Tag Archives: sourceforge

ApacheCon welcomes SourceForge back for another year

The following guest post appears on the SourceForge blog today. I’m personally very pleased to welcome SourceForge back to ApacheCon for another year.

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The Apache Software Foundation is pleased to announce ApacheCon US 2014, which we’re presenting in conjunction with the Linux Foundation. The conference will be held in Denver, Colorado, and features three days, ten tracks of content on more than 70 of the Apache Software Foundation’s Open Source projects, including Apache OpenOffice, Apache Hadoop, Apache Lucene, and many others.

We’re especially pleased to welcome SourceForge as a media partner for this event.

See http://na.apachecon.com/ for the full schedule, as well as the evening events, BOFs, Lightning Talks, and project summits.

Co-located with the event is the Cloudstack Collaboration Conference – http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/cloudstack-collaboration-conference-north-america – the best place to learn about Apache CloudStack.

Apache OpenOffice – http://openoffice.apache.org/ – has an entire day of content, including both technical and community talks.

Hadoop, and its ecosystem of Big Data projects, has more than five full days of content (two tracks on two days, one track on the other).

Other projects, such as Cordova, Tomcat, and the Apache http server, have a fully day, or two, of content.

If you want to learn more about Apache Allura (Incubating), an Open Source software forge (and also the code that runs SourceForge) we’ll have two presentations about Allura, by two of the engineers who work on that code: Dave Brondsema and Wayne Witzel. Learn how to use Allura to develop your own projects, and join the community to make the platform even better.

This is the place to come if you rely on any of the projects of the Apache Software Foundation, and if you want to hang out with the men and women who develop them. We’ve been doing this event since 1998, and this promises to be the best one yet, with more content than we’ve ever presented before.

SourceForge Allura submitted to the Apache Incubator!

Today we submitted Allura to be considered for the Apache Software Foundation Incubator program.

Allura is the software that powers SourceForge’s developer experience. It offers source code hosting, discussion forums, issue ticket tracking, wiki, mailing lists, and much more. It’s been Open Source from day one under the Apache License, and we’ve decided that we want so much more.

By submitting Allura to the Apache Incubator, we hope to draw an even wider community of developers who can advance the feature set and tailor the framework to their needs. With the flexibility and extensibility Allura allows, developers are free to use any number of the popular source code management tools, including: Git, SVN, or Mercurial. We are indeed willing to turn our own open source platform in a tool that everyone can use and extend, and we believe Apache is the best place to steward the process.

The Apache Software Foundation is a non-profit that provides the legal and technical environment for Open Source projects to flourish. The Incubator is the mechanism for accepting new projects into the foundation. Today we’ve submitted our proposal to the Incubator, and over the coming weeks and months, will continue building a larger community around Allura.

We’re very excited about this step and think that it’s going to be a big turning point in the history of SourceForge. Many of us are thrilled because we have been huge Apache fans for more than a decade, and have been actively working to support the Apache OpenOffice podling. We look forward to collaborating with some of the brightest people in the world, and benefiting the thousands of Open Source projects that are hosted at SourceForge. It’s clearly the best of all possible worlds.

You can read more about Allura features, and you can read more about the Apache Incubator. We hope to be joining a truly stellar group of projects in the Incubator.

If you want to participate in the Allura development, there are many ways for you to get involved. There’s the source code, documentation, UI/UX, and just using it and telling us what you like or don’t like. We’d love to have you as part of the Allura development community.

Moving Furniture

I work from home, and our house is not enormous. When I first started working at home, we put a desk into our bedroom, and got a shoji screen to partition the room into two rooms. It’s worked pretty well, but there are some drawbacks to the room layout. The room felt rather cramped, and because the desk was just a couple of inches too tall, we could no longer open the window any more.

I’ve been working that way for a little over two years now, and a few days ago we decided to try to rearrange.

The trouble is, with a lot of bulky furniture, and not much maneuvering space, it’s not something you really want to experiment with.

Open Source to the rescue. We downloaded Sweet Home 3D, from SourceForge, measured all of the furniture in the room, and then started moving it around.

Sweet Home 3D has a library of furniture items that you can resize to exactly the right dimensions. You put the outlets on the wall, as well as the pictures, so that you can see whether furniture will block outlets, and whether you’re going to have to rehang any of the paintings. You can position things in three dimensions, so you can set lamps on top of tables, or stack crates, and you can see all of this in a 3D model so you know what it’s going to look like.

rearranged_room
Rather than spending a few hours hurting our backs, we were able to position things exactly as we want them, and plan out how we were going to get things there with the minimal amount of effort.

So, my desk is no longer by the window. (Yes, I could see the squirrels, and they were, indeed, merry.) but also the room feels much more open, and we’re not always dodging one another when we walk around the room. The lighting is better, and best of all, I don’t hurt all over from having to move the furniture two or three times to get it right.

In addition to the built-in objects, Sweet Home has a community website where people can contribute their creations. I imported an office chair from the website, because the one that was built in didn’t look right. There’s also trees, cars, and people, if you want to make a model of your entire house and surrounding land.

downloadable_objects

You can even create a video walkthrough of your room by selecting places to stand, and what direction to look. The software does the rest, connecting the positions smoothly to create a view of the room.

You can see an example of this below – the desk isn’t quite right, and I couldn’t find a shoji screen, but the general layout is right.

So, over all, four thumbs up from the Bowen moving team. I start work today in my “new” office, and although there’s still a lot of stuff still to be put away, it’s nice to have it done with so easily.