Tag: open source

Posted on

Joind.in Puts All Those Conference Session Feedback/Evaluation Forms Online

Joind.in is the replacement for all those paper submission forms that get left on the floor at the end of an event. The site gives details of events past, present and future, the sessions, timetable and speakers at each, and allows all attendees to register and leave feedback – for the sessions and for the event itself.
As well as the website, there is an open API and applications are freely available for iphone and android, and there is a wordpress plugin to show your event information on your own site.

via About – Joind.in.

While the service focuses on feedback for tech events, the code is open source and available on Github so it could adapted to run for other types of events like academic conferences. Imagine a service that provides speaker/session evaluations for AALS, AALL, CALIcon, and all other legal and law school conferences and symposia in one place. One site to get information about upcoming events and evaluate past events. Sounds like a good idea to me.

 

Posted on

EpicEditor Is An Embedded Markdown Eidotr in JavaScript

EpicEditor is an embeddable JavaScript Markdown editor with split fullscreen editing, live previewing, automatic draft saving, offline support, and more. For developers, it offers a robust API, can be easily themed, and allows you to swap out the bundled Markdown parser with anything you throw at it.

via EpicEditor – An embeddable JavaScript Markdown editor.

A nice editor that you can embed in your project. Out of the box it supports Markdown1» but it is extensible so you can add or create parsers for other formats. It’s an open source project you can fork on Github.

Yes, Markdown is pretty neat but for academic and legal writing it lacks features like footnotes or endnotes. AsciiDoc is a better choice.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5
Posted on

Red Hat Finally Adopts CentOS, Brings Legitimacy To Enterprise Open Source

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a wonderful operating system for commercial users. However, there is one major downside to it — it costs money. Luckily, Red Hat provides the source code to the open-source community. This enables groups to use the code to build their own free distributions, such as CentOS. While these distributions are just as functional as RHEL, they lack support from Red Hat.

Even though the existence of CentOS can potentially take money from Red Hat’s pockets, there never seemed to be any resentment or animosity. In fact, just yesterday, Red Hat surprised the Linux community and announced that it will sponsor that distribution going forward. In other words, CentOS is now owned by Red Hat Inc — the father has officially adopted its illegitimate baby and Fedora has a new step-brother.

Via Beta News

This is great news for the open source community. CentOS provides an excellent open alternative to RHEL but has suffered from quite a bit of lag that has left it a step or two behind other server grade distros. I’ll be taking a close look at this to see if it warrants a shift away from Ubuntu LTS.

image

Posted on

Suggestions on How Non-Programmers Can Contribute to Techie Projects

I get asked a lot by people who are interested in helping out open source projects, but have absolutely no programming skills. What can they do? Well, here’s a few ideas how non-programmers can contribute to open source projects.

It is worth noting that it is best to contribute to software that you actually use yourself. That way you feel the benefits.

via How non-programmers can contribute to open source projects | opensource.com.

There are many ways to contribute to an open source project that go well beyond being a crack programmer in the language of the day. Indeed many of the suggestions cover ground that many Teknoids are already familiar with in other contexts. We love documentation, for example. Here’s the list:

  • Use the product
  • Bug test
  • Write documentation
  • Translation
  • Evangelize
  • Donate
  • Be professional

It is possible to help out other projects and organizations, like CALI, using these suggestions. For example, you could help out CALI by using and recommending our resources, reporting bugs you find, or write some docs on how your law school community could use CALI resources. And let us know if you’re doing any of these, we appreciate all of the support we get.

