Category: FreeSoftware

Erlang/OTP – the community

If you got interested in Erlang after my previous blog entry on the topic, you probably want to know more about the community created around the language since it became Open Source in 1998. Well, here goes a list of interesting events, webpages and mailing lists related to the Erlang community:

  • Open Source Erlang webpage, all kind of information and documentation related to the language and the platform can be found here.
  • Erlang User Conference, yearly conference, hosted by Ericsson in Stockholm, where the last projects related to Erlang from a professional point of view are presented.
  • Erlang Workshop, yearly conference, co-located with the PLI’s and the ICFP conferences, where the last projects related to Erlang from a research point of view are presented.
  • erlang-questions mailing list, the main Erlang discussion list. There is more information about other mailing lists here.
  • Planet Erlang, aggregates the
    weblog entries of the Erlang users and developers.
  • Erlang Foundation, is one of the fresh new ideas for expanding Erlang outside of the current community, but it is still under discussion. A proposal was presented in the Erlang User Conference 2004.

aLANtejo 2005, 20-22 October, Évora, Portugal

aLANtejo 2005 is a technological event directed to students, graduated and curious about information technologies and computer science, as well all people that like conviviality and diversion of a Lan-Party. The organization has the main objective to promote the conviviality, the exchange of knowledge and experiences between the participants.

I will be participating in a round table about “Gnome vs. KDE” during the third day of the event. The idea is to give a short talk on the Gnome project and then, after a similar talk by the KDE developer, discuss a bit the state, the similarities, and the differences between both projects with the people attending.

It is going to be really nice to be there. Will blog more about this during the next couple of weeks.

Erlang/OTP – the language

Erlang is a programming language designed in the late 80s at the Ericsson CSLab, a research laboratory that was in operation from March 1, 1984, to June 30, 2002, at Ericsson, Älvsjö, 10 minutes by commuter train from the center of Stockholm.

The language was designed for programming telecom systems, where handling concurrency, being fault tolerant, and having easy to maintain systems which are working 24×7 are some of the most important issues. After analyzing some of the available programming languages and technologies, the research group in charge of selecting the best language for Ericsson’s telecom systems, decided to implement a new one from scratch. About a decade later, after being used by Ericsson internally for several projects, in December 1998 the language was released as Open Source.

Erlang has several key features and advantages over other options:

  • It is declarative, with a high abstraction level. In fact it has a lot in common with functional languages like Haskell or ML. This means less code, and easiest to maintain programs. There are some articles claiming that Erlang programs have four to ten times less code than C or Java programs.
  • The language is process oriented (as opposed to object oriented), and handles massive concurrency and message passing. Concurrency and distribution are inside the language, not an addition as in Java or C.
  • Hot code loading. Systems can easily be upgraded without stopping.
  • Powerful fault tolerance mechanisms based in organizing the program in supervision trees.
  • Transparent and very natural distribution. A program designed for working in a machine can be distributed among several ones almost without changing the source code.
  • Independence from hardware and operating system.
  • Open Telecom Platform (OTP): a set of applications, libraries, design patterns (Erlang behaviours), and programming rules and all kind of things for making life easier for people programming in Erlang

As a summary: Erlang is a very interesting language, and an option you should have a look into if you have plans for implementing a telecom system or a control system, where the advantages of the technology are more powerful. I am not saying that Erlang cannot be used for other kind of projects (there are some examples of using it for banking or business management applications), but in this area is almost unbeatable.

I will talk more about this language from now on, in the Erlang section of the weblog.

How to become a hacker

Liked a lot Nat Friedman’s answer to the question “How can I become a hacker?” that he and Miguel de Icaza get all the time during his talks and travels: just get the code, open it, improve something and send the patch to the mailing list.

In the answer, I just miss the social part of being a hacker, including the Hacker Ethic and the Hacker Culture. I don’t see a hacker as someone that changes code, but as someone seing changing code as a way of changing the world.

