● 12.31.12

● Links 31/12/2012: openmandriva.org Emerges, Many New Android Devices

Posted in News Roundup at 11:36 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The Linux Foundation has released a video highlighting some of the major accomplishments this year for the free and open source operating system.

• One of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns of all time has been criticized for the fact that it may never deliver what it promises, but the bright minds behind the project are hitting each of the deadlines they originally promised — an incredible feat especially when considering the undertaking.

Desktop

• When buying portable computers, I always went to computer stores. I could check several laptop or netbook brands, but I always had to buy Windows with the PC no matter if I intended not to use it.

• Since my Toshiba Dynabook laptop (which I had bought back in 2003) is about to die on me (it still runs thanks to MEPIS 8), I decided to go hunting for a good replacement. Although netbooks are more convenient for my work-related purposes, I still can do with my little Toshiba NB100. Even if its specs are far from powerful, it is capable of running several Linux distros and has never failed me.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Look for a really great 2013 with many improvements and new features being planned to the Phoronix Test Suite, OpenBenchmarking.org, and Phoromatic. It should be one hell of a great year with amazing milestones being planned as the open-source benchmarking software continues to be rapidly adopted across many industries. This, along with the overall progress of Linux, is another one of the reasons for my eventual departure from the editorial side of Phoronix to better focus upon these technical benchmarking areas with continuing to be the main developer behind these original software projects.

Graphics Stack

• Vadim Girlin has published a new Mesa branch that integrates a shader disassembler and ISA information tables within the AMD R600 Gallium3D graphics driver.

• For aiding in the debugging process and for improving the Radeon Gallium3D driver with regard to shader optimizations, Vadim Girlin is looking to have a shader disassembler within the driver itself.

• Over this weekend a new DRM pull request was submitted by David Airlie for the Linux 3.8 kernel.

• While it’s past the Linux 3.8 merge window, besides this pull having fixes, it does have some changes that aren’t strictly regression fixes. In particular, on Nouveau for open-source NVIDIA support there is initial GK106 enablement. Furthermore, there’s FUC microcode fixes for the Fermi-based GF119 and for NVE0 there’s fixes as well as enabling acceleration on all known GeForce 600 “Kepler” chipsets.

Applications

• Most components of a web application produce operational log files. Some logs are written by each application in a unique format. Other components generate out-of-the-box logs. Monitoring system logs is an essential activity for anyone charged with taking decisions. System administrators need to monitor logs to look out for unusual activity, to troubleshoot applications and websites that are under their control. By scanning logs, extracting and correlating data, system administrators can investigate and resolve problems, carry out capacity planning, help to detect vulnerabilities, ensure the smooth running of services and balancing capacity, and establish who has used services and when.

• Do you have problems getting to sleep after a late night computer session? Does the monitor brightness hurt your eyes? Several Linux tools are available that could help with these problems.

• ASCON Group revealed that it has developed a version of its C3D modeling kernel for the Linux operating system. ASCON welcomes 3D application developers who work with alternative operation systems to try out the beta version of the C3D kernel.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• While at the start of every year there’s always individuals making predictions about “the year of the Linux desktop”, for 2013 at least it looks like it will actually be the year of gaming on Linux. Everything is coming together quite nicely to make 2013 the most exciting year ever for Linux gaming.

• In the past nearly nine years of running Phoronix, every year seems to get better in terms of advancements for Linux gaming. There’s been setbacks along the way like the Epic Games mess, id Software losing faith in Linux, and the fall of Linux Game Publishing, but every year seems to generally be better than the last.

• While 2013 is shaping up to be the best year for gaming on Linux with so many major milestones just ahead of us, it’s not without some unfortunate sore points still present for gaming and the Linux desktop.

• There’s a lot to be happy about with everything going on in the Linux gaming space at the moment, but there’s some fundamental problems to be addressed for Linux to become a viable platform for gaming and to be widely embraced by commercial studios. Among the current Linux gaming issues that quickly come to mind include:

• The OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.20.0! Release packages for Ubuntu are now available via our Launchpad PPA. Release packages for other platforms are available on our Download page. This release brings a near-complete implementation of the dialoque system, visual player race changes in character creation, and many other fixes and improvements.

