Blogs about: Open Source

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Give me that old bitcoin religion
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PandoDaily No one person is in control of bitcoin. No central banker, no governing or regulatory bodies, and there is no mechanism to suddenly manipulate money supply. That’s the point, of course. Satoshi Nakamoto, its pseudonymous creator whose image is represented in the artwork above, called it a peer-to-peer electronic cash system designed “to allow online payments to be sent from one party to another without going though a financial institution.” Unlike American coins, which are forged at the US Mint, and dollar notes – they’re printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing – bitcoin creation is decidedly democratic and completely virtual: Anyone who has made the effort to learn can “mine” the currency, trading valuable labor and resources in the form of expertise, processing power, energy, and time. With bitcoin, Nakamoto, whoever he, she, or they are, has, in essence, disintermediated the banks and government. As with all currencies, bitcoin relies on trust, the economic lubricant t

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Open-Source software for psychology and neuroscience
Computing for Psychologists

Researchers typically use a lot of different pieces of software in the course of their work; it’s part of what makes the job so varied. Separate packages might be used for creating experimental stimuli, programming an experiment, logging data, statistical analysis, and preparing work for publication or conferences. Until fairly recently there was little option but to use commercial software in at least some of these roles. For example, SPSS is the de facto analysis tool in many departments for statistics, and the viable alternatives were also commercial – there was little choice but to fork over the money. Fortunately, there are now pretty viable alternatives for cash-strapped departments and individual researchers. There’s a lot of politics around the open-source movement, but for most people the important aspect is that the software is provided for free, and (generally) it’s cross-platform (or can be compiled to be so). All that’s required is to throw of

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Be Unlike: Join Jolla
FLOSS Blog

We’ve all heard the news, now to join! Specs for the latest Jolla mobile are: Jolla original design with ample 4.5” Estrade display Dual core and 4G**) Keep it and share with 16GB + microSD 8MP AF camera User-replaceable battery The Other Half Gesture based Sailfish OS Android™ app compliant

Benefits for Kids!
Northside Cork Coder Dojo
Mandriva Linux: Mageia 3′s out!
IT News Today
Supercharge Your Router w/ DD-WRT | D.I.Y. Not?
Seek You, Signal!
Comapre Picture Application
No Agenda Podcast Emancipated: Episode 514 Now Available in Ogg Vorbis and Opus File Formats
Gitmo Detox Press
Segmenting Images In Parallel With Python & Jug
Meta Rabbit
Configuring Orfeo Toolbox
Spatial Thoughts
New stable branch of the programming language – Perl 5.18
IT News Today

After years of development presents a new stable branch of the programming language – Perl 5.18. In preparation for the new release has been changed about 400 thousand lines of code changes affected the 2100 files, developed with the participation of 113 developers. A branch of 5.18 is released under an approved three years ago, a fixed schedule of development, implying a new stable release branches once a year and corrective releases – once in three months. June 20 is scheduled to release first correction release Perl 5.18.1, which will be corrected in the most significant errors identified in the implementation of Perl 5.18.0. Simultaneously with the release Perl 5.18 5.14 discontinued support for branches, for which in the future may be issued updates only in case of critical security problems. Also began the process of developing the experimental 5.19, on the basis of which in May 2014 will be formed stable release of Perl 5.20. Key enhancements added in Perl 5.18: The

Matt Mullenweg
Thought Bubbles

I think it’s really important for the independent web to have a platform, and to the extent that WordPress can serve that role, I think it’s a great privilege and responsibility. We don’t all want to be running on Twitter and Facebook and (LinkedIn) profile pages and being sold to the highest bidder, essentially, over and over again, a thousand times, every time someone loads a page. I mean, we can do better than that. So I’ve always tried to orient Automattic’s business model to not be advertising, where your users are the product that you’re selling to someone else, but to be subscriptions, which I feel is a lot more honest, because your users are the people who are also funding it. So you’re naturally more aligned with their interest. - Matt Mullenweg, Founder of WordPress.com

Google strips 8.8 million lines of code from Blink engine | Apt-Get GNU Linux
apt-get GNU/Linux

Google strips 8.8 million lines of code from Blink engine | Apt-Get GNU Linux. Google recently announced that it was forking WebKit to create the Blink rendering browser engine in an effort to pare down the WebKit engine to the essentials for Chrome.

