Ian Lewis' Blog

Just played a bit with graphviz and made some simple graphs. Graphviz is an open source suite of programs for generating graph diagrams from a number of text formats, the simplest of which is the dot format.

Dot format is a simple language that is used to describe the graph that will be generated. Here I created a very simple directed graph (that's a graph with arrows) using login ids for some friends on Twitter:

Essentially the parser will look over all of the strings of text and create a node for each unique string. It then links the nodes that were linked together in the text. Here IanMLewis shows up twice but only one node is created and it's linked to twice, by jbking and a2c.

So you can generate the graph image for this by running one of a few command line tools. Each one generates graphs in different styles. The dot tool, generates a graph in a linear fashion based on what unique node names it sees first. I generated the following diagram with this command:

dot -Tgif test.dot -o out.gif

neato is another tool which will generate a diagram from the same file but it generates it a bit differently. Instead of a directional diagram it tries to generate a graph with the least energy configuration. That is to say, it chooses a relatively pleasing arrangement for the graph.

neato -Tgif test.dot -o out2.gif

There are many, many options for changing the colors, layout, shapes and text of nodes etc. that I won't go into but check out the graphviz documentation.

It essentially looks like the area where graphviz would be most useful is for mashups with other applications where you would generate graphviz dot formatted files based on some data from the application. One example application listed on the website is generating diagrams from sourcecode automatically using doxygen. Others might include dynamically generating network diagrams.

Just found out about Ohloh, which is an open-source community website that allows users to give each other "kudos", and the number of kudos that you give and recieve affects your standing within the open source community.

What I found most interesting though is that Ohloh will aggregate information about projects gleaned from the source control commits, source code, and community status of the developers. It also seems to find licensing markers in source code and display how much of the source is provided in a particular license as well as giving warnings about potential conflicts. It's really interesting since it gives some info you might not have have known about some very high profile open source projects.

For instance Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA)'s profile look like this:

So it gives you what kind of looks like a risk assesment for the project. Alsa look pretty good. Screen on the other hand,

My Big Buck Bunny DVD came in the mail today!! It came a bit faster than I expected, but that's nothing to complain about!

I have to hand it to the Big Buck Bunny folks, they really did I much better job with this movie than with the previous one in terms of quality of the timing, music, animation, and finishing. It provided a much more fluid and enjoyable movie. The DVDs have a good amount of extras including commentary, "making of" documentary, and some silly outtakes.

I've always thought that the project was a super idea to push the envelope of Blender, not just as an open source project, but as a product in general. So many open source projects are not able to be tested by real world situations, but the Blender folks came up with a super way to improve Blender and at at the same time produce an enjoyable short film.

The Google Open Source Blog mentioned the Blender Foundation's project Big Buck Bunny in their most recent post about the Libre Graphics Meeting. Hopefully that will get some more exposure for what I think is a really cool and successful project to improve the quality and usefulness of open source software. The chairman, Ton Roosendaal, is truely an amazing person.

I took a look at the Google summer of code mentoring organizations for 2008 and was surprised to see BBC research listed. They were probably previous participants but it seems that BBC maintains a number of open source projects on their open source page. The most notable ones seem to be the ones that they are going to use the interns for, Kamaelia, which is apparently a test system for large scale media distribution, and Dirac, an open source video codec. All in all, some pretty cool stuff.

I have been reading the OLPC News blog for a while now and frankly I'm kind of tired of hearing about how American geeks are complaining that it's hard to get an XO or that it has taken a while for them to get their XO laptop or that the box was empty when it arrived. Here's a clue for those who are wondering why OLPCs service is sub-par. The XO laptop is was not made for American gadget addicts.

Nothing irks me more than seeing staged photos of playful American geeks fighting over their new gadget that they have no business having in the first place. And then at the same time they complain that OLPC's service is not good. Boo hoo. My shiny toy is broken. I can't believe the silliness. The last person who needs an OLPC laptop is an American computer geek and yet they complain about OLPC and having to wait a long time on the phone to get service. Think about it. OLPC is not DELL. Grow a brain.

If you will be doing OSS development (seriously, not just pretend) on the XO that will be used in developing countries, fine. But most will not. This guy even says that it's a toy and he doesn't know how he'll even use it. Most recieving an XO laptop would say that they are OLPC enthusiasts and that they think that OLPC is a great idea and that it would help the developing world a lot. I agree. But I am not itching to get an OLPC laptop. I will not do any development on one and I'm not a child in a developing country so I have no business having one. OLPC may have instigated the Give 1 Get 1 program themselves but think about it, Nicholas Negroponte said that having an XO if you aren't a child should be a badge of shame. I think that's true, whether you stole it or got it from the Give 1 Get 1 program.

Those recieving an XO laptop might say they are donating to OLPC out of the goodness of their hearts and recieving an XO is just icing on the cake. BULLSHIT. If they cared about children in the developing world they would donate the the laptop they were going to recieve too. Forget the Give 1 Get 1. How about the Give 2 program? American geeks would drop OLPC like every other passing fad that crosses their impatient minds. THEY ONLY CARE ABOUT OLPC BECAUSE THE LAPTOP IS COOL. Period. No other reason.

Gnucash 2.2.3 was released the other day and contains my first contribution to the project. Albiet, a pretty small and lame patch for a small bugfix, but a patch nonetheless!! I hope to do some more work particularly on the QIF import, eventually making it work with the generic importer, and then expand my contributions to include improvements for multi-currency and reporting.

While I love sourceforge and I really don't have room to complain because for it's free services and support, CVS and SVN server, website hosting, bug and feature tracker, and file release system, I can't help but feel that it comes off like an unfinished basement.

The homepage and project pages are covered with advertisements, and where there aren't advertisements it feels like it's missing something. It seems to have this concept of portal like "pieces" of content, "Project News", "Statistics", "Software Categories", which come off like iGoogle but you can't change it, and the content areas aren't arranged in any coherent fashion. Website content is mixed with advertisements without giving many visual queues as to which is which.

The javascripts sometimes goes into infinite loops on me (I block some of the scripts that are run on the page. Maybe that's the culprit), and the number of ads and scripts slows the site down. Now with all the downtime and bugs in the SVN and CVS services, it's no wonder many successful projects ditch sourceforge for their own solutions.