Open Source on Steve Hatch's Blog

Frontier goes Open Source (soon)

Tue, 18 May 2004 00:42:43 +0000

After dabbling with Frontier over the last five years, I often miss the outlining features of Frontier’s built-in IDE when working in other environments. I’m intrigued however with
Dave Winer’s latest announcement regarding the eminent release of the Frontier kernel as OSS.

It will be interesting to see what OSS license UserLand chooses and if they intend on releasing any of the non-kernelized code such as part of the CMS framework, Manila and/or Radio.

Boot. Play! Retro-style

Mon, 03 May 2004 23:22:46 +0000

Give that old PC a new life by turning it into a retro gaming console with the KnoppiXMAME Live CD Linux Distro.

“KnoppiXMAME is a bootable CD/DVD image with hardware automatic probing and configuration for playing MAME games. No games are included, but they can be added to the ISO image, as well as new versions of X-MAME, gxmame, and the Linux kernel”

Of course you’ll need to legally obtain a few MAME ROMs, but you knew that anyway ;-)

SENTINIX as a Secure Mail Server Cluster

Mon, 19 Apr 2004 17:03:21 +0000

After reading a bit about the Sentinix GNU/Linux distribution, I wasn’t entirely interested because it’s described as a Linux distribution for network monitoring intrusion detection, penetration testing, auditing, statistics/graphing and anti-spam.

The anti-spam feature seemed to be a minor addition.

That is until I read an article about the current Sentinix release from November 2003 on NewsForge.

Ignore the title of the article too and scroll down to the middle of the page where they mention how the OpenMosix clustering enables it to be a Spam/Virus filtering super-computer.

Open Source Movies

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 11:18:51 +0000

I just read via Boing Boing that the copyright on the original Night of the Living Dead movie has expired and the entire film is available online for download via Archive.org! (Brewster Kahle, I’ll say it again, you rock!)

Incidentally, not only does the Internet Archive have a huge collection of Public Domain movies, it also has what appears to be a growing compilation of Open Source movies (and I don’t think they are talking about code)

Live Linux CDs

Fri, 20 Feb 2004 14:20:52 +0000

I’m constantly amazed at the influx of customized bootable Linux CDs (aka Live Linux)

For example, check out some of the distributions on this list

The distro’s geared toward kids and education are starting to look particularly interesting to me these days.

MAGNET-URI Project

Wed, 21 Jan 2004 20:58:31 +0000

Kazaa is promoting a BitTorrent-like distributed P2P alternative that can be embedded in other P2P networks and web links, which they are calling Magnet links (via Anil Dash’s Links)

More here…

“Magnet links allows users to directly download large media files saving website creators and bloggers money on bandwidth costs and effectively propagating files on p2p networks that attract millions of users per day.”

“Magnet links” uses…

“MAGNET-URI, [which] is an open URI-scheme and supporting practices/code for enabling seamless integration between websites and locally-running utilities, such as file-management tools.”

MandrakeMove: Bootable Linux Distro

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 15:33:01 +0000

Looks like Mandrake has joined Knoppix in the bootable Linux CD distro trend…

“The MandrakeMove Download Edition is a new product based on Mandrake Linux 9.2 which provides a complete personal desktop operating system on a bootable CD. With MandrakeMove, bring your Mandrake Linux system everywhere: demo it, use it to connect to the Internet, listen to MP3s, watch DivX movies — the possibilities are endless! In addition, the MandrakeMove Boxed Edition provides the ability to save configuration and personal data to a USB key.”

Understanding Open Source Software

Sun, 04 Jan 2004 17:03:04 +0000

This is a handy legal explination of Open Source Software by Red Hat’s Mark Webbink, Esq.:

“Mark Webbink, Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Red Hat, Inc., wrote this article for corporate attorneys, explaining free and open source software and comparing various open source licenses, detailing how the GPL really works, explaining US copyright law, and listing some corporate law office best practices for software, from the standpoint of what policies are prudent for the corporate environment.
He also explains how derivative works are defined, touches on the indemnification issue and the difference between open source and “shared source”, and highlights some of the main myths and misconceptions about the GPL and open source.” (via /.)

Open Groupware Knoppix CD

Fri, 12 Dec 2003 17:20:16 +0000

Build a test Open Groupware server simply by rebooting your system with the
OGo Knoppix CD!

“OGo Knoppix CD is a bootable CD which contains a complete Debian GNU/Linux system, a fully configured OGo installation, a Cyrus server and some more Linux software.

I think this is worth a burn and reboot!

