software
XMP Toolkit 4.1.1 Officially Released under BSD License
rejon, May 14th, 2007
That’s right, Gunar from Adobe, blogged it today and sent me an email! This is super great news that I want to blockquote:
The 4.1.1 XMP Toolkit (SDK) has been finalized and moved to the Adobe’s Developers Center. The 4.1 Toolkit is now available under the BSD license for open source developers.
Although the previous Adobe open source license is quite open, we decided that is was best to use a standard open source license that is respected in the open source community. Opensource.org was invaluable in reviewing the many different open source licenses that are available.
The 4.1.1 XMP release is significant because it include the source code for developers to read, write and update XMP in popular image, document and video file formats including JPEG, PSD, TIFF, AVI, WAV, MPEG, MP3, MOV, INDD, PS, EPS and PNG.
Also, please help digg this so more can find out about it!
No Comments »VMware Workstation 6 released
Nathan Yergler, May 10th, 2007
I’ve been a fan of “VMware”:http://vmware.com for years. Both at my previous job and this one, their Workstation product has made cross-platform development sane. So I just noticed they released a new version of “VMware Workstation”:http://www.vmware.com/products/ws/, 6.0. The new version includes lots of new features, but two things caught my eye.
First, they have “Eclipse”:http://eclipse.org integration for debugging and testing. I don’t think I can do the feature justice — “this blog post”:http://quikchange.livejournal.com/170570.html goes into some detail. Basically it allows you to take a Java application you’re developing in Eclipse, select a particular VM, and then build, deploy, launch and connect remote debugging. And when you’re done (optionally) revert the VM to the original state. I don’t do much Java work, but this is seems like a great idea.
Second, the look and feel of VMware under Linux has been improved and (more importantly) the icons (most of them, anyway), have been licensed under “CC Attribute-ShareAlike”:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/. More details available “here”:http://www.chipx86.com/blog/?p=206.
No Comments »StuffIt 10 Considered Harmful
Nathan Yergler, May 1st, 2007
Mac OS X users of “ccPublisher”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcPublisher have long been plagued by the following error:
No module named os. Check console.log for complete error report.
The source of this has been a mystery. For a while the pattern suggested it was only older, non-supported versions of Mac OS X. Then my suspicion was Intel-based Macs. But neither of those really held up under scrutiny. Last month a “thread”:http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pythonmac-sig/2007-April/018882.html on the Python Mac SIG(Special Interest Group) mailing list revealed the culprit: Stuffit 10.
StuffIt has an option to “continue expanding” archives, so if you have a gzipped tar file, it will do both passes: un-gzip, un-tar at once. However, Python applications packaged for Mac OS X using the “py2app”:http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/py2app/ utility contain an additional zip file, hidden in the application. This zip file contains the Python runtime library. Apparently StuffIt 10 traverses into application bundles and continues the unzip process if you’ve chosen to “continue expanding”.
From my brief testing this morning, it appears that StuffIt 11 is smarter in this respect — even with “continue expanding” checked it doesn’t traverse into application bundles. So if you’ve run into this problem, either unzip from the command line or upgrade StuffIt. Future releases of CC software for OS X will use DMG(disk image) files to avoid this problem in the future.
No Comments »wiki.creativecommons.org skin available
Nathan Yergler, April 23rd, 2007
The skin for Creative Commons’ “wiki”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org is now available from Subversion. You can find decidedly minimalist details (where else) “in the wiki”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcWikiSkin.
No Comments »CC Tools @ Berlios Unavailable
Nathan Yergler, April 23rd, 2007
Back in November, 2005, SourceForge wasn’t looking so hot: no Subversion support, despite repeated promises for it, seemingly increasing down time, that sort of thing. “Berlios”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlios seemed to be the obvious alternative, and so we moved the “ccPublisher”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcPublisher project to it. It was undergoing a period of really active refactoring, and Subversion actually made some of that easier. SourceForge actually launched their Subversion service not long after we left, but there was never a compelling reason to merge things back together — the two codebases didn’t have tons of intersection points and there was never a pressing need that would raise the idea to the top of the task list.
Unfortunately Berlios has apparently taken a big dirt nap. I was traveling over the weekend and when I came back online yesterday there were several messages asking about ccPublisher downloads (which were hosted at Berlios). At this point it appears Berlios has been down for at least 72 hours. I haven’t been able to find anything online about what happened or when (if) service is expected to return. The bad news (yes, that wasn’t really the bad news) is that we don’t have backups (outside of Berlios, of course) for the ccPublisher installers.