 

Posted on

Notes from Drupalcamp Atlanta 10/27/12

These are my notes from dcATL.
  • Josh Clark @globalmoxie
  • The mobile future
  • Mobile is a new platform. What do we do with the new platform?
  • How do we do more with mobile?
  • Sensors give us super powers.
  • Mobile provides the opportunity to interpret the environment, think of augmented reality.
    • Think of ways to use camera and audio in classroom, like prof mentions case and it pop ups on device.
  • Table Drum app usess augmented audio.
  • AnyTouch turns everyday objects into interface objects.
  • Leap Motion moves touch interface into 3d space, natural gestures.
  • Natural gestures are the next break through in interfaces.
  • We need to design for natural gestures.
  • Windows 8 is intended to work with any input interface. Hugely challenging.
  • Medical field is using all sorts of special sensors with mobile devices to drive data collection.
  • Personal sensors make sense of our environment.
  • But we don’t need more operating systems, interfaces.
  • Remote control is an answer.
  • Ambiguous control among devices is coming, think of phones in cars. Your car rings. When you park the car, the interface follows you. Migrating interface.
  • http://bit.ly/day-glass– A day made of glass from Corning.
    • One smart device somewhere that is driven by ambiguous interfaces
  • Wii U
  • Grab Magic http://bit.ly/grab-magic
  • http://bitly.com/proto-gestures
  • Sifteo cubesare social toys.
    • Download software as it needs it.
  • Web is just in case, everything is loaded in case we need it. Needs to move to just in time, software loaded when we need it.
  • Passive interfaces just work on their own, doing the things they need to do to perform the functions they are designed to do.
  • Devices will get both dumber and smarter.
  • Metadata is the new art direction – Ethan Resnick @studip101
  • A cloud of social devices
  • Look beyond the interface, beyond the device, the presentation to the content and the services.
  • Push sensors
  • Think social not FB
  • Your ecosystem
  • We’re all cloud developers
  • Mind your metadata
  • New input methods
  • The future is here
  • Eric Webb @erikwebb
  • See slideshare
  • Evaluating modules
    • Supported version, maintainer rep, usage, # of open issues, usage over time.
    • Record before and after install using Devel module
    • Search for tag ” performance ” to weed out general issues.
    • What to look at
      • When does it run?
      • How does it scale?
      • What if it fails?
      • Does my site care?
      • Do I need this module?
    • ID the problem
    • Where problems occur
      • Page building like views and panels
      • External web services
      • Overall complexity
        • Views in panels in panels….
      • Misconfigured components
    • Keep records, establish a metric, adopt a definition of done, don’t hide behind infrastructure
  • Types of caching
    • App level caching is not really configurable. Tings like menus, forms
    • Component level caching, user facing stuff like blocks, views, panels
      • Best to speed up for authenticated users
    • Page level caching is important mostly for anon users
  • Configuring Drupal

  • Randall Kent @randallkent rkent@sevaa.com
  • http://bit.ly/dcatl-services
  • Web services as the tip of the iceberg.
  • REST is the key to getting at the stuff in Drupal. REST is one way to create an API on Drupal.
  • REST
    • built on http
      • GET, POST, PUT, DELETE
    • Client/Server
      • Separates ui from data storage
    • Stateless
      • All info necessary to process request must be included in the request itself
    • Cacheable
    • Layered
    • Uniform interface
  • /myapi/node – gets XML
  • /myapi/node.json – get JSON
  • REST console for Chrome
  • http://github.com/randallkent
    • DrupalREST.php
    • DrupalREST.net
  • See http://drupanium.org
  • David Bassendine @dbassendine
  • Open data, social, business tools
  • Few modules for consuming services
  • Always start with looking on line for a module
  • REST vs SOAP
  • Get to know the API you are working with
    • URL and path structure
    • Testing in browser for GET, POST requires extension/plugin
  • Services client for D7 will consume Services from another Drupal instance
  • REST API and Query API handle some RESTful APIs that serve json
    • See red mine module for example
  • Core HTTP API for other services
    • drupal_http_request($url,$options(headers,methods,data))
    • Slightly diff D6 & D7
  • Last 2 require custom modules to do the work
  • Krumo – http://krumo.sourceforge.net/

  • Talking to Web Services – Resources

  • Matthew Connerton @connerton
  • AJAX allways for there fresh of data in the browser page with refreshing the whole page.