Morphix Modular Live-CD Linux Distribution

Thu, 06 Nov 2003 12:25:29 +0000

Morphix is similar to Knoppix in that it’s a complete bootable Linux Distro on CD. The main difference however is that Morphix is modular — with ISO packages ranging from light-weight GUI to gamer

“Morphix is a modular distribution, with live-cd support (you burn the CD, you put it in your CD-Rom drive, you boot and it works… no harddisk-installation necessary, doesn’t touch your data). Also, installing Morphix on a harddisk is a breeze, if you want to. Just click on the icon on the desktop, or choose the installer from the morphix/babytux submenu.”

Stopping spam with the Anti-Spam-SMTP-Proxy

Wed, 05 Nov 2003 11:09:10 +0000

This seems like a smart approach: Stop spam at the SMTP-level with Whitelists and Bayesian filtering using the Anti-Spam-SMTP-Proxy (ASSP):

“The Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy (ASSP) Server project aims to create an open source platform-independent SMTP Proxy server which implements whitelists and Bayesian filtering to rid the planet of the blight of unsolicited email (UCE). UCE must be stopped at the SMTP server. Anti-spam tools must be adaptive to new spam and customized for each site’s mail patterns. This free, easy-to-use tool works with any mail transport and achieves these goals requiring no operator intervention after the initial setup phase.”

JavaScript: Search word hit-highlighting

Wed, 29 Oct 2003 15:10:29 +0000

I found searchhi, which is a slick JavaScript library by Stuart Langridge that will highlight keywords in your documents when the referring link to you page comes in from a seach engine such as Google:

“searchhi JavaScript library is a way of automatically highlighting words on a page when that page was reached by a search engine. In essence, if you search, for example, Google for some words, and then follow a link from the search results to a searchhi enabled page, the words you searched for will be highlighted on that page.”

Hybrid Application Manager

Fri, 17 Oct 2003 12:10:29 +0000

AppRocket seems to be a hybrid application manager with “intelligent search” that appears to be based on LaunchBar for Mac OS X. (link via Les Orchard)

“AppRocket uses a very special search algorithm to zip through thousands of items and only show you that which is most relevant.”

Just a note however, AppRocket requires .Net 1.1.

Jahia: Integrated Java CMS and Portal

Fri, 10 Oct 2003 03:10:52 +0000

I had a chance to take a look at the new 4.0 version of Jahia and I must say that I am very impressed. As 100% Java solution, it’s a competitive alternative to SharePoint.

Jahia is not quite Open Source however, you do get the source code, but the license model is “Jahia Collaborative Source License (JCSL)”, which roughly means that you can either pay for the license in dollars or pay with code contributions to the project. Certainly an interesting model that is similar to Sun Collaborative Source License (SCSL).

Explorer bar Maker

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 10:09:09 +0000

I love this stuff too…

“Explorer Bar (Band) Maker is a Windows tool (one-step wizard) that lets you create your own Explorer bar from any HTML page, picture or Macromedia Flash file.” (via Anil Dash’s Links)

File Sync Tool for Unix and Windows

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 03:08:31 +0000

Unison seems to be a file-system agnostic replacement for the Robocopy tool found in the NT Resource Kit and others…

“Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.”
(via decafbad)

Open Source Exchange and SharePoint portal server

Fri, 11 Jul 2003 11:07:45 +0000

Yesterday the OpenGroupware.org (OGo) site was Slashdot-ed, so I couldn’t really get a look at the docs, but OGo announced the release of an open source groupware, which according to the OGo FAQ “is something between a mixture of Exchange and SharePoint portal server.”

John sent me a good InfoWorld article as well.

My initial reaction is, “Wow!”

Although, I think it’s lofty and a brash move to make statements like the following during your initial release:

Knoppix Bootable Linux CD

Wed, 21 May 2003 04:05:07 +0000

I needed to do some quick testing in Linux today, but I didn’t have immediate root access to a Linux distro. That’s when I popped the
Knoppix Bootable Linux CD into my drive, restarted and POOF!! …
my laptop is now running a complete Debian-based Linux distro including OpenOffice, Mozilla, KDE, and more. I could even get to the local file system.

Awesome!

Don’t leave home without it! It’s a great recovery CD as well.

So much Open Source Software

Mon, 31 Mar 2003 11:03:33 +0000

I certainly agree with Mark that the availability of Open Source Software is tremendous — I believe this has been the case for a long time.

DiveIntoMark: “In the future, there will be so much open source software available, programmers will be judged by how much they know about it and how well they can glue it together to build solutions.”

