Open Source Initiative : All about Open Source Software

Clock Widget for WordPress

admin — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:18:25 +0000

This is easy widget that displays your clock in your sidebar .

Clock widget for wordpress:

Display a customizable analog clock.
Select your location, select a size and choose a color.

Download from Wordpress.org

Screen short:

If you already have widgets installed as part of your Wordpress installation, you can try this widget out yourself. All you need to do to use it:

Download from Wordpress.org
, extract the clock.php file and save it or upload it into your widget plug-ins directory.
Go into the ‘Plugins’ area of your Wordpress installation and activate the ‘Sub page hierarchy’ widget.
Go into the ‘Sidebar Widgets’ section of the ‘Presentation’ area of Wordpress, and drag your new ‘Sub page hierarchy’ widget to the desired location.
Hit the configure icon, select the page that is the parent of the pages you want to show in your page hierarchy and then close the configuration box.
Hit ‘Save Changes’

It’s all.

If you don’t have widgets installed, head off to Automaticc’s Widgets project page and follow their extremely helpful instructions on how to install widgets and add them to your blog template.

You can find lots of useful widgets via the Wordpress Widgets blog.

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10 Myths about Free and Open Source Software

admin — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:25:16 +0000

By now, you’d think that anyone who owns a computer knows about free and open source software (FOSS). However, once you move beyond techie circles, you’ll find that, for many people, the concept is unknown. Even worse, when people have heard of it, they have alarming — and rather discouraging — misconceptions of what it involves.

Here are the twelve most common misconceptions of FOSS, and why they’re distorted, exaggerated, outdated, or just plain wrong:

1. If software costs nothing, it’s no good

Technological culture is so influenced by business logic that most of us believe that “you get what you pay for” is common sense. However, when you only look at proprietary software, that adage isn’t true. If price really reflects quality, then Adobe Creative Suite would be six times better than Xara Xtreme.

By the same logic, you can’t judge FOSS by the fact that the price is usually either gratis or nominal to cover shipping. In fact, since FOSS like Bind or Apache is running much of the Internet, you have to conclude that at least some of it is high-quality indeed. But, really, you can’t judge any software in any meaningful way until you’ve tried it.

2. FOSS is inferior to proprietary software

This idea may have had some truth twenty years ago, when FOSS was just getting started, and needed a lot of development to catch up with existing proprietary programs. And you can still find areas today, like OCR scanning, where FOSS is inferior in functionality or usability to its proprietary equivalents.

However, if you compare the most common programs — for instance, Firefox to Internet Explorer, or OpenOffice.org to MS Office — the idea quickly becomes indefensible. While you can quibble over a feature here or there, in general, the leading FOSS programs are a close match for their proprietary equivalents.

3. FOSS is piracy (or at least encourages it)

Actually, since FOSS licenses permit copying and redistribution, the concept of piracy is irrelevant to it. You can’t pirate what the copyright holder encourages you to give away. Moreover, when the few restrictions to copying in FOSS licensing are violated, such as the preservation of the original creator’s credit, many holders of FOSS copyright are prosecuting the violators as fiercely as proprietary software vendors do pirates. For instances, the Busybox project has brought legal action against several violators of its license in the last year.

True, many FOSS supporters would like to see a world where proprietary software doesn’t exist, so you can easily imagine that some might use that ideal as an excuse to ignore proprietary licenses. But since most FOSS supporters either use proprietary software reluctantly or refuse to use it all, such cases are hardly the norm.

4. FOSS has no support

Selling support and related services is how many FOSS-based companies like Red Hat make a profit. But, even if you don’t want to pay for support, most FOSS has mail forums in which you can receive free help — often as quickly as you can from a commercial company. If anything, the problem is not getting help so much as being deluged by suggestions from helpful volunteers.

5. FOSS is only for developers

FOSS has always been centered on developers, who invented it and continue to sustain it. Especially in the early history of FOSS, this orientation meant that little attention was paid to usability. But, as the popularity of FOSS has spread, artists, technical writers, and usability experts have also been attracted to the community. For the last decade now, usability has been an important aspect of FOSS development, and now the leading programs are as easy to use as the leading proprietary ones.

As FOSS continues to spread, the attention to usability can only increase. Recently, for example, Mark Shuttleworth, the leader of the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux, has challenged project members to exceed OS X in usability in the coming years.

