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Making Government Transparent Using R

By James Turner
July 14, 2009

With Open Source now considered an accepted part of the software industry, some people are starting to wonder if we can't bring the same degree of openness and innovation into government. Danese Cooper, who is actively involved in the open source community through her work with the Open Source Initiative and Apache, as well as working as an R wonk for Revolution Computing, would love to see the government become more open. Part of that openness is being able to access and interpret the mass of data that the government collects, something Cooper thinks R would be a great tool for. She'll be talking about R and Open Government at O'Reilly's Open Source Conference, OSCON.

Sequencing a Genome a Week

By James Turner
July 13, 2009

The Human Genome Project took X years to fully sequence a single human's genetic information. At Washington University's Genome Center, they can now do one in a week. But when you're generating that much data, just keeping track of it can become a major challenge in itself. David Dooling is in charge of managing the massive output of the Center's herd of gene sequencing machines, and making it available to researchers inside the Center and around the world. He'll be speaking at OSCON, O'Reilly's Open Source Conference, on how he uses open source tools to keep things under control, and he agreed to give us an overview of how the field of genomics is evolving.

Patrick Collison Puts the Squeeze on Wikipedia

By James Turner
July 2, 2009

Think about Wikipedia, what some consider the most complete general survey of human knowledge we have at the moment. Now imagine squeezing it down to fit comfortably on an 8GB iPhone. Sound daunting? Well, that's just what Patrick Collison's iPhone application does. App Store purchasers of Collison's open source application can browser and search the full text of Wikipedia when stuck in a plane, or trapped in the middle of nowhere (or as defined by AT&T coverage...) Collison will be presenting a talk on how he did it at OSCON, O'Reilly's Open Source conference at the end of July, and he spent some time talking to me about it recently.

Read an Excerpt from Intellectual Property and Open Source: Winner of a Productivity Award at the 19th Annual Jolt Awards

By Sara Peyton
March 16, 2009

We're proud that Intellectual Property and Open Source: A Practical Guide to Protecting Code won a Jolt Productivity Award this year. The Jolt Awards--considered the Oscars of the industry--showcase the books and products that have "jolted" the industry with their significance. We congratulate author Van Lindberg for creating an award-winning guide guide to the legal system--without the legalese. And to celebrate the win we've posted an an excerpt from the book.

Software Freedom Day

By Nat Torkington
September 14, 2008

Software Freedom Day is free and open source's open day, a chance for the general public who might have been curious about open source to come along and learn more. I'll be in Wellington on Saturday, September 20th, for Wellington's event. There'll be: copies of Linux given out and a WellyLUG installfest to provide any help people need installing Linux...

Radar Theme: Open Beyond Source

By Nat Torkington
August 14, 2008

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly] The lessons and techniques of open source are applicable beyond source code. Open standards, open hardware, open data, open government are all borrowing from the legal, cultural, and technical toolbox of open source. Watchlist: Sunlight Foundation, Limor Fried, Change Congress,...

Adhearsion - next killer app for Ruby?

By Artur Bergman
August 11, 2008

Foo camp attendee Ben Black alerted me to Adhearsion, a framework for developing applications in the VoIP space. Think of it as a Ruby on Rails for telephony. Developed by Jay Philllps who got frustrated by the slow uptake of Asterisk. Adhearsion is written in Ruby and lets those even without any VoIP experience write applications intuitively and productively or...

Random OSCON Tidbits

By Nat Torkington
July 31, 2008

Some things I learned about at the Django/Python meetup in downtown Portland during OSCON: JS Bridge: a Python to Javascript bridge for all Mozilla applications, still under very active development (i.e., changing daily). 960.gs: a grid framework for Javascript (replacing Blueprint CSS) with a naming scheme that makes prototyping designs a lot less painful. Dojo has Django Templates: I take...

Open Source and Cloud Computing

By Tim O'Reilly
July 31, 2008

I've been worried for some years that the open source movement might fall prey to the problem that Kim Stanley Robinson so incisively captured in Green Mars: "History is a wave that moves through time slightly faster than we do." Innovators are left behind, as the world they've changed picks up on their ideas, runs with them, and takes them...

