Announcements
Non-Commercial announcements
Microsoft to make an open source ODF translator
Microsoft has announced that it has started the "Open XML Translator Project," which "will create tools to build a technical bridge between the Microsoft Office Open XML Formats and the OpenDocument Format (ODF)." The result will be released under the BSD license.
The OpenOffice.org project has sent out a release of its own expressing its pleasure that "Microsoft has bowed to pressure from the marketplace
".
anti-DRM campaign DefectiveByDesign
DefectiveByDesign.org has announced a new petition: "The direct action campaign DefectiveByDesign.org, today called for all technologists to sign the petition calling upon Bono the lead singer of U2, to take a stand against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). The campaign aims to collect 10,000 signatures, at which point they will seek an audience with Bono, and discuss with him the threats posed by DRM."
Austin Group announces POSIX Revision Draft 1
The POSIX(R) Revision Draft 1 has been announced by the Austin Group. It is available for review and revision until September 1, 2006.5 years of Open Source Voice over IP
Damien Sandras has put together a project history of the Ekiga project (formerly GnomeMeeting). "We celebrate this week the 5th birthday of the Ekiga project. Ekiga is the first Open Source software to bring both Voice over IP/IP Telephony and video conferencing to the desktop, since 2001. It quickly became popular, among others thanks to the compatibility with the Netmeeting software. Today, Ekiga has evolved into a mature and stable product which is not limited to Netmeeting anymore, in terms of compatibility. This was made possible thanks to the addition of another protocol, namely SIP."
ScreenKast and captorials.com
Bram Biesbrouck has announced a new community-enabled video helpdesking project. "It gets down to this: A friend asks you to help solve some computer-related problem. You fire up ScreenKast (see below), record the answer/solution from your screen, add comments, submit your captured tutorial to http://captorials.com and share it with your friend and everyone else."
Women's Summer Outreach Program 2006 Update
Google has announced the selection of six projects for the Women's Summer Outreach Program 2006. "Following on from GNOME's participation in Google's Summer of Code, we've decided to sponsor three projects in a similar fashion to the Summer of Code, but for women only. GNOME had no Summer of Code applications from women, and we think it's time to do something to encourage more women to join our development community."
Commercial announcements
froglogic Announces KDE Edition of GUI Testing Tool Squish
froglogic GmbH has announced the availability of Squish/KDE. Squish/KDE is a special, free edition of the Qt GUI testing tool Squish to create and run tests on applications developed for the K Desktop Environment.Mirus, Linspire and AOpen Introduce $399 Mini Linux PC
Linspire, Inc., partnering with AOpen and Mirus Innovations, has announced the Linspire Mini Koobox PC. "Measuring in at just 6.5 x 6.5 x 2 inches and 3.0 lbs., the basic configuration boasts a brushed matte-platinum case with clear blue plastic accents, slot-in slim CDRW/DVD combo drive with DVD-playing software, integrated Ethernet card, and is based on the Intel 915 chipset. To add to the streamlined aesthetic, ports are located in the back of the unit, including two USB 2.0 ports, one IEEE 1394 port (Firewire), speaker-out, S-video, and mic. The Mini Koobox also has a DVI monitor connector and includes a DVI-to-VGA adapter so that it can be connected to plasma-display or large-format monitors. Inside, the machine checks in with 256 MB DDR2 RAM, Intel Celeron M 370 1.5 Ghz processor, and a 40 GB hard drive."
Resources
Linux Gazette #128
The Linux Gazette for July 2006 is out. Articles include How Fonts Interact with the X Server and X Clients, Creating a Rudimentary Kiosk System using FVWM, A Brief Introduction to VMware Player, Subversion: Installation, Configuration -- Tips and Tricks, Coding a Simple Packet Sniffer, and more.RJS Templates for Rails, Managing Your Boss, and More - New PDFs from O'Reilly
O'Reilly has published several new PDF Guides, including: "RJS Templates for Rails" By Cody Fauser, "bash Quick Reference" by Arnold Robbins, "How to Keep Your Boss from Sinking Your Project" By Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene and "Your Life in Web Apps" by Giles Turnbull.
