Like a mille feuille or a mont blanc pastry, this post is intended to be short and sweet; a light gathering of thoughts, sprinkled with icing sugar. Any extension of this post by way of comments and feedback will, as always, be most welcome, and anyone slipping off to the local pâtisserie to satisfy a craving for cake will be duly forgiven.

Effectively, this is the continuation of a personal response to a recent trial of RockMelt, the new Chromium powered, social browser. My purpose here is not to offer a user review, but to question some of the basic assumptions at work in the way the browser frames the user experience of the world wide web. Click here to continue reading

The old school bloggers among you will remember the days back in 2004-5 when WordPress was just starting out; a time when the themes were free and the blogosphere was alive and bristling with excitement. By 2007 the platform had begun to dominate the blogosphere and the blogging industry as a whole was about to reach its peak. Around that time a whole new market opened up for paid WordPress themes. The era of the ‘premium theme’ had arrived and with it some brilliant developments to WordPress architecture. Premium theme developers helped move WordPress on from being an efficient blogging engine to a fully-fledged CMS. Click here to continue reading

A while back I listed 10 of the most promising real world Open Source projects on this blog, and today I want to add one more contender to that list: Apertus, an Open Source cinema camera project.

Led by Oscar Spierenburg and a team of international developers, the project aims to produce “an affordable community driven free software and open hardware cinematic HD camera for a professional production environment”. Let’s take a quick tour of the hardware and software components that constitute Apertus, before moving on to address some concerns about the overall viability of the project. Click here to continue reading

I want to share the following idea for a new WordPress plugin or Open Source widget in the hope that someone might either: implement it; bring an existing implementation of the idea to light; critique it as not worthy of implementation; and/or build on it, make it better. Here goes nothing… Click here to continue reading

Two websites were brought to my attention recently, the first is Open Source Ideas and the second (very similar in name) Open Ideas. It prompted me to google the terms “Open Source Ideas” and I discovered a long list of sites that attempt to apply the principles of open source software to thought processes or the generation of ideas. In browsing through some of these projects I began to question the validity of the claim “to open source ideas”: What constitutes an idea? Is an idea inherently closed at source? When do ideas cease to be free? When we say “I have an idea”, what do we really mean? Here below are a few musings on the theme.

Idea – from the Greek idein (to know, to see) – is to bring to the fore of the conscious mind a synthesis of past knowledge with a desire to shape or give shape to an aspect of the world as yet unexplored by the ideator.

The use of the verb have in the utterance “I have an idea”, is at the same time possessive and ‘unpossessable’; bound on the one hand to the confines of individual thought and thought-mechanics, but free on the other in its transfer to an audience at the point of public scrutiny – an act of (in/dis)semination, a disclosure of the amalgam of past knowledge from which it draws and an exposure of the new configuration, a transformative act which cements the idea as proposition(s). Click here to continue reading

I review hundreds of new and existing open source software (OSS) for inclusion in the OSLiving archive, and so inevitably I get to experience a wide range of websites. More often than not, the website experience leaves alot to be desired. Aside from the very large-scale projects for which money (and therefore custom design and usability testing) is no object, the majority of Open Source project websites are either community-built or left to the program developers themselves. While instances of good practice can be found in both large and small-scale projects, problems tend to arise more frequently in the latter group. All too often the website is the last “chore” in a taxing software development process. This is problematic since the success of your software depends very much on how you present and contextualise it.

In this article, I highlight some of the recurrent issues and offer some common sense suggestions for an improved OSS experience. My purpose is to help remove as many barriers as possible between your open source application and your potential audience. This is particularly important in thinking about attracting first-time and novice OSS users. The good news is that it really doesn’t take much to improve accessibility other than simple planning, realistic goals and some solid resources. The following notes are part of a forthcoming project for the main OSLiving site, a guide to getting started with open source. Accessibility, usability and ‘findability’ (see above diagram) are the 3 core criteria that Paul Veugen uses in his micro usability tests. I’m going to borrow these terms (somewhat out of context) to inform our discussion here. Click here to continue reading

There has been a proliferation in Open Source Software (OSS) adoption over the past decade, with particular momentum in the last 3 years. Much of the challenge in convincing companies and individuals to adopt OSS lies in demystifying deep-seated stereotypes that have typically framed OSS as an affront to closed source alternatives. It goes something like this…

How could a project run by a geek in his (gender-stereotyping is rife in the OSS world) spare time, updated on an ad-hoc basis, free for all to use and manipulate (even repackage and resell!), housed on a pre-Web 2.0 site, how could this possibly be anything other than a hobby at best?

Ok, I exaggerate, but regardless, these fears and concerns do exist and do contribute to an OSS sub culture; an online currency of jokes and jibes coupled with more serious aspirations to the ideals of OSS. Part of this culture has filtered through to an increasingly wide range of tech-oriented comic strips. It has even been known to capture the imagination of old favourites as you’ll see below.

