Hackers, Get Ready! LEGO Group Announces Open Source Firmware, Developer Kits for LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT

Consumer-directed robotics experience creation to enter “NXT” phase with open firmware, Software, Hardware and Bluetooth Developer Kits to launch in August

ENFIELD, Conn. (May 1, 2006) – The LEGO Group today announced that for the first time it will release as open source the firmware of the LEGO® MINDSTORMS® microprocessor – the new NXT brick – the core component of its next generation robotics toolset. Additionally, the company announced that it will release Software, Hardware and Bluetooth Developer Kits to its growing global audience of robotics enthusiasts. The firmware code and three developer kits will be available in August 2006 in the “Extreme” section of www.mindstorms.com, in conjunction with the retail availability of LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT.

• LEGO.com MINDSTORMS Press NXT : Open Source Announcement

• My first example test script

“IT services provider Atos Origin has predicted a forthcoming change in the software landscape based on the results of a survey it has carried out in conjunction with the UK’s National Computing Centre. The survey, which was compiled through over 140 web-based questionnaires completed by senior UK IT professionals in May and June, indicated that over 60% believe open source will either increase its presence in certain business areas
or be a fundamental component in core IT systems, while
73% expect open source to develop within their organizations’ IT strategy over the next five years.”

Slashdot | Atos Origin Predicts Open Source Landscape

WordPress Development Blog – WordPress 1.5.2

At OSCON 2005 there was a lot of interest in Ruby. Ruby is the hot new? language popularised by Rails. Rails is derived from/inspired by Basecamp.

What was more surpising to me, as a Java developer, was the way Java has come in from the cold. There were lots and lots of Java sessions. The daily keynotes discussed Java. Last year there was little Java and the year before that none. Two open source Java stacks, gcj/classpath and Apache Harmony had sessions and generated a lot of excitement. The Apache Geronimo guys announced Geronimo M4 which passes the J2EE 1.4 TCK, and is open source. Java seems to be front and centre. In many other sessions constant comparisons were made with Java. Java is the reference language…

Read Greg’s complete report:
Greg Luck’s WebLog: OSCON2005: Ruby is hot, Java is cool, C# is neither

p.s.: I will sadly not attend, since I have postponed hollidays for the not-so-near future.

COPYFIGHT

I’m currently reading Joel’s latest book, so obviously this had to be posted promptly

Doctor O writes “Joel Spolsky (of joelonsoftware
fame) has some good points and fun with numbers on the quality of programmers and whether it is more profitable to go with cheap or good programmers. His point is that a good programmer will simply create code of a quality that average programmers never can create. An interesting read.”

Slashdot | Hiring Good Programmers Matters

The Mozilla Foundation has announced the creation of the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary that will continue the development, distribution and marketing of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation will be a taxable entity (that is, a for-profit rather than a non-profit) but the Foundation is eager to emphasise that it will pursue the same public benefit goals as the Foundation itself and will not be driven purely by revenue goals.

The change will not affect the day-to-day development of Mozilla, with the current system of module owners, drivers, reviewers and super-reviewers staying in place. End-users are unlikely to notice any difference either, though the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation will eventually have separate websites. At the moment, only Firefox and Thunderbird will be developed under the auspices of the Mozilla Corporation; other projects, such as Camino and SeaMonkey, will continue to be overseen by the Mozilla Foundation…

Full story:
Mozilla Foundation Announces Creation of Mozilla Corporation – MozillaZine Talkback

Mozilla Foundation Reorganization [RSS]

Originally the blog was intended to be non-personal, because I wanted to get co-writers to join in. But I decided to keep it personal with the option of spawning new blogs in the future with other people.

I wanted to share the great stuff I find on the net, and after years of hesitating I finally created this blog as a platform for that goal, and as such I have succeded very nice indeed, I love this platform so much that I have almost dropped making my own blogging system, as was the original intention – WordPress basically works like a dream (can be a bitch to setup, when you go to the more advanced areas) and I am generally amazed and crazed about the technologies that the blogging communities has created or actively promoted (Technorati, Flickr, BlogLines, GeoURL, Podcasting (Audio Blogs), FeedBurner, Creative Commons, XML / RDF / RSS, and tons of other stuff!).

In total there are currently 444 posts by me, and 20 comments posted by readers, including my responses (not mentioning the hundreds of comment-spams I recieved while franticly trying to create and configure solid filters), so I’m guessing people aren’t too chatty and debateful while reading this blog, either that or nobody is reading it!! haha
Well, the actual fact is that I mostly post other folks posts, mainly from slashdot.org and other sources I visit for news and info about stuff that matters in any way or form. I will try to write more myself, but sometimes I sacrifice it in order to deliver more important news, since as I said before, my goal is to inform about stuff that happens out there, it has never been my goal to be a reporter, I see it more like a messenger of coolness, or info-filter of boredom and info-overload.

I have learned much in the past year, and I feel prepared to bring my log into another year of glory, and urge you all to contribute with comments, questions and what else you come with. I have planned to make a new WordPress Theme and ofcourse it will be dark purple with sparkling anim-gif stars all-over!!! ( Coz that’s what a real theme is about! ) Or maybe it will be mind-blowingly cool in other ways, wait and see, hopefully I will be friendly enough to publish it in the CodePit.

The existing theme originated from my first edition of this blog running Moveable Type, but I decided to look for a system which was licensed under a true open source, and which was not written in Perl which I have little experience with. Then I found WordPress and hacked my existing look into it, improving on it as I went along. Finally this spring WordPress 1.5 was released which featured a real “Theme System API”, which allows you to easily switch the complete look and feel of a WordPress site.

On the personal side, no radical changes this last year. I got a new job at Valtech in may, so I’m back from the mobile Internet business into the good old Desktop Internet business with big screen systems and mozilla/firefox/safari etc. to play/mess around with, working on some large corporate website portals, that I couldn’t possibly mention here, but it’s Java Enterprise and Web Standards based so I’m basically a happy man on planet earth.

If you actually (omg!) read this far, well congratulations, now post a comment full of ideas and praise!

Here’s the intro text from the Inkscape Website:

Inkscape is an open source drawing tool with capabilities similar to
Illustrator, Freehand, and CorelDraw that uses the W3C standard scalable vector graphics format (SVG). Some supported SVG features include basic shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, and grouping. In addition, Inkscape supports Creative Commons meta-data, node-editing, layers, complex path operations, text-on-path, and SVG XML editing. It also imports several formats like EPS, Postscript, JPEG, PNG, BMP, and TIFF and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.

Inkscape’s main motivation is to provide the Open Source community with a fully W3C compliant XML, SVG, and CSS2 drawing tool. Additional planned work includes conversion of the codebase from C/Gtk to C++/Gtkmm, emphasizing a lightweight core with powerful features added through an extension mechanism, and the establishment of a friendly, open, community-oriented development process.

* Inkscape.org – Draw Freely

* Slashdot | Inkscape 0.42: The Ultimate Answer