Marc Fleury and Home Automation

By Nat Torkington
July 30, 2008

Marc Fleury of JBoss fame blogged about his new project, OpenRemote. OpenRemote aims to build open source middleware, UI, and hardware for home automation while working hard on interoperability with all existing protocols and systems. Also working on the project is Mark Spencer, the creator of Asterisk. At O'Reilly we're watching the move of computing from desktop computers out into...

Marc Fleury and Home Automation

By Nat Torkington
July 30, 2008

OSCON in 37 Minutes

By Nat Torkington
July 29, 2008

The wonderful Gregg Pollack, of Rails Envy fame, wandered the halls and speaker room at OSCON with his video camera. He asked a pile of speakers to summarize their talks in 30 seconds or less, and has compiled the results into "OSCON in 37 Minutes". It's well worth watching even if you were at the conference—as anyone who's attended knows,...

Perl on App Engine?

By Artur Bergman
July 23, 2008

I am a Perl hacker. I have written parts of the core, created CPAN modules and written tons of perl code. In fact I am addicted to it ; or rather, CPAN. I have been wanting to play around with Google App Engine, but I haven't had time to get up to speed in Python. Today at OSCON I met up with Brad Fitzpatrick, who told me he had permission from Google to talk about and work on a Perl on App Engine project.

He makes it clear that,

I'm happy to announce that the Google App Engine team has given me permission to talk about a 20% project inside Google to to add Perl support to App Engine.� To be clear:� I'm not a member of the App Engine team and the App Engine team is not promising to add Perl support.� They're just saying that I (along with other Perl hackers here at Google) are now allowed to work on this 20% project of ours out in the open where other Perl hackers can help us out, should you be so inclined.

The plan is to harden Perl (one layer of defense in App Engine's hardened environment); implement Protocol Buffers and stubs of the backend services, so people can write App Engine applications on their local servers.

There is more information at Brad's LiveJournal, as well as the the Perl-AppEngine project. Capturing the creative spirit here at OSCON, Brad and I hacked together a new module that emulates a protected environment, Sys::Protect (generally good idea for any web application).

The Last HOPE

By Jim Stogdill
July 21, 2008

The Last HOPE conference in NYC was a great mix of hardware hacking, open source, phone phreaking, lock picking, sleeping on the floor, and good old fashioned paranoia mongering.

RailsConf Europe Early Registration

By Allison Randal
July 10, 2008

The schedule for RailsConf Europe just went up last week. It's shaping up to be another great conference. A few sessions and tutorials that particularly catch my eye are David Heinemeier Hansson's keynote on Wednesday morning, "Meta-programming Ruby for Fun & Profit" by Neal Ford, "Offline Rails Applications with Google Gears and Adobe AIR" by Till Vollmer, "From Rails Security...

Nokia to buy and open source Symbian

By Nat Torkington
June 25, 2008

Nokia have announced their intentions to buy Symbian and open source it. It's being seen widely as a response to Google's Android, also an open source mobile operating system. I think it's easy to confuse "open source operating system" for something that will provide all the benefits of the Linux development model. As always, "open source" covers a wide range...

Video of Rich Wolski's incredible EUCALYPTUS talk at Velocity

By Jesse Robbins
June 24, 2008

Rich Wolski gave a truly impressive talk at Velocity about an open-source software infrastructure for cloud computing called EUCALYPTUS . The API is compatible with Amazon's EC2 interface, and the underlying infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. EUCALYPTUS is implemented using commonly-available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain. Watch and learn......

code_swarm - visualizing the life of open source

By Jesse Robbins
June 19, 2008

code_swarm was created by Michael Ogawa with Processing. This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights...

Two new open source projects at Velocity

By Jesse Robbins
June 17, 2008

At Velocity next week there will be two significant open source projects debuting. The first is the Jiffy: Open Source Performance Measurement and Instrumentation tool created by Scott Ruthfield and his team at Whitepages.com. Most tools for measuring web performance come in two flavors: Developer-installed tools (Firebug, Fiddler, etc.) that allow individuals to closely trace single sessions Third-party performance monitoring...