6. FOSS is only good for small projects

FOSS developers have inherited the Unix preference for small programs of limited functionality. And it is true that several large FOSS projects, such as OpenOffice.org and Java, were developed privately and later had the code released.

All the same, FOSS has no shortage of large-scale projects, ranging from the GIMP, a PhotoShop equivalent to Scribus, a desktop publishing program, and Inkscape, a vector graphics program. Desktops like Xfce are even larger projects, while GNU/Linux distributions like Ubuntu are larger yet, involving thousands of applications. Such examples make clear that FOSS is perfectly capable of scaling as necessary.

7. Having the code freely available makes it less secure than proprietary code

For those new to security, the idea that the best way to keep something safe is to hide it. This idea is known by experts as security through obscurity, and is generally discredited.

Probably the greatest reason that security through obscurity doesn’t work when it comes to code is that, if security is breached, you have no way of knowing what has happened. By contrast, if the code is open to anyone to read, then the odds are that the insecure elements will be detected and corrected. Since what you want to protect is the information, not the technique used to protect it, according to most security experts, FOSS tends to be more secure than proprietary software.

Of course, because bug detection is public, detractors can say that FOSS is buggier than proprietary software. However, because we have no way of knowing how many bugs in proprietary software go unfixed or unnoticed, the number of reported bugs is not a reliable measure of security.

8. FOSS is unable to innovate

When FOSS got strongly under way in the 1990s, proprietary software had almost two decades’ head start. Under these conditions, for a long time, FOSS development focused on catching up with proprietary software. Also, the standards for usability were developed for proprietary software, so FOSS often seemed to be imitating its rivals, especially since one school of thought held that, to attract users, FOSS needed to resemble as closely as possible what users were familiar with.

Yet, even while the goal was equivalent functionality, FOSS never lacked for innovation. Both the GNOME and KDE desktops, for example, allow a degree of customization unheard of on the Windows desktop, to say nothing of standard features such as virtual desktops. And now, with the release of KDE 4.1, some developers maintain that the FOSS desktop has surpassed proprietary ones, and is now setting the pace for innovation.

Similarly, FOSS has caused a revolution in business, showing that companies can be successful by selling services rather the software itself. You might say that the very idea of FOSS is a major innovation — to say nothing of the communal organization in which FOSS development takes place.

9. Since the license places restrictions on the users, FOSS isn’t really free

The truth is, proprietary licenses restrict users far more than any FOSS license. If you read the typical end-user license agreement closely, you find that you don’t even own the software that you buy. What you have purchased is a license to use, and that license severely limits the number of computers you can install it on and your ability to work with the code.

By contrast, FOSS licenses give you a right to the source code and to use it more or less how you want. Such restrictions as they include, such as preserving copyright notices, fall upon distributors more than users. BSD-style licenses are so permissive that you can even incorporate the code into proprietary code.

Copyleft licenses are more restrictive, in that they insist that, if you distribute the software, you do so without changing the license. However, that restriction simply means that you pass along the same rights that you have in the software to anyone who receives a copy from you. Compared to proprietary licenses’ terms, this is a minor restriction, and justified by the theory that the only way to ensure your own freedom is to ensure everybody’s freedom.

10. FOSS is all about price

The fact that FOSS is often free for the downloading is often what attracts people to it. However, if the lack of cost was a primary motivation for using FOSS, then it would probably be no more popular than shareware.

Those who stay with FOSS usually do so for one of two reasons. For free software supporters, the reason is that they wish to control their computers and what they do with them, rather than allowing a company to exercise that control. For open source supporters, the reason is that freely available source code is an extension of the academic free exchange of ideas, which they believe results in better quality software. In both these cases, it is idealism, not price, that makes FOSS attractive.

Conclusion

Anything said often enough takes on a life of its own. And, because FOSS is relatively unknown and is different from the proprietary norm, it is likely to continue to attract rumors and half-truths. For these reasons, while the myths above are easy to debunk, I don’t imagine that doing so will greatly slow their circulation — nor stop other misconceptions in the future.

Perhaps, though, by answering these myths when you encounter them, you can clear the way for the greatest argument of all — sitting the users of proprietary software down with FOSS to try it for themselves.

Reprinted from: itmanagement.earthweb.com

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10 must have widgets for WordPress

admin — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 17:54:04 +0000

1. Clock widget for wordpress

- This is easy widget that displays your clock in your sidebar .

Clock widget for wordpress:

Display a customizable analog clock.
Select your location, select a size and choose a color.

