Open-Source

It’s always interesting to see “business” people getting things right about the Free/Open Source world. For example, the last month Boulder Open Coffee Club was dedicated to “open source issues that developers face”. The NVA blog contains a summary of the recommendations. Basically, it is: " know the licenses you are using and what you can(’t) do with them". And AskTheVC gives links to Lawrence Rosen’s book: " Open Source Licensing" (not read yet, maybe for a future post). They also link to a Boulder’s company ( Openlogic) that helps you to maximize returns, minimize risks and accelerate innovation with Open Source (all keywords you should have in a business plan! ;-)). They also have some resources about Open Source for businesses. ...

I’m very disappointed by this BSN meeting. This event is organised every 2 years so you might expect some quality standards. Well, don’t expect too much … (don’t expect anything, in fact). Morning talks were ok, nothing more: it was not better nor worse than any other congress. But the poster session was not organised at all and there was no support from senior scientists … Moreover, authors of about 1/3 of posters didn’t even deign to come and hang a poster! Most of senior scientists left before the afternoon poster sessions (usually, questions from seniors are more useful than other students’ questions); maybe 2-3 seniors were left (for the whole Belgium!!!). And the final touch, lunch was not free (not even sandwiches!) although we paid 45€ for registration (free for members - membership is 12€ per year for students). Instead we were redirected to the UAntwerp canteen … Are they not smart enough to find a sponsor? I think it would have been better to attend the Neuroinformatics Meeting only. ...

In case someone will need it, here is a very small Python script that will convert your address book from SquirrelMail to a file you can import in a Yahoo!Mail address book: addressbookS2Y.py (2ko). To use it: save the “program” in the same directory as your address book you imported from SquirrelMail rename your address book from SquirrelMail as “addressbook1.csv” download and install Python (if not already installed) launch the “program” Voilà! You have now a file named “addressbook2.csv” that is suitable for Yahoo :-) ...

A lot of publicity is made around CCTV cameras in London (e.g. recently). But surveillance cameras are also invading other cities like Liege. You can be pro or against. The least thing is awareness: citizen should know where they are and how data is used. But nor the Liege city, nor the Liege police websites display a map of cameras. So I decided to create such a map here (in French). Of course, I cannot do everything by myself. If you know the location of some camera, just let me know and I will add them on the map. ...

Nearly 2 months ago, I got a GPS tracker. I discovered its antenna is sufficiently sensitive to work in my pocket so I took it on my Saturday morning bike ride. Back home, I was able to retrieve data from the tracker in various formats. What can I do with this data? Find the total distance I rode, of course! I am lazy ;-) so I decided to use the Kompass track file since it’s only a CSV text file (I should have used the GPX file format but parsing XML is still more difficult for me than a plain text file). With a rather simple Python script, I was able to store all the latitudes and longitudes in a collection of objects. But, hey, how do I compute the distance from longitudes and latitudes? ...

In the last issue of the Journal of Neuroscience Methods (impact factor: 1.5), 3 papers deal with animal behaviour monitoring and 2 of them introduce open source software. Roseanna Ramazani and her colleagues “designed an automated system for the collection and analysis of locomotor behavior data, using the IEEE 1394 acquisition program dvgrab, the image toolkit ImageMagick and the programming language Perl” [1]. What is interesting is that they highlight the longevity and reliability of open source software, leaving behing the simplistic view “open source = free as in free beer”: ...

In science, you have to justify nearly all your assertions and this is done by citing another scientific paper, called a “reference”. With practise and advices of some people, I arrived to a satisfactory references management system I’ll explain below. My “problem” is that in the academic world where I work nearly everyone use EndNote or Reference Manager, two proprietary reference management software for MS-Windows. And I want to use the simple yet powerful BibTeX system. ...

This Sunday, I attended only two talks. These talks were in the embedded track since I was with my brother who is interested in this. The first talk, “SH-2A Linux kernel” by Yoshinori Sato, was very difficult to follow since Yoshinori did not tell us what is the SH-2A microprocessor (it is apparently used in cars, a.o.) and his English was very bad. In the second talk, Vitaly Wool introduced XIP, a way to directly run portions of software from where it’s stored in a type of Flash memory (instead of being copied to RAM first). With XIP, you can reduce boot time (or at least the “time to splashscreen”, especially interesting in handheld devices where you want to quickly be “productive”). But you can have other occasions where speed of execution is more important than price (because the type of Flash memory used is more expensive than standard RAM). Yesterday, Jim Gettys said the OLPC laptop can boot very quickly but it was thanks to the use of LinuxBIOS (and maybe XIP?). I also liked when he took a pen to show us something on a slide and said that it’s “because my wife is here and she said it’s bad manners when I point at things with my finger”. ;-) ...

OpenStreetMap is a “project aimed squarely at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways.” I thought it was worth participating and more documented than the UPCT project. So I got a Locosys NaviGPS GT-11 and used it for the first time on the way to FOSDEM (and back). I did a small mistake by taking an interval between points of 30s: on a highway, at 120km/h, 30s means 1km and the road direction can change a lot. When I’ll have more time, the next step will be to do some edition and mark roads, highways, interesting landmarks, etc. Stay tuned … ...

I spent this Saturday at FOSDEM, listening to some interesting talks. Pieter Hintjens spoke about the Status of Software Patents in Europe. As the FFII president, he should clearly be against software patents. But, although his speech went in this direction, the 3 new FFII initiatives are diluting his/its position as well as the threat (the 3 initiatives are European patent conferences, the creation of the European Software Market Association to lobby the EU and a Campaign for Ethical Patents). Let’s talk seriously: software patents are not a solution and shouldn’t be allowed ; no trade-off. ...