3monkeys

Open Source Developer Labs and the Free Standards Group announced that the are merging in to a single entity to be known as the Linux Foundation. OSDL scaled back operations in early December, 2006. OSDL, still employs Linux founder and advocate Linus Torvalds, the new group will employ about 45 full-time and contract workers. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Free Standards Group, has been named the Executive Director of the foundation.

OSDL was founded in 2000 and supported by a global consortium of major Linux customers and IT industry leaders. It is a nonprofit organization that provides state-of-the-art computing and test facilities to developers around the world. The Free Standards Group has overseen the Linux Standard Base, or LSB. LSB is an effort to stabilize the API between the operating system and higher-level applications so software runs seamlessly on different distributions of Linux. Bringing the two organization under one roof should provide a greater good than two separate organizations.

The new foundation has the backing of industry leading Linux supporters such as IBM, HP and Intel. However, to date, neither of the former groups had much support from Red Hat. Getting Red Hat on board will key in the success of the foundation.

The foundation has defined its goals as three separate areas of interest.

• Protecting Linux by sponsoring key Linux developers and providing legal services

It’s vitally important that Linux creator Linus Torvalds and other key kernel developers remain independent. The Linux Foundation sponsors them so they can work full time on improving Linux. The Linux Foundation also manages the Linux trademark (www.linuxmark.org) and offers developers legal intellectual property protection through such initiatives as the Open Source as Prior Art project (www.osapa.org), the Patent Commons www.patent-commons.org), and sponsorship of the Linux Legal Defense Fund.

• Standardizing Linux and improving it as a platform for software development

A platform is only as strong as the applications that support it. The Linux Foundation offers application developers standardization services and support that make Linux an attractive target for their development efforts. These include the Linux Standard Base (LSB) and the Linux Developer Network. All major Linux distributions comply with the LSB.

• Providing a neutral forum for Collaboration and Promotion

The Linux Foundation serves as a neutral spokesperson to advance the interests of Linux and respond with authority to competitors’ attacks. It also fosters innovation by hosting collaboration events among the Linux technical community, application developers, industry and end users to solve pressing issues facing the Linux ecosystem in such areas as desktop interfaces, accessibility, printing, application packaging, and many others.

The merger is expected to be complete by early February.

Popularity: 5% [?]

After sometime of exclusively using RSS Ticker and Live Bookmarks in Firefox, I decided to try another aggregator. After soliciting suggestions from colleagues, I decided to give Google Reader a test drive. I thought my experiences might be of use to others so I am chronicling them here. I this article I will walk through the various steps I used in setting up Google Reader for basic feed reading. In later articles I will explore Google Reader features and how to use it more effectively.

The first thing I was exposed to was this video. Maybe Chris is a little too happy about Google Reader, we will see. So, on to the real work. Google Reader presents the user with three initial ways of subscribing to feeds; feed bundles, user feeds from a variety of social sites such as Blogger or Flickr, and search and browse.

Click to enlarge

The first feed I wanted to add was 3Monkeys, so I chose the search feature. I was a little surprised by the results. There were 20 feeds in the results and the 3Monkey feed was included along with feeds to some of my social networking sites and several blogs that had written stories about me. What was a little disturbing is that some feeds where listed multiple times, in particular digg was listed 5 times, 3Monkeys 4 times, and del.icio.us and Netscape twice each. I would think that Google would have done a better job at identifying and limiting duplicate entries. I happened to notice a few other areas where Google could improve:

• The search did not indicate how many matches occurred, I actually had to count the results. While this is of little concern for such a small number of results as 3Monkeys, other searches may provide thousands of results. It would be nice to see the number of matches in order to know when you should refine your search terms.
• The individual results have very little preview content and are not click-able. I think previewing the feed to be certain it is the one you want is an essential feature Google should add.
• Since the search for 3Monkeys did span more than one page, when I had navigated to the second page and wanted to return to the first page I clicked the “Back” button in my browser. That was a mistake. Google reader makes heavy use of AJAX and this action caused me to return to the site I had previously been viewing.

Once I added 3Monkeys, I noticed that Google Reader updated each of the listed results for 3Monkeys as being subscribed. A slight improvement, but I would rather have duplicates eliminated.

Next, I wanted to explore the bundles. Google Reader provides three bundle categories in the main browse page, News, Sports and Fun, with a link to an additional 12 categories. While an interesting concept, I found that the overall makeup of the bundles was some what lacking. In most bundles there were feeds I was interested in, however there were just as many or more that I was not. It would be more effective for the new user to have a choice of individual feeds separated by topic rather than these prepackaged bundles. Google does provide this type of functionality in some sense by supplying a few topic searches at the bottom of the page: All, News, Fun & Games, Finance, Sports, Lifestyle, Technology

The social network feeds method of subscribing to feeds was of no help to me. Currently only seven sites are supported: Blogger, del.icio.us, Flickr, LiveJournal, MySpace, Windows Live Spaces and Xanga. If you have friends on any of these sites this may be of interest to you.

What I was interested in was importing my Live Bookmark feeds from Firefox. Separated from the other feed population methods is an Import your subscriptions link. This link takes you to a setting screen where you may import an OPML list of feeds. Since Firefox does not naively support OPML export of Live Bookmarks, the first order of business was to download and install the OPML Support plugin. The plugin installs fine and is easy enough to use. Below are two screen shots of the process used to export my Live Bookmarks as an OPML file.

The File -> Export -> OPML Option is added by the OPML Support plugin

Change “What do you want to export?” to Livemarks

The resulting OPML file was then successfully uploaded in the Import/Export Settings screen in Google Reader. If you are switching from another reader and have many existing feeds, I strongly suggest using this feature.

Next, I set out to organize my feeds into topic folders. This was one of the reasons I had decided to try a new reader in the first place. After the import Google Reader redirected my to the Settings -> Subscription page.

Click to enlarge

This allowed me to quickly move feeds into appropriate folders, rename feeds more descriptively and remove feeds that I no longer read. One issue I found while organizing my feeds, was that when I added a new folder, while that folder name would be displayed for the feed, it did not appear in the drop-downs for other feeds. Since, many of my feeds were being moved to common folders, this was a little annoying. I worked around this by navigating back to the main Google Reader page, and then back to the Settings page. This would refresh the drop-down content. Another annoyance was the inability to preview the feeds while sorting them in to folders.

So there you have it, the steps needed to setup a Google Reader account and start receiving feeds. Next time we will look at ways to effectively use Google Reader.

Until next time-

-3Monkeys

Popularity: 14% [?]

Adobe announced the release of Adobe Flash Player 9 today. While I’ve been using the beta version since it was released, I am glad to see an official release. This reconfirms my view that Adobe is interested in providing cross platform solutions.

Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced the availability of Adobe® Flash® Player 9 for Linux, the next-generation client runtime for engaging with Flash content and applications on Linux open source operating systems. Adobe Flash Player 9 delivers a consistent cross-platform experience and extends unprecedented performance and advanced features to the broadest set of developers and users to date. Additionally, Linux developers can create, test and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on the Linux platform using the free Adobe Flex® 2 Software Developers Kit (SDK), Adobe Flash Player 9 and the free Flex Data Services 2 Express.

The player can be downloaded here as either a .tar.gz or .rpm. Now, if we can get Photoshop ported to Linux.

Until next time-

-3Monkeys

Popularity: 6% [?]