• Earlier this month the first Unreal Engine 3 game that’s native to Linux was released, thanks to the work of Ryan “Icculus” Gordon. Now with UE3 being “officially” ported to Linux in a released game, after Unreal Tournament 3 for Linux failed to be released, other UE3-based games have hope for a Linux debut.

• Software firm Sortasoft LLC, of Brooklyn, NY, aims to bring a fresh and innovative RPG to Linux, and it’s not too short of it’s financial backing goals; but it hasn’t reached them either. In order to accomplish its financial goals, Sortasoft has looked to engage its future audience using the Internet darling of the crowd-funding phenomenon, Kickstarter.

Desktop Environments

• More than three years after its last major release, the developers of awesome have released version 3.5 of their dynamic tiling window manager. The new version, code-named “Last Christmas”, includes a large amount of changes, many of which are internal and will not be noticed by users.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE developer Martin Gräßlin has posted a road-map for Kwin on Qt 5. The release of Qt 5 has brought many system optimizations as well as 99% backwards compatibility. But applications that interacts with system needs to be ported on Qt 5. Kwin is one such application, it needs to be ported to Qt 5. To bring Kwin to Qt 5 developer needs to switch to XCB from Xlib.

• KDE dev team has posted some changes in the KDE during this week. In addition to switching to XCB from Xlib for porting Kwin to Qt 5, There are many tasks in todo list. Some critical bugs and crashes are fixed in this version.

• Krita developer Boudewijn Rempt has introduced a new feature to Krita, Flipbook. He was initially planning to work on implementing PSD export support, but vacations lead him to develop this feature instead. Surprisingly this is not some beta software, it’s ‘production’ ready.

• Well, it seems that after 2 decades –or probably 15 years– of headaches setting up multiple monitors in Linux, things are finally turning around in the user’s favor, or rather, KDE users favor. In the beginning, there was X. X allowed –and still allows for– WIMP interaction on the Linux platform. Then came the evolution into Xorg, which eventually led to –just a few short years ago– zero configuration single monitor setup. As great a Linux is, some of us still to this day toil away at our xorg.conf trying to make our unique setup work, manually setting monitor coordinates and defining refresh rates. KScreen is the next evolution in multi-monitor setup in Linux, that is, if you’re a KDE user.

• One of our KWin Effects hasn’t seen much love over the last years and is in fact more broken than working. It’s a pure eye-candy effect which means that it is not at all in the development focus of the KWin team. The truth is, that we are tempted to just delete the effect because we won’t fix it. But of course there are users who like it and would be sad if it gets deleted.

GNOME Desktop

• Gnome development is on rise and developers have already pushed an unstable Gnome 3.7 update. While the major release of Gnome 3.8 will be published by the end of the first quarter next year, we quickly summarize the major changes in upcoming Gnome 3.8. Remember, all these are whiteboard images and show the plans and ideas of developers, and may or may not land in Gnome applications.

• The year 2012 has not been very good for Canonical and Ubuntu. The end of the year saw harsh criticism of Ubuntu from bodies like EFF and FSF which accused the operating system of ‘data leak’, ‘privacy invasion’ and adding ‘spyware’ features.

• Ubuntu got quite a lot of bad press due to default shopping lens which was introduced and ‘turned on’ with 12.10. The Amazon shopping lens was criticized for various reasons; the most notable was zero control in the hands of a user, which is something contrary to the ‘free software’ approach where a user is in control.

• [...]

• Canonical has not yet officially responded to either EFF or FSF.

• After pessimistic views regarding the health of the GTK+ tool-kit project were recently shared on IRC, Alberto Ruiz took it upon himself to create some statistics about the development of this critical component to GNOME to show in fact things aren’t entirely bleak.

• Shared in GTK+ Healthcheck from his blog, Alberto created some charts that show the number of unique contributors working towards each GTK+ release. In addition to contributors on the overall code-base, he also plotted the number of contributors working on translations each release.

• Broadway is a back-end to the mainline GTK+3 tool-kit that allows for GTK applications to be rendered within HTML5 web-browsers. It’s progressed a lot since originally being introduced in late 2010 and then being merged in 2011 for GTK+ 3.2, but still it’s mostly a toy for now. The multi-process support merged this week is notable in that multiple GTK applications can run within a single web-page, treated similar to an X11 session.