CloudCamp gathering after Velocity

By Jesse Robbins
June 13, 2008

On Tuesday after Velocity closes there will be a CloudCamp gathering at Microsoft's San Francisco Office. I'll be going (unless I'm too exhausted to stand). CloudCamp was formed in order to provide a common ground for the introduction and advancement of cloud computing Through a series of local cloudcamp events, attendees can exchange ideas, knowledge and information in a creative...

Ignite Boston shows the way to beat commerce interruptus

By Andy Oram
June 2, 2008

I felt like was I drifting back to the dot-com boom last night during Ignite Boston. Movements that I saw getting stalled seven years ago seem to be finding their way forward again. I think such projects, nationwide, will pull us out of the slump that left so many dreams in the bit bucket after 2001.

Ignite Boston shows the way to beat commerce interruptus

By Andy Oram
May 30, 2008

Why search competition isn't the point

By Tim O'Reilly
May 25, 2008

This morning, in response to my Microhoo: Corporate Penis Envy? piece, Michael Arrington wrote The importance of a competitive search market. First, let's be clear. I agree with Michael that competition is a good thing, and that there's a real risk that, absent competition, Google will become "evil," as "absolute power corrupts absolutely." Nonetheless, I thought I'd take a...

MicroHoo: corporate penis envy?

By Tim O'Reilly
May 24, 2008

After reading endless pieces about Microsoft's obsession with search, I am forced to offer the following theory: penis envy (from Wikipedia): I worked with Freud in Vienna. We broke over the concept of penis envy. He thought it should be limited to women - Woody Allen in Zelig While not the same kind of penis envy as that typically referred...

Yochai Benkler, others at Harvard map current and future Internet

By Andy Oram
May 16, 2008

Harvard's world-renowned Berkman Center for Internet & Society is celebrating its tenth anniversary with a conference called Berkman@10. The center is a conglomeration of many people, both lawyers and non-lawyers, who study the Internet and add their efforts to empower its users. In my opinion, the most salient contribution of the Berkman Center is its devotion to new research instead of pure theory. I'll report here on today's sessions, which were organized as a fairly conventional symposium (although as loosely as one could run it with 450 attendees).

Disaster Technology for Myanmar/Burma aid workers

By Jesse Robbins
May 8, 2008

There is an ongoing crisis in Myanmar (Burma) in the aftermath of cyclone Nargis. The ruling military junta is finally allowing humanitarian organizations into the region after denying access for almost a week. The situation is grim, and you can help by donating to organizations like: Doctors without Borders, Direct Relief, and UNICEF. There has been some incredible discussion on...

Maker Faire mimesis and open speculation

By Andy Oram
May 4, 2008

Maker Faire is a string-and-duct-tape combination of O'Reilly's, Emerging Technology, Open Source, and Money:Tech conferences. The ultimate impact, like the free software movement, is to enhance everyone's mastery of their environments and both the tools and the confidence for solve one's own problems. This process--which reflects the way most of the great scientists became their mature selves--can not only increase the number of scientists and engineers, but alter the kinds of scientists and engineers they are. To anyone who's attended Maker Faire, seen what it does for children, and felt its effects on oneself, there's really nothing more to say.

Mondrian, Just the First Internal Google Tool Be Released Via App Engine?

By Brady Forrest
May 2, 2008

Guido van Rossum, creator of Python and Google employee, has released a version of the internal Google code-checking tool Mondrian via the Python mailing list (text after the jump). The new app is called Code Review and was built with almost all new code on the Django framework. Code Review uses a lot of the same concepts and infrastructure that...

Missed Twitter Questions from Jonathan Schwartz Interview at Web 2.0 Expo

By Tim O'Reilly
April 26, 2008

In the Jonathan Schwartz interview at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco yesterday, I screwed up. After learning we weren't set up for audience Q&A with microphones, I thought, "well then, I'll just suggest to the audience that they twitter questions @timoreilly, and I'll check my phone during the interview." I kept checking, but no questions. Bummer. Not...

Call For Open Source Awards 2008 Nominations

By Allison Randal
April 15, 2008

For the 4th year running, Google and O'Reilly will present a set of Open Source Awards at OSCON 2008. The awards recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software. Past recipients for 2005-2007 include Doc Searls, Jeff Waugh, Gerv Markham, Julian Seward, David Heinemeier Hansson, Karl Fogel, David Recordon, and...