Download from Wordpress.org

2. WP-UserOnline

- Enable you to display how many users are online on your Wordpress blog with detailed statistics.

Download from Wordpress.org

3. Smartlinker

- Smartlinker is a toolbar on the WordPress TinyMCE editor that enables you to hyperlink words and phrases in your blog.

Download from Wordpress.org

4. Weather Widget

- Display your local weather forcast.

Download

5. Incoming Links - Who Link Here

- Shows incoming links on your sidebar. Using for it the Technorati API or Google Blog Search.

Download

6. StatPress

- The real-time plugin dedicated to the management of statistics about blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers etc. StatPress also includes a widget one can possibly add to a sidebar (or easy PHP code if you can’t use widgets!).

Download

7. Get Recent Comments

- This plugin shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your sidebar. You have comprehensive control about their appearance. This ranges from the number of comments, the length of the excerpts up to the html layout. And it is a widget.

Download

8. Add to Any Share/Save/Bookmark Button

- Helps readers share, save, and bookmark your posts and pages using any service, such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, and all the rest.

Download

9. WordPress Digg Widget

- Displays your latest dugg items.

Download

10. Fresh Comments

- display recently approved comments with configuration panel to control how recent comments are displayed.

Download

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Browser Battle: Firefox 3.1 vs. Chrome vs. IE 8

admin — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:25:24 +0000

Mozilla’s second alpha of Firefox 3.1 is upping the ante in the next-generation browser battle. So how do the main contenders stack up so far now? One thing’s for sure, the Firefox team has taken note of Google’s recent Chrome release and worked hard to make sure its offering can hold its own.

Mozilla had already claimed its 3.1 version could outperform Chrome when it comes to speed (and most independent tests show it at least tying). Now, the engineers have incorporated Chrome-initiated options such as the ability to drag and drop tabs in and out of browser windows. The second alpha release also adds support for the HTML 5 video tag, which gives Web developers expanded options for embedding video within a page. Don’t forget, too, that Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 — released at the end of August and quickly eclipsed by Chrome’s introduction — is also vying for a piece of the pie.

Here’s a breakdown of the high and lowlights of each offering and where it stands as far as a full release.

Contender #1: Google Chrome

The status: Windows beta released September 2. Mac OS X and Linux versions still under development and said to be coming soon. No indication of targeted full release date.

The good:

Reliability. Chrome’s multiprocess architecture makes a bad Web page less likely to take down the whole browser.
Speed. Chrome loads fast and keeps your surfing super-fast.
Simplicity. Its clean design wastes no screen space.
Searching. The Omnibox lets you type search terms or URLs into a single spot and figures out what you want.
Privacy. Chrome offers an "Incognito" mode that lets you easily leave no footprints from where you’ve been.

The bad:

Privacy. Chrome’s taken a lot of heat for its monitoring and collection of user data, some of which happens before you even hit enter.
Security. It didn’t take long for users to discover vulnerabilities in the beta browser. Several of these have already been patched.
Reliability. Some sites and online services still don’t work with Chrome.
Consistency. Because Chrome is build on the WebKit system, it differs from the dominant platforms that most designers focus on.
Support. Chrome doesn’t yet have any add-ons or customization options available. It’s yet to be seen how these, once developed, will compare to the rich options available for Firefox.

Contender #2: Firefox 3.1

The status: Second alpha build released September 5. Beta expected in the next month. Full release targeted for end of 2008.

The good:

Strong foundation. Mozilla’s already built a loyal following with Firefox, and it doesn’t intend on letting that go. With Firefox 3.1, you know you’ll have a powerful library of add-ons and support already at your fingertips, not to mention the slew of other assets unveiled in Firefox 3.0.
Speed. Mozilla says its still-under-development TraceMonkey JavaScript platform will leave Google’s V8 in the dust. The second alpha build revs things up, too, with added support for "Web workers" — a system that lets multiple scripts run as background processes.
Competitive edge. Mozilla’s developers have good reason to watch what Chrome is doing — and work to match it, if not one-up it.

The bad:

Security questions. Some studies — albeit, Microsoft-funded ones — have suggested Firefox, with its frequent new versions, is more susceptible to threats than the other options.
Crash potential. Unlike Chrome, Firefox does not have separate environments for each tab — so one rogue page can still take the whole program down.
Support. Firefox has worked hard to snag a small portion of the browser market share, and most early predictions show Chrome taking away more of its userbase than IE’s.
Google’s focus on Chrome will also take away some of its previous focus on Mozilla’s development efforts. Will Firefox be able to remain a key player in the browser war?