• It’s been a rough year for Linux on the desktop. More specifically, it’s been a rough year for GNOME-based Linux on the desktop. But a glimmer of hope may have appeared thanks to a Mint-flavoured distribution of the open-source operating system.

• Among many new features in GNOME 3, the most exciting one is the ability to build extensions. Here’s how it’s done…

• Why does everything want to become an operating system? First we had Firefox OS, and now Gnome OS is here.

• The buzzword at the moment definitely seems to be “platform”, and the Gnome team aren’t happy just writing a bunch of libraries and programs sitting on top of a base system that they don’t control.

• More specifically, they’re looking to have more control over the whole experience for Gnome users. Let’s ask some more questions.

• A while ago I had a discussion with Benjamin on IRC about the health of the GTK+ project, he seems pretty pessimistic about the state of GNOME in general and GTK+ in particular, and I showed my disagreement. Now don’t get me wrong, there are challenges and I do share some concerns. Mostly, the fact that programming and delivering GNOME apps these days is way too complicated compared to other development platforms, consuming and viewing large online datasets and the lack of a coherent set of widgets and guidelines for touch driven devices are among those. Some of these issues will be covered at the DX hackfest of course and I’m certain that we will find solutions in the long term.

Distributions

• I kept hearing about Arch Linux from time to time. Every time I gathered courage to try Arch, I would be lost in the amazingly great Arch wiki. There is so much information there that at times it’s intimidating – it’s hard to find what you are looking for.

• However, thanks to a guide from Life Hacker I was able to install Arch on my test machine. The system broke after two days, that was my mistake, and I almost gave up on it. But then decided to give it another try — I installed it again; it broke again. I installed again, and this time everything worked as expected. I was so impressed by Arch that I took a plunge and moved ahead to install it on my main PC (which I usually never touch, it runs openSUSE 12.2 and is extremely stable.) I did come across a few hurdles (I actually struggled to set-up Samba server for couple of hours before turning to the community for a solution), but the amazing Arch community on Google+ had answer to every single question that I raised. This experience with Arch encouraged me to share my experience with my readers.

• I reviewed the last two releases of Manjaro Linux (0.8 and 0.8.2) earlier this year and was quite impressed by the last release. There were some glitches of course, like high RAM usage, in spite of being based on Arch Linux. But Manjaro has its own advantages as well like rolling release. To be honest, I wasn’t using using Manjaro on a regular basis – relying more on Linux Mint and Archbang for productivity purposes. Hence, when the new updated release of Manjaro (0.8.3) came out, I had to do a fresh install to try it out. Manjaro 0.8.3 has now Cinnamon, Mate, KDE and XFCE versions – Gnome is left out for obvious reasons. Both 32 and 64 bit ISOs are available for download.

• KDE has always intrigued me a lot, though I never started using it on daily basis for production purposes, till last week. I liked Gnome 2 a lot, but with Gnome 3 and it’s resource hungriness, it is out of favor as far I am concerned. My interest these days is growing more and more on KDE – it is really user-friendly, plasma interface looks awesome, effects are subtle and KDE 4.9.* is quite stable with loads of KDE specific applications. Almost every popular distro now has a KDE edition for the users, an evidence of the growing popularity of KDE.

New Releases

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• …the domain name of the association OpenMandriva.

Red Hat Family

• Virtualization start-up VMTurbo Inc. continues its path into the virtualized world with official support of Red Hat Inc.’s Enterprise Virtualization 3.1. VMTurbo’s integration with the fedora-clad OS comes with “performance and resource optimization” perks, which expand VMTurbo’s capabilities and strengthen the flexibility of its workload and infrastructure management solution.