Book review: "The Future of the Internet (And How to Stop It)"

By Andy Oram
April 14, 2008

You can read Jonathan Zittrain's book for cogent discussions of key issues in copyright, filtering, licensing, censorship, and other pressing issues in computing and networking. But you're rewarded even more if you read this book to grasp fundamental questions of law and society "The Future of the Internet" offers valuable summaries of current debates, but Zittrain also tries always to hack away at the brambles that block the end of each path.

You Become what You Disrupt - (part two)

By Jesse Robbins
April 14, 2008

Google's GrandCentral (Radar coverage) was down over the weekend resulting in missed calls and other phone problems for its users. This is very similar to the the two day Skype outage last year where I said that "You Become what You Disrupt". I've spoken about this issue several times, most recently at the Princeton CITP "Computing in the Cloud" workshop....

Velocity preview at Web2.0 Expo

By Jesse Robbins
April 11, 2008

At the Web2.0 Expo this month we have a small preview of some of the topics and speakers at the Velocity Web Performance & Operations conference. (Radar readers get a 20% discount by using "vel08js" as a discount code... and yes it works with the $300 early registration discount!). Failure HappensFriday @ 11:00 am, Room 2009 Artur Bergman and I...

Getting the iPhone Open Source Tool Chain Up and Running

By Tim O'Reilly
April 2, 2008

Tomorrow at 10 am pacific time, oreilly.com is hosting a free webcast with Jonathan A. Zdziarski, one of the original hackers of the iPhone and author of iPhone Open Application Development. From the announcement: Jonathan will demonstrate how you can use the iPhone open source tool chain to design third-party software that will run on on both today's iPhones, and...

Open Source "Social App Server" Might Crack Garden Walls?

By Jim Stogdill
March 26, 2008

New social application server space may crack social network garden walls.

To be free, information has to be smart (comments on Chris Anderson's "Free!")

By Andy Oram
March 24, 2008

WIRED Magazine's editor in chief Chris Anderson, following up on the popularity of his Long Tail meme, theorizes in the March 2008 issue of WIRED about the modern tendency to put information online at no cost. I think this is highly volatile and that the phenomenon will be driven in very different ways from his six models. "Free as in freedom" may ultimately triumph. Furthermore, professional quality doesn't come for free, so projects and industries have to find ways to fund it.

Penguin's Missed Ebook Opportunity

By Jimmy Guterman
March 19, 2008

I've seen several softball pieces (such as this one) praising Penguin's decision to release, on Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader, some classics of English literature, starting with Jane Austen, with certain extras, in multiple ebook formats. Austen's Pride and Prejudice,...

Given Enough Eyeballs - Art Meets Open Source in Philly

By Jim Stogdill
March 14, 2008

Art meets Open Source in Philly

Perl mailing lists added to Markmail archive

By Tim O'Reilly
March 14, 2008

Jason Hunter writes in email: Perl is the duct tape of the internet. Created by Larry Wall in 1987 and made famous with his Programming Perl "camel book" published by O'Reilly, it's the tool sysadmins use to keep things...

Free Computers for Local Schools

By Allison Randal
February 28, 2008

If you're located in the Bay Area, take a bit of time out this weekend to help the community and the environment. On Saturday, March 1st, the Alameda County Computer Resource Center together with Untangle, are hosting an installfest in...

Take the Money and Run? I think not.

By Tim O'Reilly
February 20, 2008

There's a scorching article on Forbes about the Sun acquisition of MySQL, entitled Cash Me Out: The End of Open Source as Counter-Culture: These deals have nothing to do with peace, love and software, and everything to do with money....

R.E.M., Open Source, and Staying Alive When an Industry Shifts

By Jimmy Guterman
February 19, 2008

Over the weekend, Nat posted "Artistic License 2.0 and ... REM?!" which noted that the veteran rock'n'roll band was releasing its new video under an open license (if not in an open format). It's good to see an old band...

Interview with Linus Torvalds

By Allison Randal
February 4, 2008

The second half of the Linux Foundation interview with Linus Torvalds went up today. Several interesting perspectives on patents, competition, innovation, community building, target markets, and the future of Linux. If you're looking for hope that Linux will focus more...