Contests and Awards
Nominations Open for 2006 Linux Medical News Freedom Award (LinuxMedNews)
LinuxMedNews has announced that nominations are being accepted for the 6th annual Linux Medical News Freedom Award. "Deadline for entries is July 30th, 2006. This is NOT a officially sponsored event of AMIA. Free and open source software isn't 'magic pixie dust' and there are people making significant personal sacrifices as well as doing difficult work to make medicine's free software future a reality. This award is intended to honor the individul or project who has accomplished the most towards the goal of improving medical education and practice through free/open source medical software."
French Atomic Energy Authority's Tera 10 Supercomputer is Confirmed No.1 in Europe
BULL has announced that its Linux-based Tera 10 supercomputer is ranked as the fastest in Europe. "Tera 10 is ranked number one in Europe and number five in the world in the 27th TOP500 listing of the world's supercomputers, published at the International Supercomputer Conference (ISC2006) in Dresden, Germany - Installed in 2005, the supercomputer is made up of 544 NovaScale computing nodes and 58 I/O management and system administration nodes, representing over 4,500 Dual-Core Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 'Montecito' processors".
Education and Certification
Novell announces SUSE learning courseware
Novell, Inc. has announced a collaboration with Thomson Learning involving the creation of new SUSE courseware. "Novell unveiled its "Train the Teacher" series, the industry's first free week-long boot camp for Linux educators. In addition, Novell is the first Linux vendor to partner with Thomson Course Technology, the world's leading technology education publishers, with the release of a series of new joint SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise courseware offerings."
Calls for Presentations
Registration Open, Call for Speakers for Gelato ICE: Itanium Conference & Expo Singapore 2006
Registration is open for the Gelato ICE: Itanium(r) Conference & Expo to be held on October 1-4, 2006 at the Biopolis in Singapore. In addition, Gelato is seeking quality technical speakers to share their expertise of Linux on Itanium architecture for this conference.lca2007 CFP open
A call for presentations has been sent out for LCA 2007. The event will be held on January 15-20, 2007 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. "The linux.conf.au 2007 team have opened the gates for new talent to submit a presentation, paper or mini-conf proposal. Earn your place amongst the league of lca speakers such as Andrew Tridgell, Alan Cox, Eben Moglen and Van Jacobson. We are particularly keen to hear from new talent to add to the magic of lca."
CFP: CIC-2006, 15th International Conference on Computing
A call for papers reminder has gone out for the 15th International Conference on Computing, the event takes place on November 21-24, 2006 in Mexico City, Mexico, papers are due by July 7.No cON Name 2006 Congress Call For Papers
A Call For Papers has gone out for the No cON Name 2006 Congress (NcN). "This congress is thought for system and network administrators, programmers, experts and/or security auditors, and also independent self-taught computer security experts. All of them with the same objective: to share and understand new and different systems that actually form the world networks." The event will take place in Palma de Mallorca, Spain on September 29-30, 2006, submissions are due by August 15.
Upcoming Events
Registration Opens for Akademy 2006 (KDE.News)
KDE.News has announced the opening of registration for the Akademy 2006 conference. "KDE welcomes registration from anybody interested in the future development of KDE, including developers, translators, other free software projects, representatives of the software industry and ISVs interested in using free desktops and the KDE application framework." The conference takes place from September 23-30, 2006 in Dublin, Ireland.
php|works/db|works 2006
The php|works/db|works 2006 conference will take place in Toronto, Canada on September 13-15, 2006. "The theme for this year's conference is "Lighter. Faster. More Powerful." Today's applications must be able to rapidly scale to support increasingly more complex requirements and features; php|works and db|works explore how PHP and database technologies are evolving to meet these requirements."
PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit
The PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit will take place on July 8 and 9 in Toronto, Canada. "This 2-day event will feature numerous presentations and community sessions to let community members share their knowledge. Many major contributors to PostgreSQL will be there, and most of them will be speaking or leading coding sessions: Tom Lane, Bruce Momjian, Tatsuo Ishii, Gavin Sherry, Neil Conway and more. At the event we will also discuss and coordinate community advocacy and fundraising efforts."
Events: July 7 - September 1, 2006
| Date | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| July 7 - 8, 2006 | 7th Libre Software Meeting(LSM) | (Nancy 1 University)Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy, France |
| July 7 - 8, 2006 | V Jornades de Programari Lliure | Barcelona, Spain |
| July 8 - 9, 2006 | PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit | Toronto, Canada |
| July 10 - 11, 2006 | Global db4o User Conference(dUC) | (Imperial College, South Kensington)London, UK |
| July 13 - 14, 2006 | Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment(DIMVA) | Berlin, Germany |
| July 15 - 16, 2006 | Crystal Space Conference | (University of Aachen)Aachen, Germany |
| July 16 - 19, 2006 | 2nd International Symposium on Free/Open Source Software, Technologies and Content(FOSSTEC 2006) | Orlando, Florida, USA |
| July 19 - 22, 2006 | Ottawa Linux Symposium 2006(OLS 2006) | Ottawa, Canada |
| July 22 - 23, 2006 | LugRadio Live | (Wolverhampton University)Wolverhampton, UK |
| July 24 - 28, 2006 | O'Reilly Open Source Convention(OSCON 2006) | Portland, Oregon |
| July 29 - August 3, 2006 | Black Hat USA 2006 Briefings and Training | (Caesars Palace)Las Vegas, NV |
| August 4 - 6, 2006 | DEF CON 14 | (Riviera Hotel)Las Vegas, NV |
| August 4 - 6, 2006 | Wikimania | (Harvard Law School)Cambridge, MA |
| August 4 - 6, 2006 | Vancouver Python Workshop | Vancouver, BC, Canada |
| August 8 - 10, 2006 | Flash Memory Summit | (Wyndham Hotel)San Jose, CA |
| August 14 - 17, 2006 | LinuxWorld San Francisco 2006 | (Moscone Center)San Francisco, CA |
| August 14 - 17, 2006 | ApacheCon Asia | (Trans Asia Hotel)Colombo, Sri Lanka |
| August 17 - 18, 2006 | Python for Scientific Computing(SciPy2006) | (Caltech)Pasadena, CA |
| August 18 - 19, 2006 | The Ubucon Conference | (Google headquarters)Mountain View, CA |
| August 28 - 31, 2006 | Bellua Cyber Security Asia 2006 | (Jakarta Convention Center)Jakarta, Indonesia |
Event Reports
KDE at FrOSCon 2006 (KDE.News)
KDE.News covers the recent Free and Open Source conference in St. Augustin, Germany, from the KDE perspective. "Hosted by the Computer Science department of the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, the conference also provided rooms for free software projects. One was seized by the KDE project for discussion and hacking. Additionally, representatives of the KDE project gave two talks at the official conference programs, as well as two other talks that directly related to KDE. Read on for the full report."
O'Reilly Where 2.0: The Location Revolution Has Only Just Begun
O'Reilly sent out a press release for the recent Where 2.0 Conference. "At the second annual O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, over 700 location-aware hackers, entrepreneurs, "neogeographers," and members of the mapping establishment spent two days immersed in the innovations springing up at the intersection of the Internet and location. Where 2.0, which wrapped up earlier this month in San Jose, California, explored hard technical issues such as GIS/GPS in emergency situations, Virtual Earth and Windows Live Local, NASA World Wind, the latest version of Google Earth, mapping and mobility, geospatial data, business value, and more."
Audio and Video programs
LugRadio covers GUADEC
The folks at LugRadio have produced three podcast shows, live from the GUADEC conference.
Page editor: Forrest Cook
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