• Till 2006, we were a single-product firm offering Red Hat Linux enterprise solution. After acquiring JBoss, open source application server in 2006, we got a whole set of middleware products. JBoss stands as the most popular middleware application available in market today. In 2008, we bought Qumranet, a software company offering desktop virtualisation kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) technology. In Virtualisation, KVM is a very important open standard-based choice for companies and enterprises. Last year, we acquired Gluster, which has Cloud storage and big data services. Recently, we took over FuseSource, a provider of open source integration and messaging from Progress Software Corporation and business process management (BPM) technology developed by Polymita Technologies. We have gone from a single-product solution provider from a broad portfolio to the middleware stack and to Cloud computing. We have been diversifying our portfolio for quite some time, working with the open source development community and through major acquisitions.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Klaus Knopper has released version 7.0.5 of his Knoppix Linux live distribution. It is based on Linux kernel version 3.6.11, which is relatively current and offers better hardware support than the version 3.4.11 kernel that was used in August’s release of Knoppix 7.0.4. The latest Knoppix release includes applications such as GIMP 2.8 and LibreOffice 3.5.4; however, a current release based on series 3.6 of LibreOffice did not make it into the Linux distribution. As usual, Knoppix is designed to start directly from CDs, DVDs and USB storage media without being installed on the target system.

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• On the 21 of December Linux Mint 14 Xfce has been released, codename Nadia.

• This release of Mint is based on Ubuntu 12.10 and shipped with the XFCE desktop environemnt as my readers probably know I’ve installed Mint 13 XFCE on my new desktop and so I’ve decided to upgrade my installation to this new release.

Devices/Embedded

• The credit card sized PC is now capable of doing more things than we had ever thought. A hacker by the name of baldandv has successfully compiled the newly released Qt5 on Raspberry Pi and has run it smoothly on $35 PC. This opens up room for more development and other applications that had been locked up till date.

• The Raspberry Pi, the $35 credit card-sized computer, has lived an interesting life despite being less than a year old. It has been used to teach programming and host servers, but above all it has provided a near-perfect platform for some of the most fun and interesting hobbyist projects in the computing world.

• Ever since the tiny $35 Raspberry Pi PC began shipping earlier this year, there’s been virtually no limit to the fresh uses and extensions that have been envisioned for it.

Phones

• Samsung and Docomo, Japan’s largest mobile communication company, are joining forces to develop Tizen, an open source OS that supporters hope will cut into the 90% marketshare held by Google and Apple. The smartphones may be on the market by next year, reports the Yomiuri Shimbun. DoCoMo is the only firm among Japan’s three top mobile operators that does not sell iPhones, which has caused it to lose a substantial amount of subscribers over the last four years.

Ballnux

Android

• In this day and age, there are quite a lot of people learning to code and develop. There is an open community such as XDA Developers who gathers these talented individuals who take up the challenge of making new phones more useful as well as reviving old phones that have been abandoned by the manufacturer.

• This week the ZTE Grand Era LTE has been revealed in Hong Kong with no less than the ability to connect to two different kinds of 4G LTE mobile data. This machine works with China Mobile Hong Kong’s first commercial converged TD-LTE / LTE FDD network – but there’s a hitch to this dual-connecting beast. Before we get to that though, it’s all about the specifications: a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM under a 4.5-inch 1280 x 720 pixel resolution display with Gorilla Glass up front for hardcore scratch resistance.

• Team Google – technically, Team Motorola within Team Google – is apparently working on a new smartphone that’s designed to up the ante against hotshot smartphone competitor Apple.

• The problem? It’s apparently taking a bit longer than expected for Google to produce results, which might allegedly cost the rumored “X Phone” some of its more eye-catching features.

• We don’t know if Sony is deliberately letting details slip about the company’s future flagship devices or if it’s trying to keep things as contained as possible, but one thing is clear – the “Yuga” and “Odin” are two of the worst kept secrets in recent Android history.

• Sony today announced that it plans to issue Android updates to a number of its 2012 Xperia line. As you might expect, it’s a matter of newer and more robust devices getting preference over those that are not. Keep in mind that while Sony does have a general time frame, things can slip or move up. What’s more, your particular update will hinge upon you carrier’s willingness to play ball.

• Foxconn International Holdings Ltd., an affiliate of Hon Hai Group, has allegedly manufactured a new smartphone model for Amazon on an exclusive basis, according to industry sources.