So until we get things figured out, downloads of “ccPublisher”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcPublisher, the “command line tools”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Command_Line_Tools, and anything else hosted at Berlios (just some libraries, I think) are all unavailable. We’re working on getting things restored and will keep everyone updated.
1 Comment »Summer of Code Project: “OpenOffice.org Writer Add-in for Publishing CC Licensed Documentsâ€
ksiomelo, April 14th, 2007
Hi there!
I also was selected for the Google Summer of Code with this project mentored by Nathan R. Yergler. An introduction about the project:
The goal of this project is to provide a tool for supporting the process of licensing documents. Microsoft Office has a Creative Commons plug-in to put licenses metadata in its documents. I propose a similar Creative Commons add-in for OpenOffice.org that would allow license information to be embedded in OpenOffice.org documents. Despite being a requested feature for OpenOffice.org for more than two years, nothing has materialized. Having a simple way to add Creative Commons licenses will help to spread those licenses much more broadly. Making licenses available as Autotext for example, is one way this can be reached.
At first moment, I will concentrate on OOo Writer plugin, but of course, I have plans to extend this functionality to Calc and Impress as well. Get the full proposal here. If you have any suggestion, please let me know.
Let me introduce myself. My name is Cassio Melo, I’m 22 old and I live in Recife, Brazil. I’m an undergraduate at the same university of Alan Kelon (Informatics Center, Federal University of Pernambuco).
Beyond my passion for Computer Science, I also have interests in Business and Economy. Eric Drexler and Clayton Christensen are my preferred authors.
I did work for a summer in my undergraduate course at Federal University of Pernambuco with the SimPLe, which is an open source software factory using Product Line approach for action games domain.
This year, I developed an OOo plugin to replace the existing OOo notes. Public distribution will begin in the near future.
Additionally I have a year of industrial experience, having worked as a software engineer on C.E.S.A.R, developing a tool (codenamed BART project) for software components search and retrieval. We also have developed plugins for Eclipse, MS Word and OpenOffice.org for supporting artifacts searching. As a member of the R.i.S.E group, I’ve worked on algorithms for ranking software components.
You can view my full profile here.
Finally, I would like to share the thanks with my friends. We hope to bring new energy and enthusiasm to CC projects. :)
No Comments »WordPress MU v. Lyceum
Nathan Yergler, April 12th, 2007
We’re preparing to launch “hosted blogging”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCi_Blogs service for our “international affiliates”:http://creativecommons.org/worldwide, and the TechBlog is actually the first blog to run on the new “WordPress MU”:http://mu.wordpress.org installation. Sort of “eating our own dog food”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_one%27s_own_dog_food, I suppose. Much of the pre-launch work (beyond the obvious theme tweaking, etc) was in evaluating which WordPress-based multi-user blog product was more appropriate: “Lyceum”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyceum_%28software%29 or “WordPress MU”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress_MU.
4 Comments »XMP and open source article on Linux.com
Mike Linksvayer, April 11th, 2007
Nathan Willis writes about XMP making inroads in open source imaging software at Linux.com. Nice closing:
Take Creative Commons, for example, which has already embraced XMP, even providing custom XMP templates with which Photoshop users can add Creative Commons licensing information. The size of the collective CC-licensed works on the Internet far outscales any personal or corporate collection; who better to leverage that collection than the free software community?
See XMP on the CC developer wiki.
No Comments »wpLicense 0.7.6
Nathan Yergler, April 11th, 2007
Today I released wpLicense 0.7.6 (download see update below). It’s a minor bug fix, but one worth noting. Thanks to Tiago and Cristóbal for both reporting the bug.
The bug was simple: the documentation says that the licenseUri function returns the URI of the selected license. And that’s what the internal wpLicense code relied on. However, the implementation actually echo‘d the URI, introducing a race condition: if things were timed just right, the problem wasn’t apparent. But too often they weren’t, and then it was.
There are some outstanding issues with wpLicense, particularly with rendering the selection interface under Internet Explorer. That’s just one of the tasks new web engineer will be tackling when he or she comes on board. Which reminds me, we’re still accepting resumes.
UPDATE: Yeah, so 0.7.6 only had half the fix; well, the entire fix, but I was braindead with the default parameter value. So I give you 0.7.6.1. 2 Comments »
