I mentioned back in January that there was a push to improve open video, something I think is very important for the future of the web. Chris Blizzard pointed to a recent Theora update which includes screenshots of the progress that has been made. It’s very impressive to actually see. Even more [...]
Archive for the ‘Open Source’ Category
Chromium’s WebKit Fork Is No More
This is very cool news for both WebKit sand Chromium. Chromium will no longer use a forked version of WebKit. This will mean more contributions directly to WebKit and a more current Chromium.
I wish all browser vendors could agree and sync engines a bit more so that Safari/Chrome would ship the same version [...]
Open Video
Just the other day I was complaining that Ogg Theora/Vorbis hasn’t really proven itself and achieved market penetration to the point where people will still care about it in several years. My concern with less popular file formats is that data is lost forever if future computing can’t view it. Popularity, while it [...]
Compiling RRDtool 1.3.x On Mac OS X
I’ve recently been trying to upgrade RRDtool to 1.3.x as I’ve previously been using 1.2.x. New in 1.3 is moving to Cairo graphics, which is pretty cool and provides much better anti-aliased text. MMAP IO should also help since I run it on an old box. It’s a worthwhile upgrade.
Firefox Tablet
TechCrunch popped the idea of creating a Web tablet based on Linux and Firefox. The idea is interesting and something I wanted to pick apart (and reassemble) a bit. It’s a novel idea and I’m very interested in watching it. Success or failure, I think important things will be learned in the [...]
Zero Day Vulnerability
This really isn’t very accurate. I don’t know the details of the vulnerability or even if there actually is one, but I question the marketing around the Zero Day Initiatives vulnerability report. The big news seems to be “only 5 hours” after the release.
This isn’t really accurate if you think about it. [...]
Facebook Open Sources Platform
Facebook today released the code behind their application platform. What that entails:
This release includes the API infrastructure, the FQL parser, the FBML parser, and FBJS, as well as implementations of many common methods and tags. We’ve included samples and some dummy data to help you get started fast.
It’s mostly licensed under Common Public Attribution [...]
Big Buck Bunny
Big Buck Bunny, the new open movie made using Blender is out. It’s rather good, and impressive when you realize it’s made with open source products, meaning the only barrier to making one yourself (assuming you’ve got a rendering farm, or the patience to let your workstation churn out the pixels) is your skills. [...]
MySQL Staying Open
Sun was initially thinking of a commercial fork for MySQL with some enhanced things like encryption and compression backup for commercial users. Obviously this created some outcry. It appears they’ve now reconsidered and those features will be open source. To quote Kaj Arnö:
…expect Sun/MySQL to continue experimenting with the business model, and [...]
Summer Of Code 2008
Google announced the project lists for Summer Of Code 2008. Some of the more interesting projects from my perspective:
Adium
Data Detectors for Adium
Dojo Foundation
Native cryptography API for Google Gears
Dojo-Charting improvements
Dojo GFX Enhancement
FFmpeg
AAC-LC Encoder
MLP/TrueHD encoder
Apple Lossless Encoder for FFmpeg
Gallery
Facebook / Flickr Style Image Region Based Tagging
Inkscape
SVG Fonts
Joomla!
Multi-DB support, and Database abstraction layer implementation for Joomla!
The Mozilla [...]