• Unveiled by Huawei in a couple of Power Point slides during a conference held in Beijing in late October, as well as spotted on GLBenchmark website a month later, Android running smartphone — Ascend D2 shows up at TENAA (China’s FCC) giving us a glimpse of its looks and the whole list of hardware details.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• It is said that it will feature a 7-inch screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600 – not bad for a tablet with such price tag – and will be powered by a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor. The tablet made its way to the FCC as well, which gives a hint that the tablet might land in USA as well.

• We are very happy to announce the first testing release of Plasma Active for Nexus 7. Plasma Active, in a nutshell, is a Linux distribution (based on Mer as a core) that is specifically optimized for tablet computers.

• Tuomas Kulve and me had been working on the Mer “hardware-adaptation” for Nexus 7 that enables to run Mer-based distributions like Plasma Active on the Nexus 7. Based on this hardware-adaptation and the work from Plasma Active we created an installable “image” that can be used to “flash” the current Plasma Active 3 on the Nexus 7.

• Own a Nexus 7 tablet and are left bored with the default Android OS? Want to wipe it clean and install Linux? If so, you’re in luck, as a couple of developers behind the KDE-derived Plasma Active project have just issued the first release of their distro specifically designed for the tablet. “Wipe it clean” is mentioned specifically above, as using this guide appears to purge the entire Android OS. If you’re a skillful Android tablet user, you may be able to dual-boot, but those steps are not covered here.

• We’ve been hearing quite a bit about the next big budget tablet from the folks at ASUS, and possibly Google. Many are calling this a Nexus 7, and while that’s yet to be confirmed, we do know this will be a budget $99 tablet from ASUS running Android Jelly Bean. In what seems to be the norm as of late, the tablet has leaked in benchmarks, and now has appeared on Picasa — making this a legit device. More details below.

• The Aakash 3, the next generation of India’s ultra low-cost Aakash tablet, will come with a range of new and exciting features with an unchanged price. According to reports, researchers and professors at IIT Bombay are working hard to add newer applications and more open source software to the third-gen Aakash tablet .

• The Aakash 3 will come with a faster processor, which will support both Linux and Android operating systems. The device may come with a SIM card slot, allowing people to use the device as a communication device.

Free Software/Open Source

• Any computer user today has a lot of digital photos, maybe in different social networks, Dropbox or cloud hosting services. Some he may store in his local hard-drive, or upload to a web-service to share with his friends or for backup. The problem with these services, though useful is that they make your photos scattered and keeping pace with them requires extra effort and care. OpenPhoto allows to overcome all these problems and merge your photos in a single place, so that you can see them all at once without much trouble.

• FreeDOS, the open-source DOS operating system, is still alive and seeing activity around the GPL-licensed project though the FreeDOS SVN code repository hasn’t seen any activity in nearly one year.

• The year 2012 was one of the most successful year for Linux and open source technologies with Red Hat scoring more than a billion dollars in revenues and Google’s Android became the dominant player in the mobile space. The year 2013 already seems promising for the free and open source technologies and it seems the world will see more and more open source technologies and standards dominating the IT landscape. Here is my take on the top 5 open source technologies to look out for in 2013.

• The Oak product family from Toradex is a range of USB interfaced sensors and actuators that can be connected to a wide variety of different USB host devices, extending capabilites to interface with the environment.

• Over the last few years, the wide variety of different Oak products have found their way into a diverse range of applications. They have been used for all sorts of purposes, from professionals in laboratory automation to hobbyists interfacing them with the latest Android smartphones.

• Bangalore: Sauce Labs Inc., the leading provider of web application testing infrastructure, recently announced Sauce Free Open Source Software accounts (Open Sauce), a new program offering open source developers free unlimited use of the Sauce Labs cloud for testing web applications.

• The new program represents another Sauce Labs’ contribution to the open source philosophy of providing code and services needed to develop and support projects that are free, openly available and community-driven. In keeping with that model, Open Sauce user test results will by default be publicly viewable on Sauce Labs.

• Using open source cloud technology boosts innovation, according a new report by Rackspace, itself an open cloud provider.

• It said figures collected show that almost three quarters (74%) of those organizations using open source cloud technology said it makes their business more innovative.

