Archive for the 'Open source' Category

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TEDTalks download script and MythTV metadata

Published on February 4, 2008 in Open content and Open source. 20 Comments

I have been watching TEDTalks off and on since a friend of mine introduced them to me a couple months ago. They are videos of presentations done at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), an annual conference that “brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers”. I would highly recommend browsing through them if you have a minute; there is some really good food for thought (and action) in there. All of the TED videos are licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works) license, which allows them to be freely redistributed as long as they are not modified.

To make them more accessible to me, I downloaded all the TED videos and put them on a computer running MythTV. Read on for details on how I did it and links to scripts that will automate the process for you if you have a MythTV setup or if you just want to download all the TED videos.
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ABM Locator 0.1 released

Published on December 11, 2007 in Open source. 0 Comments

With the help of Stephen Paul Weber, I have created a web-based tool that plots Canadian automated banking machines (ABMs) using Google Maps, which is called ABM Locator. The first version of this tool (0.1) has just been released. I suggest viewing the live demo if you’re interested in seeing it work.

You can get the source code from the Download section of the ABM Locator project page or check it out from Subversion (also on the project page). Please send any comments, questions, bug reports, etc. to the mailing list.

USB magnetic stripe reader instructions

Published on November 13, 2007 in Open source. 0 Comments

I have released instructions and code for connecting a magnetic stripe reader to a computer using USB. These are an answer to a common problem that people wanting to get into the magstripe reading scene face: a gameport or parallel port is required for interfacing with a magstripe reader and many computers these days don’t have either.

The project that got me interested in reading magstripes is Stripe Snoop. I highly recommend it if you’re interesting in finding out what information is encoded on magnetic stripes, such as those on credit cards, debit cards, hotel access cards, etc.

I couldn’t have done the project without Dean Camera’s help. He created the MyUSB library that the project uses to do the USB communication. The library is GPLed, which is why I used it instead of the Atmel-provided library, which has a much more restrictive license.

574 days of time diaries

Published on October 15, 2007 in Open content and Open source. 2 Comments

I have published a log of all of my activities between October 20, 2002, and May 15, 2004, on the 574 days of time diaries web page. The page has links to the raw data and some summary tools I wrote along with an online summary generator that you can use to see where my time was spent for a given set of days. The main reason for publishing this information is so that researchers can use the data in studies that require time diaries or similar types of information. For more details, see the web page.

XO Giving: helping children in developing nations

Published on September 25, 2007 in Open source and World issues. 0 Comments

Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the One Laptop per Child project, has announced that you will be able to buy pairs of XO laptops (the laptops they are selling to developing nations), one for you and one for a child in a developing nation, starting November 12 for “a brief window of time”. You can find out more at xogiving.org. I would highly recommend supporting the project through this. The OLPC project looks like a really good way to get education to children. For some background information on the project, check out Negroponte’s talk at TED.

I will definitely be getting one. Hopefully others in the area will get them as well so we can try out the interesting wireless meshing capabilities and sharing features that the laptops have.

It is important to note that an XO laptop is not designed for everyday use by the average adult. The web site suggests that you give your XO laptop to an interested child you know. I’m interested in seeing just how much of my usual computing I can do on this device, but probably not everyone would be interested in taking the time required to figure out how to do the things they normally do on it. For those that are considering using the XO laptop for everyday tasks, it appears that the XO laptop will come with a standard set of desktop applications, including a word processor, web browser, and basic graphics editor (see the application list for more details).

For the technically-inclined people out there, I think the XO laptop would be a very interesting piece of hardware to have for tinkering. It’s got a 433 MHz x86 processor, 512 MB RAM, and 1 GB flash (its only non-volatile storage). For more, see the full specs.

The announcement was also covered by Slashdot and the Associated Press.

Economic motivation of open source software

Published on April 13, 2007 in Open source. 0 Comments

Have you ever wondered why companies like IBM tend to use open source in their solutions and even pay developers to write software that’s given away for free? An article by Dirk Riehle entitled The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software: Stakeholder Perspectives may answer some of your questions.

The article will be most interesting to those with a basic understanding of microeconomics (like the knowledge gained from Waterloo’s ECON 101). However, I’m sure you’ll still find it valuable if you’ve never seen a demand curve before. If you’re interested, you can read up on demand curves at Wikipedia’s page on supply and demand.

Complete video of Richard Stallman talk available

Published on April 13, 2007 in Open source. 1 Comment

I’ve updated the page containing pictures and videos from the Richard Stallman talk at UCSD, which was mentioned in a previous post, with a complete video of his talk, provided to me by UCSD. I would suggest skimming the index of interesting points in the video that I’ve added to the page to see if there is anything in the video that you’d like to watch.

Companies writing open source

Published on March 2, 2007 in Open source. 0 Comments

I read an interesting article linked from Slashdot the other day entitled “Who wrote 2.6.20?“, which details the approximate percentage of code that people and companies had contributed to version 2.6.20 of the Linux kernel using various metrics based on lines of code (while this may not be a perfectly accurate representation of the amount of work that went into the contributions, it is at least an approximate measure).

I found it particularly interesting that over 65% of the code was contributed by companies (see the article for how this was measured), which shows that a lot of people are paid to write open source kernel code.

If you’re interested, as I am, in writing open source kernel code for a living, I would suggest checking out the companies that contributed a large percentage of code according to the article. Of course this should not be your only way of determining who to work for. I would also consider how much of this code is useful to the general public versus how much is specific to a certain piece of hardware that most people don’t use.

Richard Stallman talk at UCSD

Published on March 2, 2007 in Open source. 0 Comments

I recently went to a talk by Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, at the University of California, San Diego. While I don’t necessarily endorse all of his views, I think he’s got a lot of good things to say. Stallman is a great example of a person who is not afraid to stand up for what he believes in.

You can view the pictures and video I took on the pictures/videos page and the notes I recorded on the notes page.

For those of you in the Waterloo area, you may be interested to know that Richard Stallman will be speaking at UW on April 11. For more details see the CS Club’s description of the talk or the FSF’s description.

Notes from SCALE talks

Published on March 1, 2007 in Open source. 0 Comments

I’ve finally got around to typing up my notes from the talks at SCALE. Here they are for anyone who’s interested.

Some talks that I found particularly interesting:

I would highly recommend looking at all the talks to see if there’s a talk that’s particularly interesting for you.