Open Source Bridge – Android App

Published on May 28, 2010 in android, Dev Front Page and Open Source. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Open Source Projects often start with the question “Wouldn’t it be cool if _____?“. A few days ago that ended with “we had an Open Source Bridge android app“.  Fast forward 48 hours and, thanks to Igal’s quick response enabling JSON feeds from OpenConferenceWare, the app is now available in the Android Market Place.


Features:

  • Pulls in the conference schedule from OSBridge.org
  • Lists session schedule, filtered by day.
  • Click on sessions for detailed descriptions.
  • Now button takes you directly to sessions currently underway.

This is just a start

There are a few features I’d like to add, and welcome suggestions of your own.  Or better yet, the source code is available for everyone to view and hack on.  I invite anyone who’d like to improve the app, or learn about android development, to join me in the Hacker Lounge.

Touchscreen 2.0

Published on May 28, 2010 in Dev Front Page, django, Open Source, python and twisted. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Touchscreen is a platform building interactive kiosk displays.  We built it to show off our data center, which houses some of the worlds most important open source projects, and for status displays within our network operations center.  We have plans to build a status dashboard for our development team as well.

Touchscreen 2.0 is nearly complete rewrite of the framework.  The original version was written using OpenLaszlo a language that compiles XML and Javascript into Flash applications.  OpenLaszlo served its purpose but was a niche language that very few people knew, or would use elsewhere.  Ever increasing browser speeds, better support for SVG & canvas, along with great Javascript libraries such as Jquery and Raphael have enabled us to rewrite touchscreen using well known technologies.

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AJAX Requests for Realtime Messaging

Published on March 25, 2010 in Dev Front Page, Open Source, python and twisted. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

AJAX is ubiquitous these days.  Its incredibly common to see pages update themselves.  Your Twitter homepage, or Facebook timeline will periodically update itself seamlessly integrating the new content into the interface.

Websites with realtime updates often poll for new updates.  They do this because HTTP is a stateless protocol, as soon as your request completes the server can send no more information unless you make another request.  It works, but your stream is not realtime, your content is delayed.  Delay is fine for a news article, but not something interactive like chat or a game.  Interactive applications are negatively affected by latency in message delivery.  Realtime messaging is required for a good experience.

The interactive display outside the Open Source Lab’s server room needed realtime messaging for the display to quickly respond to user input.  It’s powered by Touchscreen 2.0, which ships with a realtime messaging server; a message queue which clients can push and pop via a REST API.  It responds in 100ms providing seamless interaction between two web browsers.  Let’s talk about how it works.

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Pydra 0.5 Released

Published on September 21, 2009 in Dev Front Page, Distributed Computing, django, Open Source, Pydra and python. 0 Comments

This marks the first beta release of Pydra, a distributed computing framework for python.  While most core features are implemented, at least partially, there are many open tickets in the tracker for bugs and improved features.  While this is not a stable release we felt the project was far enough along that there should be an installable package out there for people to experiment with. The coming months will bring more stability and features as we transition to a scheduled release cycle.

Many thanks to Jakub Gustak, Yin Qiu, and Almir Karic who have contributed code vital to this release.

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