IMHO, the difference is that now so much of the open source software is geared toward the average user and has become increasingly less technically intense to install and deploy.

Jabber with Intel Inside

Tue, 25 Mar 2003 09:03:20 +0000

Congrats go to Jermey and the Jabber gang …

Jabber gets $7.2 million from Intel

New version of Freenet released

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 08:03:05 +0000

There are some interesting new features in the latest release of Freenet:

Like for example, “Forward Error Correction and Healing” or FEC, which not only allows for larger files to be shared, it also provides a “healing” feature, so that parts of files can be re-created.

In addtion, “Anecdotal evidence suggests that FEC allows the reliable downloading of files as large as 600MB from Freenet at average download rates as high as 90k/sec on a broadband internet connection (which compares quite favorably to more conventional P2P applications).”

Slashdot subscriptions

Thu, 06 Mar 2003 02:03:49 +0000

Slashdot is offering subscriptions

Personal Web Proxy: Agent Frank

Fri, 28 Feb 2003 09:02:45 +0000

Agent Frank wants to learn about the user, observe preferences and habits, and become capable of automating many of the tedious tasks infovores face. Eventually, this will come to involve various forms of machine learning and analysis, & etc.

Note to self: Check this out when you get a chance.

PostNuke Template Rendering Engine

Tue, 11 Feb 2003 12:02:11 +0000

An overview was posted on the PostNuke site about the Smarty-based Template Rendering Engine for PostNuke Phoenix.

I can’t wait to see this in at least a beta. I’d love to rid theme templates of those nasty nested tables and exploit CSS.

Rainbow Portal Project

Tue, 04 Feb 2003 11:02:10 +0000

“Rainbow Project, an open source Content Management System (CMS) based on MicrosoftÂ’s .NET IBUYSPY portal application.”

I’m starting to really dig the IBS portal framework Microsoft made available to demonstrate .Net

Open Source Blog and CMS Portal

Wed, 29 Jan 2003 01:01:13 +0000

OS-CMS is an informative portal that lists and briefly summarizes many of the Open Source CMS and Blog tools available. However, what makes this portal special is that they also provide demos of each.

Spam Filtering with gzip

Mon, 27 Jan 2003 08:01:45 +0000

From Kuro5hin: “While many people see gzip as a compression tool, it also makes a credible spam filter. Here’s how.”

Open Source CMS: eZ Publish

Fri, 20 Dec 2002 07:12:25 +0000

I spent some time today learning about and installing a test version of eZ Publish. I’m still investigating, but so far it seems to have decent workflow and user permissions system. However, it might be overly complex for a blog or small site, but for a site with many contributors and content forms it should be well worth the initial hurdle. I’ll post more as I dig deeper.

Improve Your Career with Tomcat and Aspire

Wed, 18 Dec 2002 09:12:44 +0000

“Information technology companies today have a hidden resource that they have
barely started to exploit. IT companies have, over the years, spent a
considerable amount of money equipping themselves with strong relational
database expertise. But these relational teams are traditionally isolated and
kept behind the glass doors, primarily supporting the development teams that
churn out end-user applications. This practice largely continues even today as
the programming face of IT moves to the Web.”
(via ONJava.com)

Hep Message Server

Thu, 05 Dec 2002 11:12:26 +0000

Hmm, this looks like it’s worth a look … “Hep Message Server is software that transfers bits of information between different messaging sytems on the Internet. When it’s done, you’ll be able to use Hep to transparently route messages between e-mail, weblogs, and instant messaging. “

The Waypath Project – Weblog Linking

Wed, 20 Nov 2002 01:11:27 +0000

I’ll have to keep an eye on this … “The Waypath Project is an attempt to network the weblog community, connecting weblogs that share common themes, ideas, and topics. “

Outlaw the GPL?

Sat, 26 Oct 2002 12:10:53 +0000

“An attack on the software license behind the Linux operating system has stirred
up a free software controversy in Washington.”
Congressman
Criticized For Attacking Free Software Movement Information Week
Bid to
outlaw GPL The Age
Slashdot –
Newsday –
San Jose
Mercury News – Fort Wayne News
Sentinel

From: Google News

Building XML Portals with Cocoon

Thu, 25 Jul 2002 06:07:36 +0000

You all are probably aware of this and excuse me if someone mentioned this before, but I found a new and interesting article on XML.com by Matthew Langham and Carsten Ziegeler, which describe the portal components they built and donated to the Apache Cocoon Project. The donation consisted of components and tools for authentication (originally called “sunRise”) and portals (originally called “sunSpot”). [ More here ]

Porn goes “Open Source”

Fri, 19 Jul 2002 12:07:06 +0000

I found this while paging through the new releases on SourceForge:

“You would like to have your own erotic-porno-sex web site but you don’t want to spend time on it? This project will create it for you, it will browse other erotic-porno-sex web sites and it will put their pictures on your!” [ more here ]

PeerCast

Sun, 14 Jul 2002 10:07:45 +0000

“PeerCast uses the Gnutella protocol as the basis for all communications, and complies (mostly) to the Gnutella 0.6 protocol. It works in much the same way as other Gnutella clients except instead of downloading files, the users download streams. These streams are exchanged in real-time with other users.”

