Document Actions
LibreSoft Planet
Up one levelMining software licenses with cvsanaly and ohcount
During the last three weeks I’ve been diving into cvsanaly to refresh my python skills. My first contributions have been a couple of easy fixes but now I’m finishing the integration of the ohcount tool which detects the license used in source code files ( see my previous entries about ohcount ).
This afternoon with 35ºC outside I’m very close to the air
conditioning while testing and cleaning up the code before submitting
the patch to my colleague carlosgc. With this new extension we get a table which relates files, revisions and licenses. See the picture below.
Ohcount is a very interesting tool, we even realized we had incorrect headers in 31 source files of cvsanaly. The new extension allow us to detect these changes. For instance the image below reflects the different licenses over time on one of the cvsanaly files, as you can see the file had two licenses (gpl and lpgl) before revision 609. That happened due to a incorrect header which mixed gpl and lgpl text together.
So, our plan is to integrate ohcount to study the licenses used in the fresh code and start studying if there are significant facts over time. I hope the code will be committed to git://git.libresoft.es/git/cvsanaly by the end of next week, in any case drop me a mail if you are interested on it and I’ll let you know.
LibreGeoSocial attended The W3C Workshop: “Augmented Reality on the Web”
During the past 15th and 16th of June at Barcelona was celebrated the W3C Workshop: “Augmented Reality on the Web”.
“This W3C Workshop was held to discuss whether and how the exciting opportunities offered by Augmented Reality can benefit from Web technologies. Augmented Reality on the Web was hosted in Barcelona by Escola Tècnica Superior d'Enginyeria de Telecommunicació de Barcelona (ETSETB) at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). It attracted over 40 attendees and 22 papers. The participants represented a broad range of businesses including telecom operators, device manufacturers, AR content and platform developers, AR users from the advertising world, academics and standards bodies.”
GSyC/LibreSoft was invited to participate in the event thanks to their experience with LibreGeoSocial regarding social networks and augmented reality. During the event, GSyC/LibreSoft exposed the paper: “Mobile Augmented Reality browsers should allow labeling objects”, and a presentation about the needs of allowing users to tag the reality with augmented reality technologies. Also, a live demonstration of LibreGeoSocial was made, about the capabilities of tagging the real world.
The experience was very interesting because it was a workshop organized by the W3C. It was focused in the importance of using standards for augmented reality, a good opportunity to point to FLOSS solutions to achieve this goals.
Proyecto IllumOS: ¡el futuro de OpenSolaris es brillante!
Después de una expectación inusitada tratándose de algo tan minoritario como OpenSolaris, el Proyecto IllumOS ha sido presentado en Nueva York por parte del líder del nuevo proyecto, Garrett D'Amore. Garrett ha contestado pacientemente a la avalancha de gente preguntando desde el IRC (ha habido más de 130 personas conectadas simultáneamente en Freenode) y creo que ha respondido a todas las dudas.
¡Algo se mueve en OpenSolaris!
En pleno verano y por sorpresa, aparece un rayo de luz en el incierto horizonte del proyecto OpenSolaris. Se llama Illumos y el día 3 de agosto se desvelarán todos sus detalles.
AR LibreGeoSocial: Comparing images and anchoring virtual information
Recently, we have added a new feature to LibreGeoSocial platform to extend the usability of our MAR (Mobile Augmented Reality) engine. We can sub-divide this feature in two sub-features. The first one analize and compare the images to find similar image. Using SURF technologies we can obtain several key points of the image that are distinctives and relevants. These points are invariant to the size, orientation or rotation, so the algorithm can find the original image although the image taken has not the same size, orientation or rotation. The second feature shown in the video is the possibility to anchor virtual images on a real picture. The image is analyzed in the mobile itself and looking for ways similar to a picture or photograph (like square or rectangle). This analysis is done in real time and keeps the tracking of the geometry shape to anchor the virtual information on real information.
Currently, we are studying new ways to analize and compare thousand the images in a small time.
This system has multiple uses in tourism, museums, publicity, online publicity and other sectors where it is your imagination :-). The video shown all these features in action. Remember activate the subtitles to get more information about the system.
FreeBSD 8.1 sobre ZFS: la unión hace la fuerza
En el software libre no tenemos por qué limitarnos únicamente a Linux: podemos sacar mucho partido de otros sistemas operativos libres, como FreeBSD y OpenSolaris, combinando lo mejor de cada uno. En esta ocasión vamos a ver cómo instalar FreeBSD 8 sobre ZFS usando un disco con tabla de particiones GPT.
