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

Infoworld has announced the winners of their “Bossie” Awards, their top OSS picks for desktop and mobile; there are a lot of SourceForge based projects in that list. Check them out:

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

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.

Depending on the size of your project, it may take a few minutes to generate.  You’ll receive an email when it’s done, with instructions on how to securely download it.  If you have private data (e.g. tickets), that will be included, so keep your data safe.

Code repositories and file releases are not included in this backup file.  If you want to back up your code repository, see these SCM rsync backup instructions.  File releases are already mirrored to servers around the globe, but if you’d like to pull down a copy for yourself, see our file management instructions which also covers files on your project web space.

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:

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.