• Open source can offer huge benefits, enabling faster innovation and reduced total cost of ownership. While moving from closed to open systems is no trivial task, unless businesses take this step, they risk being left behind as competitors take advantage of the new possibilities on offer.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Got your attention? Don’t hold your breath, we’re not there yet, but we’re a step closer: it’s now possible to build Firefox from the Iceweasel package, since version 17.0.1-2 in experimental as of writing, 18.0~b6-1 from the iceweasel-beta repository, or 19.0~a2+20121228042015-1 from the iceweasel-aurora repository.

SaaS

• John Engates, Rackspace’s CTO, dropped by to provide an update on public clouds and openstack.

• Cloud services come with a new risk: terms of use that allow your supplier to pull the plug on your site with little warning

Databases

• Eyeing greater use of the open source Postgres database in the cloud, hosting provider Open Hosting has launched a service that allows users to run an automated cluster of PostGres databases on the company’s own servers.

• The company has released a package, Cloud Postgres, that streamlines the process of installing, configuring and monitoring a multiple-server Postgres (formally known as PostGreSQL) implementation on Open Hosting’s own servers.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation had exciting and successful journey this year. With 2012 coming to an end, they have published a report which shows the state of affairs of LibreOffice suite. One of the most striking news of this report is that LibreOffice has been downloaded around 15 million times this year alone, and over 100 thousand people download it daily. The below graph shows the increase of usage of this office suite this year.

• As the year comes to an end there are plenty of accomplishments that the LibreOffice community can be proud of, and a week ago we added another success — the end of our 6 day testing marathon[1] against the upcoming release of LibreOffice Version 4.0 (scheduled for February of 2013). While the Quality Assurance (QA) team didn’t set any goals for the week other than to “get as many people as possible involved with testing LibreOffice Version 4.0 Beta 1″, the statistics speak a great deal about how great our growing community is and far exceed the results that I personally was expecting. Any time “Version 4″ is referenced it includes the master build, Beta 1 build as well as the Alpha build.

CMS

• Australia’s multilingual broadcaster is preparing a staged rollout of Drupal across its online properties in early 2013. The roll out of the open source content management system (CMS) will be the culmination of a process that began in 2011 and represents a complete rearchitecture of SBS’s online systems.

• “It’s been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but I only got the resourcing and the budget to do it last year,” said Matt Costain, the broadcaster’s technical director for online and emerging platforms.

• Blue River Interactive Group announces the availablity of Mura CMS 6, featuring an entirely new editing and management experience focused on usability and productivity.

• Mura CMS is an open-source Web Content Management System used by organizations like the U.S. Senate, European Commission, CSX Corporation, AT&T, and the City of Cincinnati to power their mission-critical websites and intranets.

Education

• In the story, I reported that the Lawrence school district is about to start pilot-testing a new web-based learning platform called Canvas. One commenter, who goes by the screen name “repaste,” strongly urged the district to consider open-source software to run that system.

Business

• OpenGamma has released version 1.2 of its open source financial analytic and risk management platform. Released as Apache 2.0 licensed open source in April, the Java-based platform offers an architecture for delivering real-time available trading and risk analytics for front-office-traders, quants, and risk managers.

Semi-Open Source

• Open source has its share of challenges, but its biggest fans extol the platform as open, malleable, flexible and cost-effective.

• Nowhere are these qualities more in demand — or lauded — than in the customer relationship management (CRM) market. In fact, open-source attributes not only play well into the small-but-growing CRM niche, theycould be the catalyst that drives its growth.

Funding

• For much of its crowd-sourcing campaign, it seemed Peter Molyneux and 22cans’ Project Godus would fall short of its goal. Things really picked up in the final few days, however, and it wrapped up this afternoon a safe distance past the finish line. Good news, everyone! Peter Molyneux is making another god game.

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• With the release of version 2.17, the GNU C Library (glibc) now supports the upcoming ARM 64-bit infrastructure (AArch64). The port was accomplished with help from developers at the Linaro engineering organisation. Glibc 2.17 also includes better support for cross-compilation and testing and a number of performance improvements.

• …freedom is the root of creativity and fulfilment.

• [...]

• But a large part of my life is given to one or another form of political activity: reading, writing, organising, activism and so on. Which is worth doing, it’s necessary but it’s not really intellectually challenging. Regarding human affairs we either understand nothing, or it’s pretty superficial. It’s hard work to get the data and put it all together but it’s not terribly challenging intellectually. But I do it because it’s necessary. The kind of work that should be the main part of life is the kind of work you would want to do if you weren’t being paid for it. It’s work that comes out of your own internal needs, interests and concerns.

