the OpenBox window manager. Suitable for both desktop and portable systems – It is fast, stable, and always up to date. http://sourceforge.net/projects/archbang

NASA WorldWind: NASA World Wind is a graphically rich 3D virtual globe for use on desktop computers running Windows. It combines NASA imagery generated from satellites that have produced Blue Marble, Landsat 7, SRTM, MODIS and more. http://sourceforge.net/projects/nasa-exp

PhotoFilmStrip: PhotoFilmStrip creates movies out of your pictures in just 3 steps. First select your photos, customize the motion path and render the video. There are several output possibilities for VCD, SVCD, DVD up to FULL-HD. Creates animated slideshows. http://sourceforge.net/projects/photostoryx

py2exe: A distutils extension to create standalone windows programs from python scripts. http://sourceforge.net/projects/py2exe

In Closing …

As always, thanks for being part of the SourceForge community.

If you want more frequent updates than this newsletter, there’s several places where we make those updates. We’re on Twitter – http://twitter.com/sourceforge We’re on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/sourceforgenet We’re on Google+ – https://plus.google.com/u/1/102470258162390195749/posts And if you follow the opensource and software Reddits, http://www.reddit.com/r/opensource and http://www.reddit.com/r/software respectively, you’ll see the occasional post from us there, too.

And, of course, there’s our blog – http://sf.net/blog – where we post longer articles about our projects and our platform.

Keep coding.

The SourceForge Community Team
communityteam@sourceforge.net