You would never have thought.......

By now I'm sure you're tired of hearing "Na'vi", "world tree" or just a reference to "blue people", yes I'm talking about Avatar. I bet you're wondering why I'm even posting about such a thing here just bear with me for at least one more sentences and I promise it will be worth your time. Suprisingly the Na'vi and Open Source have a lot more in common than we'd like to think, this is because the film Avatar was rendered by 35,000 cores running Ubuntu....yes it's not a typo or my early morning-half awake typing.

Weta Digital the studio responsible for the graphics rendering used a setup comprised of:

- a 2 Petabyte disk array
-10gbps networking
-35,000 cores (4,000+ HP blades)

and even with this setup for some of the sequences it took 48 hours to render the graphics for the sequence.

If you're interested check out the article/blog post by Dustin Kirkland. I think I'll stop there as it's really early in the morning for my tastes. Oh but class is in just a few hours....heh.

Add-On Weekly: TwitterBar

So I've recently upgraded to the latest version of Firefox (which is 3.6, if you haven't done so I would highly recommend you do!) which is filled with lots of nifty little add-ons and newly introduced "Personas" which gives your browser an edgier look. Now I've recently got into using Twitter which in the past I've considered a personal blasphemy and I found it to be tedious that whenever I wanted to post a new "tweet" I would have to go to the website log in and go through all that jive. Enter Christopher Finke the developer of TwitterBar an add-on that makes posting to your twitterboard as easy as pie.

TwitterBar enables you to post links and short lines of text from your browsers address bar directly to your twitter board as long as you end it with "--post". For example, if I entered:

"Mass Effect 2 is out today go out and get it! --post", it would post that line onto my twitterbar in mere seconds.

If you're a casual twitter poster like myself its a wonderful add-on to have, if you're a heavy poster its also great but it has a few limitations at the moment for example image uploading and reading/posting to other peoples blogs. But these will be worked on sometime in the future.

Making way to the festival

So it's week two and things are now really getting interesting in OSD600. Last week we were introduced to the two different types of developer environments described by Eric Raymond in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". This week we were introduced to different tools and services that can help us on our journey to the "Bazaar". Tools such as IRC, mailing lists, public calls and Bugzilla are among the few explained and demonstrated. Personally I've never been one to get involved in mailing lists, use a blog or even utilize Twitter. However after toying around with a few of them my opinion has changed completely and the adamant anti-Twitter facade I once flaunted has pretty much vanished. As individual pieces I was unaware of how purposeful these tools could be, but after viewing a few resources this week its all coming together now. Something that stood out to me in particular was a quote that came from the "Learning to Be at the Festival" lecture by David Humphrey, he says "The Festival only exists if we decide to recreate it". The Open Source community is a strong embodiment of this festival and its community continues to recreate it. In essence the attendees of the festival are just as important as the festival; one cannot exist without the other. Should the community cease recreating and carrying on this festival it would only be a matter of time before the festival ceases to exist.

In due time I hope to improve my effective use of these tools as I would like to expose more people from my country to Open Source seeing that there is still a vast majority that are unaware of the impact that its having on all aspects of technology today.

OSD600 Beginnings....

First off I would like to welcome you to my blog, my name is Gustone Lewis a 4/5th semester student in the CTY program at Seneca College. After our first week of lectures in this course (OSD600) I was left a bit intimidated and unsure of whether I'm up for the challenge that this course will present me with. However I'm also excited to actually get a sample of the world of an Open Source Development and the environment that they work in.
We were presented with a few resources to better familiarize ourselves with Open Source, its history and a bit of information on the Mozilla Project. Of all the resources two in particular perked my interest:

• "Revolution OS"
• "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"

The film "Revolution OS" fascinated me to see how the Open Source community got started and yet it coexists alongside another entity, the Free Software Foundation (started by Richard Stallman), in which they both believe that software should be "free" in a sense of freedom and not cost. Yet they differ in that the FSF believes that all software should be free and non-free software should not exist, the Open Source community believes that non-free software and free software should co-exist. From Eric Raymond's article "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" it was interesting to learn that the Open Source environment is similar to a Bazaar, seeming chaotic from a surface viewpoint yet it produces incredible results. It can because there is in fact some level of order just not as strict and hierarchic as the Cathedral model which is used mostly by proprietary developers (e.g Microsoft).

Overall I'm looking forward to this course and have confirmed my resolve to enjoy working in this course and with my fellow peers.