• Automake 1.13 was released on Friday with a number of major changes to this component of the GNU build system. With Automake 1.14, there’s already a number of additional changes being considered.

Project Releases

• The developers of the CodeMirror, the JavaScript component for editing code in the browser, have released version 3.0 of the editor. The MIT licensed editor component can be embedded in any JavaScript enabled page and has been put to work in applications such as Adobe’s Brackets editor, CoDev, Light Table and various online playgrounds for SQL, Haxe, JavaScript and WebGL. The 3.0 update is the result of four months work and although the API is similar to the 2.0 version there are a number of incompatibilities detailed in the upgrade guide; most importantly, 3.0 drops support for Internet Explorer 7.

• The developers of the toolkit for developing concurrent, distributed event-driven applications in Java or Scala, Akka, have announced the release of Akka 2.1 which adds experimental cluster support to the toolkit.

Public Services/Government

• The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is known for sending rockets through the clouds, and now its web services are headed there, too.

• NASA awarded a $40 million blanket purchase agreement to Rockville, Md.-based InfoZen to create, maintain and support NASA’s 140 websites and 1,600 web assets and applications, which are used by the public, media, students, and private- and public-sector researchers all over the world.

• The team that manages Data.gov is well on its way to making the government data repository open source using a new back-end called the Open Government Platform, officials said during a Web discussion Wednesday.

• In a cost-cutting move, the Homeland Security Department wants to replace more than 500 brand-name systems that identify vehicle license plates at border stations with generic technology.

• The Ministries of Education and Training, Industry and Trade, Construction and the State Bank of Vietnam have been using open source software in their works.

• Quach Tuan Ngoc, Director of the Information Technology Agency of the Ministry of Education and Training, has affirmed that a lot of products designed on open source software which have been operating effectively. The ministry’s information portal at www.moet.gov.vn, for example has been designed on PHP, Web server Apache and My SQL.

Openness/Sharing

• Two Danish amateur engineers and entrepreneurs plan to create a homemade, manned spacecraft to launch into suborbital flight within the next few years.

• Self-Publishers often have to deal with complicated distribution methods and clunky software when creating their ebook. Pressbooks seeks to make your life a little bit easier with its online ebook creation tools going open source. This allows you to develop a book using the WordPress Interface and convert it over to an ebook friendly format.

• OSDD or Open Source Drug Discovery is a community of students, scientists, researchers, academicians, institutions, corporations and anyone who is committed to discovery of drugs in an open source mode. It promotes collaborative scientific developments through integration, open-sharing, taking up multifaceted approaches and accruing benefits from advances on different fronts of new drug discovery. Numerous academic and research institutions along with industries are partnering with CSIR in Open Source Drug Discovery Project to take the movement forward and spread the awareness that it rightly deserves.

Open Access/Content

• The textbook industry and classrooms across the country could be due for a shake-up, thanks to the rise of open-source learning materials — digital media that can be distributed to students for free if used for classroom purposes.

Open Hardware

• It’s being billed as “Lego for adults” and could mean your fondness for construction toys may no longer be just a guilty pleasure.

• The new robotics kit created by China-based Makeblock provides all you need to relive your childhood, with nearly 100 Lego-compatible mechanical and electronic components.

Programming

• The Clang segmentation faults have been common within the ARM Instruction Selection pass on this release that came out last week and has occurred for multiple test profiles on different functions. This A15 upset is sad to see with the ARM Cortex-A15 performance being a huge upgrade over the A9-based ARM SoCs.

• GitHub is a San Francisco company that started in 2008 as a way for open-source software writers in disparate locations to rapidly create new and better versions of their work. Work is stored, shared and discussed, based on the idea of a “pull request,” which is a suggestion to the group for some accretive element, like several lines of code, to be “pulled,” or added, to a project.

• “The concept is based around change: what is the right thing to do, what is the wrong thing?” said Tom Preston-Werner, GitHub’s co-founder and chief executive. “The efficiency of large groups working together is very low in large enterprises. We want to change that.”