What the following list represents is a range of humorous, satirical and sometimes foreboding takes on a burgeoning industry. The list is far from comprehensive, so please do share your favourite comics in the comment section below and we’ll be happy to update this post accordingly. Enjoy!

Click here to continue reading

The consensus is that WordPress has benefited greatly from the explosion of the premium theme market. It has brought new designers, ideas and extensions of the WordPress blogging platform to proliferation. WordPress is far more versatile and complex a CMS than it was in its first few years of development. At the same time, there is a portion of the WP community that bemoaned the decline of free themes that was such an exciting part of WP in its early years. The abundance of free themes in 2004-2007 (along with plugins) is arguably what set WP ahead of its competition.

The following list was created to champion free themes released within the last few months, to revive a glimmer of the former WP theme glory and to offer alternative to the Premium market. What you’ll find is a range of high quality free WordPress themes that easily rival their paid equivalents. Enjoy!

1. Food Recipe

Demo | Download

2. Artisan

Demo | Download

3. Sweet Banana

Demo | Download

Click here to continue reading

Below you’ll find some of the more prominent open source iPhone applications available for free download on the Web. The iPhone is brimming with paid apps, but with the advent of the Google Android platform and the surge of free and open source apps that it promises, we’re now starting to see a much welcome growth in iPhone open source projects. I’ll keep this listed updated as and when I find new software. If you have a suggestion to add to the list, please leave a comment and I’ll include asap. Enjoy!

Molecules

Molecules is an application for the iPhone and iPod touch that allows you to view three-dimensional renderings of molecules and manipulate them using your fingers. You can rotate the molecules by moving your finger across the display, zoom in or out by using two-finger pinch gestures, or pan the molecule by moving two fingers across the screen at once.
Visit website »

WordPress for iPhone

The WordPress for iPhone app lets you write posts, upload photos, edit pages, and manage comments on your blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch. With support for both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (2.5.1 or higher), users of all experience levels can get going in seconds.
Visit site »

TubeStatus

TubeStatus allows you to get up to the minute service details on all London Underground tube lines in a quick and easy to use format. It also includes detailed line messages as provided by Transport for London (TFL).
Visit site »

Tris

Tris is a Tetris clone game for iPhone. The project was intended as an example of general programming practices within the iPhone frameworks and of attractive interface and effective interaction design for the iPhone platform.
Visit site »

hp Calculator Emulator

This app emulates the popular hp scientific calculators. Get complex mathematic power straight from your iPhone.
Visit site »

Mobile Terminal

Mobile Terminal is a terminal emulator application for the iPhone. It does not function as an SSH client, nor Telnet, but it can be used to execute a console ssh-client application.
Visit site »

App Sales Mobile

App Sales Mobile allows iPhone developers to download and analyze their daily and weekly sales reports from iTunes Connect. The newest reports can be downloaded with a single tap and all numbers are automatically converted to your (selectable) local currency. With clear bar charts you’ll get a quick daily overview of how your apps are doing in the store.
Visit site »

Gorillas

Gorillas is a turn based single player and multi player game where the objective is to blast your opponent away using carefully aimed bananas.
Visit site »

Twitterfon

TwitterFon is a simple, clean, easy to use, and super fast Twitter client for iPhone and iPod Touch
Visit site »

iPhone Books

Books.app is a simple eBook reader for the iPhone. It reads HTML and text files stored in your ~/Media/EBooks folder, and is smart enough to enter subdirectories, if for instance, you’ve broken a book down by chapters.
Visit site »

Open Clip

OpenClip is a non-profit, open-source, community-effort project, which promotes a framework for the iPhone that allows users to copy / paste between participating applications.
Visit site »

Johnny Hughes announced yesterday the launch of CentOS 4.7 for i386 and x86_64 architectures, the “Community ENTerprise Operating System”. CentOS is built from RHEL’s sources and CentOS 4.7 was born from the recompilation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7 source code.

Its “updates” repository has the latest packages till September 12th. Talking about updates, probably the most important one is the fact that CentOS 4.7 comes with improved performance for the fully-virtualized guests. This is done thanks to the paravirtualized network and block device drivers.

CentOS 4.7 brings the latest edition of Firefox 3 and a technology preview of OpenOffice-2.0 in the updates repository. The possibility to install the preview alongside the OOo-1.1.5 version is given, but you can set it up alone too.

Password hashing with the SHA-256 and SHA-512 hash functions was added. The SHA hash functions were designed by NSA and these two cryptographic functions are 256 and respectively 512 bits long. Although there are no reported attacks related to the SHA-2 family (including SHA-256 and SHA-512), there is another hash function called SHA-3 that’s currently under development.

CentOS was created for users that don’t need commercial support but want a stable operating system that they can manage on their own. Full updates including hardware updates for the CentOS 4 branch will be supported until February 29, 2008. After this date, only maintenance updates will be provided till February 29, 2012.

You can find out more about this release in the official release announcement and on CentOS’s website.