    Sample code for AJAX in Drupal7
  • Replaces AHAH, which is a good thing. Pulls lots in crooks stuff
  • “use-ajax” class
    • drupal_add_library(drupal.ajax) to get Ajax in.
    • Pulls jquery in
  • $form[‘#ajax’]
    • drupal_add_library(drupal.ajax) to get Ajax in.
    • Blur is the default trigger.
  • It’s may ease the pain of the auth code stuff.
  • Check Drupal API for AJAX Framework docs.
    • includes/ajax.inc
  • Using #states in Form API
  • Ctools modal to open modal boxes for editing and such.
    • “ctools-use-modal” class
  • Doug Vann dougvann.com
  • Module filter is cool
  • DraggableViews
    • Makes rows of views draggable
    • Can be rearranged by drag and drop
    • Has AJAX
    • No relationship required
    • Could use this to provide a sort on Lesson topics based on order in the topic grid
    • Use this to rearrange stuff on the topic list view itself on the home page
    • No subsets or at least not easily handled
  • Nodequeue
    • Collect nodes in an arbitrary order
    • Requires relationship in order to bring stuff into proper scope


Posted on

The HuffingtonPost Provides Open Source API For Public Polls | opensource.com

The initial release is big. It includes more than 215,000 responses to questions from more than 13,000 polls, which the HuffPost Pollster team has organized by subject and geography into more than 200 charts. Per their announcement, “the data feeds operate in real time, so shortly after we add a new poll to our database, itll appear in the HuffPost Pollster APIs responses and calculations.”Adding to the coolness is that the effort relies heavily on open source tools. The HuffPost Pollster team is publishing the data as an HTTP-based application programming interface, or API, with JSON and XML responses. They are releasing the data under a creative commons license.

via The HuffingtonPost releases Pollster, open source API for public polls | opensource.com.

This lets developers get access to a large body of polling data from over 13,000 polls. The API provides JSON and XML responses to queries sent over HTTP allowing developers to parse and display the information in their applications. This represents a major open source resource in the political field.

Posted on

GOV.UK Goes Beta With Open Source, Mobile Friendly, Scalable Platform

The British Government has launched a beta of its GOV.UK platform, testing a single domain for that could be used throughout government. The new single government domain will eventually replace Directgov, the UK government portal which launched back in 2004. GOV.UK is aimed squarely as delivering faster digital services to citizens through a much improved user interface at decreased cost.

Unfortunately, far too often .gov websites cost millions and don’t deliver as needed. GOV.UK is open source, mobile-friendly, platform agnostic, uses HTML5, scalable, hosted in the cloud and open for feedback. Those criteria collectively embody the default for how government should approach their online efforts in the 21st century.

via With GOV.UK, British government redefines the online government platform – O’Reilly Radar.

The site seems pretty easy to use and is very responsive. I could see this as a model for other governments. Check it out at www.gov.uk.

 

 

Posted on

CUNY’s Open Source “Commons in a Box” A Big Win For Open Source in Academia

With a $107,500 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, CUNY has announced that it will now begin work on the “Commons in a Box” project, assembling its software into a single installation package. This means that other colleges and universities will be able to easily create their own academic platforms. News of the project came with the announcement that the Modern Language Association will take part in its development and will use the platform to create an MLA Commons for its members.

The project has been built using open-source tools, including WordPress (which enables multisite blogs), BuddyPress (a WordPress plugin that turns the blog into a social network), and MediaWiki (the Wikimedia Foundation’s wiki software). As a proponent of open-source technologies in education, that makes the Commons in a Box project a win in my book. It isn’t simply that the project will put the tools to create their own academic networks into the hands of schools; it’s that the Academic Commons development team has been sharing its coding back with the open source community, with WordPress plugins for example that have been downloaded over 100,000 times.

Inside Higher Ed: “Commons in a Box” & the Importance of Open Academic Networks

CUNY’s project joins a number of other major university projects including Open.Michigan, ELMS @ Penn State, and Open Scholar @ Harvard that are using open source software and licensing to develop sophisticated collaborative learning and research spaces. Given the collaborative nature of legal practice, law schools should be at the forefront of these sorts of projects.