Leftovers

• Verizon has been trying to justify their blocking of Google Wallet on Verizon phones, insisting the app is blocked because Google Wallet uses the “secure element” on devices to store a user’s Google ID. In response to complaints filed with the FCC, Verizon insists the unending blockade has nothing to do with the fact Verizon (in conjunction with AT&T and T-Mobile) is working on their own competing mobile payment platform named Isis.

Security

• More than 100 Queensland businesses may have fallen victim to hackers holding their computer files to ransom, police say.

• Medical centres in Brisbane’s CBD and Chermside have been held to ransom over their financial data and patient records.

• A Miami medical centre on the Gold Coast fell victim to “ransomware” hackers earlier this month, with Russian criminals demanding $4000 for the centre’s medical records to be decrypted.

Cablegate

• The report warns that an entrenched system of extreme overclassification of government information ultimately invites leaking. It further concludes that the current system of classifying and declassifying secrets is so dysfunctional and “risk-averse” that democracy suffers in its need for timely information about the workings of government.

• The board, composed of government veterans and academic specialist

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• On the high desert of northern Peru, the 5,000 people living in La Tortuga rely on fresh water shipped by lorry to meet their needs. They have electricity (from the grid), but they also have their own natural resources (lots of wind and sun), and want to develop these in a way that can benefit them and the communities nearby.

Finance

• Mark Carney, Bank of Canada governor and surprise pick to replace Mervyn King as incoming governor of the Bank of England, dove straight into the monetarist looney bin today with policy proposals.

• Below are three videos from a talk at the 2009 Economics of Peace Conference in Sonoma, CA, where James Galbraith talks about the Hyman Minsky concept of the instability of stability. This concept is fundamental to the behavioural psychology behind capitalist systems. This is a case where stability invites greater risk-taking and eventually creates instability. He sees the latest episode of financial crisis as a Minsky moment predicated on ‘Ponzi’-style debt pyramiding that is the end game in the cycle of stability to instability as it was post-1929.

• My view is that a lack of regulatory oversight allowed the system to veer away from macro-prudential finance. This is not a case of Madoff-style fraud with everyone in finance cooking up schemes to defraud homeowners. Yes, these cases of predatory lending existed. However, I see the systemic risk as more pertinent.

• The Departments of Justice and Treasury are pretending that criminally prosecuting criminal banksters will destabilize the economy.

• The exact opposite is true.

• The richest 1 percent received over one-third of the total gain in marketable wealth over the period from 1983 to 2007.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The past few years have been marked by unprecedented innovation and growth on the Internet. New digital platforms and rich content from voice-over-IP and video conferencing connect family and friends around the world at little or no cost, high quality video streams facilitate online learning and digital education along with new ways to view movies and TV shows, and a host of platforms and applications allow for the creation and sharing of original content and ideas through cloud based computing.

DRM

• And that leaves this question: where’s the DRM outrage over e-books? Or put another way, why doesn’t Amazon care about eliminating DRM for books, when it did for music?

• I recently received the Android-based Noble Nook Simple Touch ebook reader as a gift, which I enjoyed very much except for one insanely annoying issue with it: the Nook comes with two “books” on how to operate the reader which apparently cannot be removed by normal means.

• Okay, so I made that last one up. But that the number of self-published books did continue to skyrocket. According to a report released on October 24 by Bowker (which owns the ISBN number franchise for books sold in the U.S.), there are now more than 235,000 self-published titles available in print or eBook format. Interestingly, and notwithstanding the proliferation of businesses vying for all this print on demand (POD) business, just four outfits dominate the market: Amazon’s CreateSpace rules in the print space, with 58,412 titles – a 39% marketshare, while Smashwords leads in eBook publishing, with 40,608 – an even more commanding 47% share (these are 2011 figures).

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• 2012 was, without a doubt, the most intense year to date in the fight for civil liberties and against the copyright monopoly. While much work remains to be done, we can see a light at the end of the tunnel.

• While there have been nice flares of light in the past – every success of a Pirate Party comes to mind, where all other politicians suddenly compete in who’s the better critic of the copyright monopoly – those flares of 2009 and 2011 have still been flares of light, and not game-changing events. Not yet.

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