Now at Talend
Francis Upton's blog

After many years of leading Oakland Software to develop really good data transformation technology, I have moved to a new phase, having sold these assets to Talend. A little while ago, I joined Talend as a Senior Architect responsible for data transformation as well as other cross product issues and I’m very excited to be part of this team of extremely bright and talented folks. For quite a while now the Oakland Data Transformer has worked well with the Talend ESB runtime technologies, and now that it’s part of Talend we will work on integration at the Talend Open Studio level for a future Talend release. You will hear more about that as the work progresses. I am very grateful to the open source community, mostly to my friends at Eclipse on which my product is based. It would not have been possible to make such a high functionality and robust product without the extensive infrastructure provided by Eclipse to do such things. I think however that the most important part of E

FTP Upload a Perforce Changelist
Build Failure

Batch Scripts, the more I love them, the more I hate them. I only started using them about a year ago, but soon found out how handy they can be at times. Actually coding a Windows Batch Script is a real pain in the neck, the language syntax is really primitive and doesn’t make much sense (one point for Linux on this subject), so much that, oftentimes, I’d rather write a small Java app, or C#, or maybe even something with Visual Basic 6. But I’ve grown really fond of these little .bat files, that needn’t be compiled at all, and are extremely portable (under the Windows platform), and can be modified to suit your needs in a second. Anyhow, here’s p4ftp.bat, a little Windows Batch Script to upload a Perforce change list from console to a FTP host. You just need to set the constants for ftp host, username, password, the path to your workspace, and the depot name. You can call this script from console passing the cl as the first argument, for example: p4ftp.bat

Development Tools: Free is always good.
dylanwooters

I thought I’d share a list of tools I use a lot in my day-to-day work. All are free, and some have weird names. The best being GIMP. Despite the cute canine mascot, all I can ever think of is that scene from Pulp Fiction. Mac and PC Regex Pal Web-based regex tool. This thing can handle pretty hefty html and xml files, and thus is useful for scraping. The Lorem Ipsum Generator That Doesn’t Suck Straightforward and easy placeholder copy generator. Good for wireframing, html email templates, and so forth. Send HTML Emails Send HTML emails for free to any address using your Google or Facebook login. Perfect for testing HTML email templates. GIMP GIMP is rad. To me, it’s kind of the ideal open source project. It probably doesn’t compare to Photoshop in the end for real designers, but for occasional front-enders like myself, it does the job and more. FileZilla Not much explaining to do for this one, if you have ever used a computer for work. Mac MAMP Have a LAMP stack

Numerical Methods for Linear Complementarity Problems in Physics-Based Animation
Interactive Physical Simulation

Authors Kenny Erleben ( 2013 ) Abstract This course provides an introduction to the definition of linear complementarity problems (LCPs) and outlines the derivation of a toolbox of numerical methods. It also presents a small convergence study on the methods to illustrate their numerical properties. The course is a good introduction to implementing numerical methods, because it includes tips and tricks for implementation based on considerable practical experience. SIGGRAPH Course Webpage go Software go Authors Version of Notes To be available

Mining Bitcoin
Bong-Bitcoin

There are various hardware choices and methods to use to mine bitcoin. Whatever hardware and method you choose, you’ll either use your CPU or GPU, an FPGA, or the new ASICs. With the current difficulty of 11,187,257.5 (as of 5/15/13), and going up every two weeks, it is getting harder and harder to mine with the first two types of hardware. Butterfly Labs 5Gh Miner For example, a decent CPU today can get 300Khps (Kilohashes per second), while a good GPU can get 500Mhps. An FPGA might get anywhere from 100-800Mhps and higher, and an ASIC can get 4.5Ghps up to 1.5Thps! See the Mining hardware comparison wiki page for details. Check the Bitcoin mining profitability calculator to see if your hardware or the hardware you’re looking at getting is worth purchasing, and if the energy use will still make it profitable or not. Since bitcoins can only be harvested when solving a block, it can take an individual months, even a year, to solve a block on their own. Unless they are runnin

Interesting reads today
Where Eagles Dare

“Open source is not a warzone. Not every man is a dick.” A lovely essay from Perl girls, I truly enjoyed reading it. “The water we swim in.” Valorie has nailed it with this: “most of the people discussing the issue seem to be talking past the folks they are hoping to connect with.” FWIW, I just think this whole shitstorm over the Community link is too overblown, too melodramatic, a whole tornado was created inside a small glass of water. The Hitler comparisons were ridiculous, unnecessary and embarrasing for the rest of us.