Contender #3: Internet Explorer 8

The status:: Second beta released August 27. Full release expected before the end of 2008.

The good:

Support. Love it or hate it, Internet Explorer is hanging on to about three-quarters of the browsing market with its default status in all Windows machines. You know developers and designers are going to cater to it.
Security. With Microsoft at its helm, IE hangs on to a reputation of safe and reliable browsing.
Privacy. IE 8 was the first to offer a no-record browsing mode, branded here as InPrivate Browsing.
Searching. IE 8’s Smart Address Bar offers similar functionality to Chrome’s Omnibox, letting you type in URLs or search terms and taking you to the right place.
Added add-ons. IE 8 finally catches up to Firefox with a new "Gallery" full of third-party add-on options..
The bad:
Speed. Independent tests have found IE 8 to be significantly slower than the alternative choices. Resources. IE 8 uses a lot of memory compared to its competitors — a factor that could considerably slow down the rest of your system.
Crash potential. While IE 8 does use separate processes for tabs, similar to Chrome’s approach, it does not do so to the same degree
– still leaving room for a total meltdown.
Competition questions. Can IE’s add-ons reach the level of Firefox’s? Already, some users are complaining of problems even getting them to work.

That’s the lowdown on the battle’s current status. Remember, all three of these programs are still early in their development, so many of the pluses and minuses could change as things move forward. One thing’s for sure, though: This battle is on, it’s growing fierce, and each of its contenders will do anything it can to win.

Reprinted from: Browser Battle: Firefox 3.1 vs. Chrome vs. IE 8

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5 popular plugins for bloggers

admin — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 16:44:39 +0000

Optimal Title

- This re-arranges your blogs title page to be [post name ] - [blog name] which is good for SEO.

Headspace2

- Automatically create blog post descriptions. Or write your own.

Live Search

- Update your search box to show results as the user types.

Subscribe to Comments

- Keep the commenters informed with email updates to posts they commented on.

Vipers Video Quick Tags

- Easily embed YouTube, GoogleVideo or other media formats to your blog.

There are so many more that I haven’t mentioned but I wanted to keep the list short and sweet. I also left out

Akismet

(spam protection) as it’s almost a given.

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5 most useful social bookmarking

admin — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:51:53 +0000

1. Sociable Plugin

Use this awesome plugin to automatically add links below posts to popularize it on social bookmarking websites like Digg, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Facebook, etc. The admin panel allows you to choose any number of social sites from around 100 listed networking sites!

The plugin gives you a choice to decide on pages where you wish the social sites icons to be shown. You can keep it on full-posts, static pages and even in the RSS feed. The plugin is showcased as a “share and enjoy” badge just after the post.

2. ShareThis Plugin

As the name says, you may use this plugin to allow the visitors to share a post on your blog to several social bookmarking websites. They can also send your post to friends and their peers via email! This plugin is a good option if you’re looking for an option to track sharing statistics.

It is by far one of the most widely used sharing or bookmarking plugin across a plethora of blogs in the blog-O-sphere.

3. Social Bookmarks Plugin

This is yet another WP plugin which adds an array of XHTML compliant social bookmarking graphic links at the end of blog posts, allowing your visitors to submit them with ease to a number of different social bookmarking websites.

The plugin can be customized from within the WordPress admin panel. The plugin uses a stylesheet named social_bookmarks.css which can be modified to integrate it further with your theme.

4. Twitter Tools

Micro-blogging is in! Thanks to services like Twitter and Tumblr which have caught a lot of attention for people who wish to write things short and fast and wish it to spread far and wide. This plugin generates a tweet on your twitter account whenever you happen to publish a new post. If you are atwitter freak and do most of the writing on twitter, you can use this plugin to show recent twitter updates in the sidebar of your blog. Now that’s cool!

5. WP Conditional Digg This Badge plugin

Digg is something as obvious to a profit blogger as a router is to a network engineer! Out of several Digg plugins I have come across and tested, WP Conditional Digg This Badge plugin happens to be my favorite! This plugin has the intelligence of checking for a predefined number of Diggs (default is 10) before showing the “Digg This” button. Now that makes some sense to me and to your blog visitors too, I am sure. However, there have been reportedly some issues with WP 2.5 and above. This plugin is based on open source paradigm and shall soon be upgraded by someone or the other, if not the author.