I guess this is another distinction between Free Software and Open Source supporters.

Free Sound and Free Pics

The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License.

Stock.XCHNG is a Free pictures collection, where the users can browse, share pictures establishing the sharing conditions, and chatting with other members of the community.

Freedom gets more and more out of the software ghetto.

Gnome in the Uncyclopedia

According to their own definition: […] Uncyclopedia is an encyclopedia full of misinformation and utter lies. It’s sort of like Congress or Parliament. Unlike Congress or Parliament, however, we do have a sense of humor […]

This is the definition of the Gnome project: Gnome is a user interface for Linux created by the Young Mexican Miguel de Icaza when he was only 4 years old. At this time, Linux didn’t exist yet so it was pretty useless. The poor boy Miguel is suffering from a disease called Mono and before he dies it is his wish to get into the Guinness World Book of Records by collecting the most business cards. Time passes and, with the growing popularity of Linux, Gnome was developed again, against his rival KDE

They also give information on Acronym and Logo: Gnome stands for “Gtk Networking Object Model Environment” where Gtk stands for “Gimp Tool Kit” where Gimp stands for “GNU Image Manipulation Program” where GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix.” Therefore GNOME could be said to stand for “GNU is Not Unix GNU is Not Unix GNU is Not Unix Image Manipulation Program Tool Kit Networking Object Model Environment,” or “GnuGnuGnuimptknome,” and so on. Yes, the name is rather stupid, but what you would expect from a 4 years old kid eating tapas and tacos? They use the Gimp Tool Kit because gimp is another word for lame cripple and Gnome is lame and crippled. Gnome’s logo is a huge footprint, but it is not clearly established whether it is a huge memory footprint or a huge disk footprint.

It is pretty amazing the amount of free time people have 🙂

Mutt sidebar folder list

Evolution is a nice program with integrated mail, addressbook and calendaring; I have being using it for my personal e-mail for several years. But when it comes to my daily mail at work, where I receive and write hundreds of e-mails every day, and sometimes work remotely by ssh, I still prefer to use Mutt.

Mutt is fast, configurable and very powerful, but I always had missed a simple way of knowing the amount of read and unread messages in each of the mailboxes. Two days ago I discovered that Justin Hibbits and Thomer M. Gil had written a Mutt patch that implemented this feature.

The list of detailed features in the webpage is very clear:

  • A sidebar with a list of folders on the left side of the mutt window.
  • Hide/Unhide the sidebar with a single keystroke.
  • Every line in the sidebar lists a folder with the total and new number of messages in it.
  • Optionally highlight folders with new messages.
  • Scroll up and down the list of folders and open the selected folder.
  • Configurable sidebar width and colors.
  • Configurable key bindings.

After installing the Debian GNU/Linux package and following the very simple Documentation of the webpage, the sidebar folder works perfectly.

More infocenters with Gnome in Bahia, Brasil

In October and November, 200 infocenters more are going to be deployed in about 20 cities of the state of Bahia, expecting about 200,000 users. Each infocenter has 10 diskless computers using Debian-BR-CDD (a customization of Debian Stable) and LTSP, with Gnome as the desktop environment.

Some pics of the infocenters can be found here.

Related to this topic, it is really interesting to have a look into the talk that Marcos Mazoni, member of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party), CEO of CELEPAR (the Telecomunications company of the Paraná State), and Paraná State Strategic Issues Advisor, gave during the last edition of the Guadec Hispana (ogg audio, slides and summary of the talk are in Spanish). In the talk, he presented the impressive project for moving progressively to Free Software both in the public and the private sector of the Paraná State, and also talked about the problems of making this a permanent effort independent from the party in the government. As a terrible and quite unknown example, he talked about the famous Telecentros of Rio Grande do Sul, one of the first and most famous huge deployments of Gnome and Free Software, that are now being replaced by centers with proprietary software, after a change in the party in the government of that Brazilian state.

A compilation of the main Gnome deployments can be found in the Gnome Live wiki.