Rudimentary Art of Programming & Development

There are so many micro-blogging services nowadays. Sooner or later there will be an open source application for it.

And that application is called Laconica. It is written in PHP.

I haven’t try to install it yet, but it sounds fun.

Resource:

The project’s Trac

EUCALYPTUS stands for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. 

In short, it’s the open source response of Amazon EC2 instance.

Eucalyptus is developed in the MAYHEM Lab within the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It implements FreeBSD style licensing.

Resource:

Eucalyptus Main Page

Kamaelia is not yet another Rails-esque framework, thus making it more interesting.

Kamaelia is open source framework for building concurrent system. It was conceived inside BBC.co.uk r & D lab. It is written in Python, making it double interesting.

It draws its inspiration from UNIX pipeline. UNIX pipe allows chaining processes so that the output of current process goes directly to the input of the next process. The ‘pipeline’ module is called Axon.

From its documentation, Kamaelia is more like collection of components. The components comprises a lot of thing; TCP server/client, GUI builder, Audio codec, IRC client, etc…

This framework is most definitely different.

References:

• BBC open source
• Kamaelia – Introduction
• Kamaelia – Getting started on “Axon” concept
• Kamaelia – components
• Wikipedia – UNIX pipeline

This is another not so new social networking site, but its idea is somehow refreshing and original.

• There are a lot of fashion blogs/magazines…
• There are a lot of gossip blogs…
• There are a lot of social network sites…

But there’s not a whole lot of those three combined in 1 site. It definitely has high advertisement values.

Popsugar is built using Drupal, one of the oldest open source CMS. It has tons of modules. A social networking app can easily be built on top of Drupal.

Detailed conversation about Popsugar’s technical specs & Drupal tips is recorded here.

Granted that Drupal source code is somewhat funky, along with its hook architecture, but it is well known to be flexible and capable to withstand medium-sized traffic.

References:

• The Popsugar Site
• Drupal page about Popsugar
• Drupal page about TeamSugar – The social network component of Popsugar
• More Drupal powered sites

Freecol is a turn-based strategy game inspired by the widely popular Colonization game of the 90s.

It is of course open source and definitely earned the nostalgic value of the commercial predecessor.

It is written in Java, if you are a programmer, make sure to download the source code and read it. The source code is very clean and organized. The source code could definitely be an awesome learning experience for those new in software development world.

As of today the stable version is 0.7.2.

Prototype Window Class is free (as in beer) and easy to use library for creating DHTML window.

It is based on prototype.js and doesn’t really require Scriptaculous.

Resources:

• Demo Page
• Main Page
• Download Page
• Forum Page

The list as of today:

• ZSNES: A Super NES emulator. It runs on Windows, DOS, Linux, & FreeBSD. ( 15,234,160 downloads)
• VisualBoyAdvance: It is a Gameboy Emulator. It runs on All 32-bit MS Windows (95/98/NT/2000/XP), All POSIX (Linux/BSD/UNIX-like OSes), Linux, OS X, BeOS. ( 9,107,964 downloads)
• Tux Racer: It is a racing game, starring Tux the penguin. ( 2,088,083 downloads)
• Battle of Wesnoth: It is a turn-based strategy game with strong Japanese-influenced graphics. ( 1,663,510 downloads)
• OpenTTD: Open source version of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. This game is easily my favorite. ( 1,198,928 downloads)
• TORCS: The Open Race Car Simulator. Also available on Mac OS X. ( 1,080,376 downloads)
• glTron: Tron-based racing game. ( 947,379 downloads)
• Secret Maryo Chronicles: Very much like Super Mario but with lots more levels & available on almost all OSes. ( 681,365 downloads)
• Freeciv: Open source version of Civilization. ( 642,897 downloads)
• UltraStar: It’s a karaoke game. ( 581,166 downloads)
• Glest: 3D real-time strategy game, looks like original Warcraft. Only for Windows? ( 574,323 downloads)
• AssaultCube: Fun and addicting FPS game. The Cube Engine is lightning fast!! It render so fast on my built-in Intel graphic chip. ( 510,187 downloads)
• Exult: Game engine for running world’s best RPG Ultima 7. Note: gamers must supply the graphics on their own. I’ve blog about this before. ( 493,111 downloads)
• Vdrift: Drifting simulator. Available on most OSes. ( 486,321 downloads)
• UFO: Alien Invasion: I blog about this one before. ( 328,505 downloads)
• FlightGear: It’s flight simulator only for OS X? ( 273,092 downloads)
• FreeCol: Open source colonization. I talked about this one before as well. ( 252,389 downloads)

What Other people think about their favorite OSS games:

• http://akaimbatman.intelligentblogger.com/wordpress/archives/27

What is it?

Emerge installs packages along with any dependencies (similar to Debian’s apt-get). Emerge works with portage (similar to Ubuntu’s synaptic).

Basic Usage:

emerge -Dup world

Update January 1st, 2008:

Further research shown that both Portage and Emerge were written in Python.

Resources:

• Linux 101
• http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook
• http://devmanual.gentoo.org (Emerge & Ebuild)
• Upgrading to PHP5 in Gentoo
• Others blog on how to install LAMP Gentoo
• Wikipedia – Python

What is it:

Remember X-Com (in the nineties)? Yeah, this is the open source effort to recreate such nostalgic game.

Why should I download it?

Don’t be fooled by open source games, especially this one. It is kicking ass. It looks beautiful and fun to play. Not to mention various different maps and weapons.

Pros:

• Open Source X-Com, fun and free. (+32489739248)
• System Requirement is low. (+2394782398472)

Cons:

• Download size is ridiculous. (-0.0005, everyone has broadband, rite? )

Resource:

Download Page 

What is it:

A PDF Reader. Plain and Simple.

Why?

Don’t you realize how dog slow Acrobat Reader is?

System Requirement:

Windows, I tested myself on Windows XP & Windows on Parallel.

Pros:

• Download file is small (+23847991)
• Loading time is fast (+googol)

Cons:

• Not available on OS X and Linux (0.000), as if those 2 OS need yet another PDF reader.

Resource:

Project’s website 

Unrelated Side Note:

Sumatra, JAVA, Jakarta project, Kupu Kupu project, soon Indonesia becomes the Internet (or Internet becomes Indonesia?). This is irrelevant observation, but interesting nonetheless.