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Sergey Brin’s Home Page :)

admin — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:06:43 +0000

Found today Sergey Brin’s home page.

It’s very funny :).

you can look also

Sergey Brin’s Home Page

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mon.itor.us - widget for WordPress.

admin — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 08:33:39 +0000

mon.itor.us - free website and web server monitoring service allows to monitor your website performance and availability. Add your tests at mon.itor.us site and view the latest state of real time monitored sites via Snapshot.

Widget for this one you can download here.

Screen short:

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WordPress xmlPad Plugin

admin — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 17:39:55 +0000

What’s this? XMLPAD plugin for wordpress syndicate PAD file in wordpress.
REQUIREMENTS

To run xmlPad you will need WordPress 2 or greater and PHP 4.3.0 or greater.

INSTALLATION

You can download it here (xmlpad).
The installation process is very simple and no special steps are needed.
Drop the “xmlpad” directory into the “plugins” directory in WordPress.

The “xmlpad” directory should now contain the files “xmlpad.php”, “reader.php”,
“config.php”, “template.php”, “readme.txt” and the “cache” directory. The cache
directory must be writeable by web server user. If you are new to linux these
commands will help you to give proper permissions to cache directory:

cd xmlpad/directory
chmod 755 cache
chmod 755 cache/img

In the “Plugins” section of “Site Admin”, click “Activate” adjacent to
“xmlPad”. Everything is done! Now you can use your xmlPad plugin for WordPress.
USAGE

Insert “[xmlpad:URL]” into the post and replace “URL” with the URL of the
XMLPAD file location. Choose “Save” and look at your post. The first time
it loads the xmlPad plugin will try to get information from remote file
and cache it in the local directory. The images used by xmlpad file will
also be cached.

CONFIGURATION

You can find the most common setting in the config.php file. Let’s look
at it a bit closer:

$config['cache_lifetime'] - the number of seconds the cache is valid

$config['encoding'] - you can change the output encoding of xmlpad plugin
to that your blog uses

$config['dateformat'] - there are a lot of date fields in xmlpad file and
you can set your own date format

$config['relurls'] - should we use absolute or relative paths for cached images.
The default value is false.

The most interesting settings are located in $config['fields'] variables. The
second key in this associative array is the name of xmlpad field caption and
value is the path to element in remote xmlpad file. For example the line

$config['fields']['Program name'] = ‘program_info/program_name’;

tells plugin to read data from “program_info/program_name” xml node and give it
“Program name” caption in the output. You can also add separators to the output
by adding special record to configuration file. Here it is:

$config['fields'][] = ’sep’;

Try to experiment with configuration file and you will be able to fully customize
the plugin output.

If you need to change the appearance of xmlpad output you can take a look at
template.php file. It’s responsible for output formating. This file is very
small and it’s easy to understand the logic behind it. Just plain php, nothing
more.

NOTES

The cache time is set to 24 hours by default, so changes to the remote xmlpad file
may not show up immediately. You can set cache time to whatever you want in the
configuration file as described above. To clarify the cache you need to remove all
files from “cache” except “img” directory.

If you want to change the output encoding you’ll need iconv php extension to be
installed.
Example for http://www.simplysup.com/padfiles/trpad.xml :

Program name:

Trojan Remover

Version:

6.7.9

Release date:

06/22/2009

Description:

Trojan Remover is designed to automatically remove malware when standard anti-virus software has either failed to detect the malware or is unable to effectively eliminate it. It can also detect and remove malware hidden using rootkit techniques.

Type:

Shareware

Supported OS:

Win98,WinME,Windows2000,WinXP,Windows Vista Starter,Windows Vista Home Basic,Windows Vista Home Premium,Windows Vista Business,Windows Vista Enterprise,Windows Vista Ultimate

Language:

English

Specific category:

Utilities

Category:

Security & Privacy::Anti-Virus Tools

Screenshot:

Company name:

Simply Super Software

Address:

PO Box 2849

Author:

Nigel Thomas

Author email:

support@simplysup1.com

Size (Kb):

8219

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Good News :)

admin — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 15:20:12 +0000

Hello All We are opened! We provide HTTP/FTP-mirrors of popular open-source-projects for the internet-community. Please contact us if you have this one and need hosting for your project. Please contact us : info@opensourceinitiative.net

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