open-source

Edit: as of July 2014, there is a recent article discussing the use of php5-memcache instead of php5-memcache to store sessions on this blog. There are many posts around on the web about using memcached to store sessions data on high-availability servers, but few actually cover the whole topic and there are some elements that I thought might be of interest in the form of a quick recap. Memcached allows you to store frequently-used data in memory (RAM).

The documentation to install BigBlueButton 0.64 on CentOS (and on most other distributions) is really excellent. However, I found that CentOS 5.5 had not been documented yet, so I tried it and run into a few problems. I explain below how to get it all sorted out. I installed CentOS5.5 from a DVD in "server" mode, so without graphical interface.

There's a nice article about open-source tools for e-learning on one of the blogs around eFront (another open-source LMS) http://blog.efrontlearning.net/2010/10/open-source-authoring-tools-for-e.html

I figured this little trick could be useful to some of you. In the common situation of having to hire a subcontractor to execute one task inside a big project in Redmine, you might want to give him access to just one task and leave the project otherwise untouched.

I'll be talking about Chamilo and the state of open-source software in Peru on Radio Panik tonight, 7pm Paris time. French only: http://www.radiopanik.org/spip/Ecoutez-radio-Panik

Today I just saw one of the most beautiful examples of what our efforts (as a community of free software, standards, formats and knowledge evangelists) are all leading to. In short, I'm talking about the Wikipedia page in English for the OGG standard, which I'm publishing a capture of below.

I  recently started searching for a power- and price-efficient engine for modest-sized NAS, running OpenSolaris (Nexenta) of course. The idea to go to Intel ATOM first comes from their high power efficiency (1-13W TDP). To really benefit from it, do not only take into account the power used by the CPU, but also the whole motherboard (you know, chipset and GPU [Graphic Processing Unit]). ATOM is supposed to dissipate so little heat that a fan might not be necessary, so most motherboards for ATOM ship with passive/fanless cooling.

Those of you who have been following me will know that I've been looking a lot into JS libraries that can manage visual boxes and links between them. Well, it looks like there's a new kid on the block!

Those of you watching closely the Dokeos code will have noticed... I stopped contributing to the project in December 2009, along with my team of 12 and all of our fellow community members. The only changes we sent were actually customer requirements, so no way to avoid that. But that's it. I officially stopped working with Dokeos on January 1st, 2010. As many huge actors in the open-source (MySQL/MariaDB, OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice, ...) and PHP development world at the end of 2009, it was time for a big change.

Note: I'm talking about free, public, open-source software here, not that hacked open-source stuff that you just provide to your customers. Mostly, the difficulty of managing an open-source business is that there are even less good management people that know what free open-source software is than there are good management people at all. And then when an open-source business in launched, it's most probably because the initial entrepreneur knew what open-source software was and thought he had a good idea on how to make business with it.