Category: Blog

  • Internet Archive turns 20, gives birthday gifts to the world

    [ad_1] On May 12, 1996, like a benevolent mad scientist, Brewster Kahle brought the Internet Archive to life. The World Wide Web was in its infancy and the Archive was there to capture its growing pains. Inspired by and emulating the Library at Alexandria, the Internet Archive began its mission to preserve and provide universal access to all knowledge. On…

  • Perl and the birth of the dynamic web

    [ad_1] The web’s early history is generally remembered as a few seminal events: the day Tim Berners-Lee announced the WWW-project on Usenet, the document with which CERN released the project’s code into the public domain, and of course the first version of the NCSA Mosaic browser in January 1993. Although these individual moments were certainly…

  • IndieWeb: Make your social media posts open first

    [ad_1] Where do your witty Tweets end up? What about the rest of the content you create inside walled platforms like Facebook, Swarm, and Instagram*? Those posts and images are part of your identity yet they are “lost” in a sense when posted to platforms that aren’t open. That’s where the IndieWeb comes in; it’s based around…

  • DevOps is a battlefield at the IT shop

    [ad_1] If implementing DevOps practices is difficult, then maintaining them may be even tougher. Michael Nygard knows this—which is why he’s turned to the language of warfare to describe the ongoing campaign that is the agile workflow. In his upcoming talk at this year’s DevOps Enterprise Summit (“Tempo, Maneuverability, and Initiative”), Nygard, VP of Customer…

  • A new directory of open source technology events

    [ad_1] About the author D Ruth Bavousett – D Ruth Bavousett has been a system administrator and software developer for a long, long time, getting her professional start on a VAX 11/780, way back when. She spent a lot of her career (so far) serving the technology needs of libraries, and has been a contributor…

  • Hatchit: An open source game engine

    [ad_1] More students are learning about the world of open source through video games. Open source games like FreeCiv and Minetest invite young gamers to dig into the source code, while projects like SpigotMC empower them to write plugins to extend their favorite games. Unfortunately, the open source tools used to build games do not…

  • 10 tips for making your documentation crystal clear

    [ad_1] So you’ve some written excellent documentation. Now what? Now it’s time to go back and edit it. When you first sit down to write your documentation, you want to focus on what you’re trying to say instead of how you’re saying it, but once that first draft is done it’s time to go back…

  • Which 'ancient' programming language do you use the most?

    [ad_1] About the author Jason Baker – Jason is passionate about using technology to make the world more open, from software development to bringing sunlight to local governments. He is particularly interested in data visualization/analysis, DIY/maker culture, simulations/modeling, geospatial technologies, and cloud computing, especially OpenStack. Follow him on Twitter or Google+. Which ‘ancient’ programming language…

  • How to run commands at shutdown on Linux

    [ad_1] Linux and Unix systems have long made it pretty easy to run a command on boot. Just add your command to /etc/rc.local and away you go. But as it turns out, running a command on shutdown is a little more complicated. Why would you want to run a command as the computer shuts down?…

  • What software documentation can learn from tabletop gaming

    [ad_1] Do you remember Monopoly and Life and Clue, and all those old classic board games you played as a kid because sometimes you were just that bored? Do you recall ever reading the instructions? Probably not, because nobody reads the instructions for those games. We all had a friend who kinda knew how to…