Sourceforge makes a move
Yesterday night I found out that Sourceforge made available a new beta forge. You can browse the projects created so far in the new beta using the URL http://sourceforge.net/p/, to have a look at a test project go to http://sourceforge.net/p/fancypants/home/.
I also created a project to see what the new features are. At a glance you will notice that the layout is entirely different and simpler, the “old” sourceforge’s pages were offering too much information. Once you create the project you can add new resources to it, git, bts, wiki and so on .. nothing new under the sun at this point, but I’m pretty sure new features are coming soon. I’ve read in the Mark Ramm’s blog some interesting info:
- “And we are committed to making this the most open forge possible. We’re committed, to open processes, open code, and perhaps most importantly open data.” Encouraging sentence
- “data should be portable (every project gets their own database, which they can take with them if they want)”. I like this, if you want to be the best forge platform you shouldn’t obly people to stay, you must convince them to come
- “open source community ought to be able to extend and enhance the tools they need”
In any case, after a couple of minutes in the new forge I have some questions:
- Shouldn’t forges be more people oriented? I do love the way github does it
- Will be possible to integrate third party services (bugzilla or mediawiki for instance) in remote?
- Will be possible to import data from third party services? (for instance import a remote svn to git or mantis bugs to the sf’s bts)
- Are they going to integrate the forge with the ohloh’s results?
- Are they improving the search engine? I didn’t manage to find a person using its real name in the “old” sourceforge’s forge
- Some of the links in the beta redirects you to the “old” forge, I guess they will replace this with the new features slowly.
Passing new software to production is always funny and stressful. Good luck to the sourceforge’s team
Some interesting links:
At last! Our own t-shirt
If you are part of our dear LibreSoft community the libresoft t-shirt below is for you. Come to the lab and pick up yours!
Neelie Kroes on open source and the importance of communities
I would like to remark three sentences in this speech.
- “One example is the European Commission’s OSOR project. This
project raises awareness and stimulates reuse of successful open source
solutions, across European public administrations.” Look Mom! I’m on tv!
- “According to data from open source providers, like RedHat, the top three countries for open source activity in the EU are France, Spain and Germany. And with such big countries in the lead, the momentum for open source is set to keep on growing.”
- “At the EU we can bring people together, help get rid of obstacles, and occasionally give funding to help in research and development. But the real difference is made by people and communities, like the open source movement.”
Testing Gitorious and Github
The first impression in both sites is that they are really sexy, not too much information in the front page and a beautiful and simple design. Below you can find a few notes I made with the remarkable features (or lacks) of both platforms.
Ohcount, the Ohloh’s line counter
With the default parameters is similar to sloccount, it has more information about the code but nothing about effort estimation.
For me, the most interesting part is the possibility to get the license from a source code file with the flag “-l”
$ ./bin/ohcount -l /tmp/evince/
lgpl evince-document.h
gpl ev-document-model.c
gpl ev-annotation-window.h
gpl ev-stock-icons.c
gpl ev-view-presentation.c
gpl ev-job-scheduler.h
gpl ev-document-model.h
lgpl ev-timeline.c
gpl ev-page-cache.h
gpl ev-jobs.c
lgpl ev-transition-animation.c
...
gpl ephy-zoom-control.h
gpl ev-previewer.c
gpl ev-previewer-window.c
gpl ev-previewer-window.h
gpl evince-thumbnailer.c
This tool looks promising, I’m going to test it deeply to propose using it in Melquiades (flossmetrics) and the FusionForge metrics plugin that we are developing these days.
LibreGeoSocial 1.1
It's a pleasure to communicate you that LibreGeoSocial 1.1 is available in the Android Market. I appreciate the efforts made by the development team to get this milestone, thank you very much to all developers team. Remember, LibreGeoSocial is a new FLOSS (Free, Open Source) mobile social network with a Mobile Augmented Reality interface
- Improved augmented reality interface (AR)
- AR navigation with gestures
- Added Youtube Channel
- All the contents are organized with layers/channels
- The applications allows the anonymous access
- The user has a virtual layer where can see all his contents
- The contents can be temporary, with begin and end date
- Refactor API rest in server
- Many bugs resolved about usability
Google IO 2010: Keynote 1
Google IO es un evento anual celebrado por Google para desarrolladores que utilizan sus tecnologías. Desde 2008 se lleva celebrando y esta es su tercera edición. Su emplazamiento, desde su inicio, está el Moscone Center de San Francisco (California). Google suele aprovechar este evento para dar a conocer las noticias más importantes del año en su sector, por ejemplo el año pasado se presentó Google Wave y fue el primer año que regalaron a todos los asistentes (más de 4000) un móvil HTC Magic con conexión 3G gratuita durante 1 mes. Durante el evento, que dura dos días, se realizan dos keynotes a primera hora de la mañana donde se condensa en poco más de hora y media todas las nuevas novedades y noticias relacionados sobre las tecnologías Google.
