Daily Bits

Open Source

Bugs in Your Open Source Code

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Code much? I have to admit that all I know about coding has long been forgotten. While I am not that old, my university days are now part of the hazy past. Those were some good times, but as life often goes, I have branched out to other things quite unrelated to coding.

I am pretty sure we have some readers who are engaged in this activity on a regular basis, and if you are one of them, you might be interested in this infographic created by Source Ninja. ((Source Ninja Blog)) Titled Bugs in Your Open Source Code: The Financial Time and Cost of Defective Software, the infographic provides details on the impact of software defects.[Read More]

Getting Tired of Facebook? There’s Diaspora.

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In spite of all the complaints that people have been making about Facebook, no one can deny that it still has countless users – and it doesn’t look like the numbers are going to drop anytime soon.  If you don’t have a clear idea about the numbers, you might want to take a look at Infographic Labs’ post on how Facebook is dominating the scene.

However, just because everyone and their mother is on Facebook does not mean that everyone’s all happy and content about it.  That’s just the thing – with the numbers involved, you can’t really expect to make everyone happy.  That’s a fact of life, isn’t it?

Just in case you have serious and legitimate issues with Facebook, then you just might have an alternative pretty soon, and it’s called Diaspora.  With the tag line “The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network,” Diaspora is all about bringing together the users and the platform together.  The idea of Diaspora came up earlier this year, and it immediately received a lot of attention.  However, it wasn’t until last week that the brains behind the idea actually had something concrete to show.

On the 16th of September, the Developer Release of Diaspora was made available.  Before you get all excited and try to create an account, though, you ought to know that it’s simply for developers – people who can deal with the underlying technology.  In layman’s terms, if you are a mere user (like me), then there’s still nothing concrete to be excited about.  Still, once the ones who do know how to program work things out, we ought to have a safer alternative to Facebook.  Don’t hold your breath, though – small chance of seeing it in a “usable” format within the year.

Google Provides Free Storage for Scientific Data

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Under Project Palimpsest, Google will be providing free storage and public access to large scientific data sets in what could be a major data organization challenge.

An excerpt from Wired

The storage would fill a major need for scientists who want to openly share their data, and would allow citizen scientists access to an unprecedented amount of data to explore. For example, two planned datasets are all 120 terabytes of Hubble Space Telescope data and the images from the Archimedes Palimpsest, the 10th century manuscript that inspired the Google dataset storage project.

The challenge would be in the ways in which Google is able to represent the data to the public. Also, the Trendanalyzer acquisition would come really handy here. The data source is open to the public which means that additions can be made to it as well.

There is also a presentation available at SearchEngineJournal on the talk delivered last May. And if you have huge datasets that just won’t get uploaded, Google is providing 3TB disk arrays for shipping them whole file system for the dataset.

Yahoo’s Commitment to Open Source

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Recently Yahoo announced that it has become a Platinum sponsor the the Apache Software Foundation. The announcement implies that Yahoo will be supporting funding and making available software and hardware resources for the initiatives at the Apache Foundation.

Yahoo is very often in the news as a far competitor to Google. Both Yahoo and Microsoft lag behind Google in the percentage of internet searches globally. And the gap keeps on widening.

It is ironic that Yahoo was the engine that popularized web search as well as one of the first to get into the online advertising model. It was Overture ( later acquired by Yahoo!) which pioneered the concept of online advertisements.

Yahoo’s branding as a media company has also been looked upon as one of the reasons why it lags behind its technology counterparts. While Google keeps itself clean from ownership of media (YouTube content is not exactly top quality media), Yahoo’s dabbling with content generation have not generated the expected returns.

It is in supporting the open source community that Yahoo is making big moves. The trend in the web development industry seems to be capitalizing on the collective skill and talent pool of all developers while tweaking and marketing the platform. Yahoo’s support for the Apache Foundation as with the dedicated resources for distributed computing projects such as Hadoop will pave the way for platforms to run the next generation internet applications. And Yahoo is making its investments so that it can capitalize on the proliferation of the development platforms.

The company has been on the recovery path ever since Jerry Yang took over the reins from Terry Semel. It will be interesting watching the resurgence of the firm as it takes upon its ever growing rival Google and the Goliath Microsoft.