From: PeerCast.org

Apache 2.0 Beats IIS at Its Own Game

Tue, 16 Apr 2002 10:04:13 +0000

IIS takes another hit: “eWEEK Labs compared the performance of Apache 2.0 and Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Information Services 5.0, both running on Windows 2000 Advanced Server. Apache kept pace with IIS during the entire test, which means that sites that move from IIS to Apache 2.0 on Windows won’t have to worry about taking a performance hit.”

From: Apache 2.0 Beats IIS at Its Own Game

PingID: Open Identity Project

Tue, 22 Jan 2002 11:01:25 +0000

interesting, this sounds a lot like my buddy John’s old company ConsentCache: “Ping Identity (PingID) is an open, principles based digital identity project focused on ensuring that the rights and privileges we enjoy with our real world identities are not lost, changed or abused with respect to our digital identities. We stand for personal choice, privacy, security and control while ensuring maximum interoperability, openness, accessibility and an adherence to open standards.”

Third Voice + Open Source + RDF = Semantic Web

Thu, 19 Jul 2001 03:07:40 +0000

looks like the W3C is taking Third Voice’s web site “annotation” idea, opening the development and splashing it with Metadata to make way for the Semantic Web …interesting:

“Annotea is part of the W3C’s Semantic Web project, which aims to overhaul the basic language of the Web to make categorizing and describing online information faster and easier.”

From: A standard for e-comments

Linux on the PlayStation

Fri, 08 Jun 2001 01:06:54 +0000

Czech company Blokman Trading s.r.o. just released an alpha version of the Linux 2.4 kernel for the original PlayStation.

More news here: PlayStation branches out

what is project JXTA?

Wed, 25 Apr 2001 11:04:49 +0000

find out today @ 11 am [PDT] during a live webcast when Sun’s Bill Joy and John Gage unveil the P2P philosophy and vision of Project JXTA.

from what i’ve read, “Jxta will offer features such as the ability to create communities, monitoring of the network, fast polling of nodes, and encryption”

Q: What is Project JXTA?

Wed, 25 Apr 2001 02:04:49 +0000

A: Project JXTA started as a research project incubated at Sun Microsystems under the guidance of Bill Joy and Mike Clary. Its goal is to explore a vision of distributed computing using peer-to-peer topology, and to develop basic building blocks and services that would enable innovative applications for peer groups. Recognizing this effort would benefit from expert coders outside of Sun (Joys Law: Innovation Happens Elsewhere), the project has posted a draft of a specification and some prototype code to a web site, www.jxta.org under the Apache Software License, encouraging others to join in our efforts. The project now is evolving daily.

New Linux-based Worm Alert!

Wed, 04 Apr 2001 03:04:40 +0000

“The SANS institute has documented the Adore worm (previously called the Red worm), similar to the Lion and Ramen worms. It scans for Linux systems to see if they are vulnerable to the LPRng, rpc-statd, wu-ftpd and BIND exploits, and, if so, inflicts its damage. Note that LPRng is installed by default on Red Hat 7.0. The worm apparently debuted on April 1. The full write-up (a work in progress) may be found at http://www.sans.org/y2k/adore.htm.” [thanks ed!]

MP3.com gets the open-source spirit

Wed, 17 Jan 2001 12:01:00 +0000

this is interesting. i’m not exactly sure what it means [yet]

“MP3.com on Tuesday said it would make its extensive online music database and streaming technology freely available to developers, letting rivals tap into its hard-won music locker service.” [more here]

Publius Web Publishing System

Mon, 03 Jul 2000 11:07:10 +0000

Publius is a Web publishing system that is highly resistant to censorship and provides publishers with a high degree of anonymity. Publius was the pen name used by the authors of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. This collection of 85 articles, published pseudonymously in New York State newspapers form October 1787 through May 1788, was influential in convincing New York voters to ratify the proposed United States constitution. Publius Home Page