Esta primera keynote se ha basado en las tecnologías web y en toda la nueva arquitecutura que está montando Google alrededor de su Google Apps. Vic Gundotra, que comenzó la keynote, anunció muchas sorpresas para le keynote de hoy, y además explicó el significado de I/O, que por una lado son los dos elementos importantes de la cultura web: Innovation and Open, y por otro lado quiere reflejar el espíritu de colaboración, el espíritu de la web, el aprendizaje de los desarrolladores: Input/Output.
Ghymkhana project based in LibreGeoSocial [video]
'Gymkhana Movil' is free software project developed by Jorge Fernández that allow new games about location and social-networks. Jorge has based his project in LibreGeoSocial, a middleware to build location social-network applications in Android.
Playing with Timeplot
I’ve been playing a few hours with Timeplot, a javascript data visualization library created in the SIMILE Widgets project. Currently we are using Open Flash Chart for some of our web products but having flash as a dependency is not our ideal scenario at all. Timeplot is released under BSD license and uses javascript to plot the time series and overlay time-based events over them so we kill two birds with one stone.
The chart I created shows information about Balsa the GNOME mail client, the data was obtained from Melquiades.
The example chart shows the commits and reports created over the last
ten years in the Balsa project with some of the most remarkable events
(releases). I have to say that I did not include all the releases, this
was done manually and I was a bit tired . The dynamic thing is available here.
Adding events to our charts will improve the graphical information we offer but so far the extraction of the release dates is a manual process. After finding more data to be shown using the timeplot events, we will need more libraries to create pie charts and maybe bar charts.
Some useful links:
The data and html code is available here.
KVM, virtualización completa con Linux
KVM es una infraestructura de virtualización completa con Linux sobre hardware x86. Permite ejecutar múltiples sistemas operativos tal cual, sin modificarlos. Tiene todas las papeletas para acabar imponiéndose como la solución principal de virtualización en Linux, del lado del servidor, aunque tiene una dura competencia con Xen. Veremos por qué.
Teaching at the mswl in Madrid
Last Friday I was teaching at the master on libre software we offer in Madrid. It was a fun experience, the students are kind and the place (madrid on rails) is really comfortable. In my first lesson I talked about the importance of logs in the system administration and started talking about the transport layer ( DNS and web servers).
Codendi Webinar
The past 18th of february we joined to the Codendi webinar. The speaker was Eric Pimienta he talked about Codendi.
Codendi start to be developed ten years ago (2000), it was called CodeX, by the Xerox Research Centre Europe. It's based on the SourceForge.net code (2.0 version, November 2000) and distributed under GPL v2 license. Actually 8 workers of Xerox and the community is working in Codendi.
The Codendi web site shows a lof of information, for example, the difference between the codendi versions, in the services page, "Codendi Pro Services Subscription" and other services are described.
Also they have a blog where, recently, thay announced a new service: Codendi SaaS.
About the features of Codendi described for Eric, we emphasize:
- Instant Messaging
- Wiki (phpwiki)
- Contiuos Integration (Hudson)
- Improvements in the tracker: workflows, permissions,...
- Eclipse Integration
- MyPage customizable with editables panels
- Manage the documentation of each project with a tool
- Plugin to show the tweets that mention the project
Morover, Codendi has improved the code it is based on, taking into account some interesting design patterns, a new plugin system has been implemented and some of the classes used to manage users objects into the code and so on have been refactorized. Other things like checks in forms has been improved since the Codendi team took the original code.
Eric told us about Coclico, a french project related with the forges where several projects related with forge are involved: Codendi, NovaForge, FusionForge (ex-GForge), QualiPSo, InriaForge, Picoforge y Savane.
One metrics product to rule them all
During the last couple of months some interesting things have happened in my research group (libresoft.es) related with software metrics and its application to collaborative environments. One of our dearest data mining project (FLOSSMetrics) has achieved a great added value in terms of procedures to get data from libre software projects and some of its small features have been applied OSOR.eu, the biggest collaborative environment we maintain. With the background we have in this topic (see the links below) we are in a great position to contribute with something interesting in this area to the libre software community so .. there we go.
