W3m: Simple Text-Based Web Browser

w3m is simple Text-Based Browser support for SSL Connetions, Tables, and frame color and inline images on suitable terminal. Generally, it renders pages in a form as true to their original layout as possible. With w3m you can browse web pages through a terminal emulator window (xterm, rxvt or something like that). Moreover, w3m can be used as a text formatting tool which typesets HTML into plain text.

W3m Commands also running on Unix Based (Solaris, SunOS, HP-UX, Linux, FreeBSD, and EWS4800)

Generating Ext JS and Java CRUD Applications with CDB.

Clear Data Builder for Ext JS (CDBExt) is an open source tool that automatically builds Ext JS/Java EE CRUD applications given one or more annotated Java interfaces. The generated JavaScript and Java code enforce best Ext JS and Java EE practices and is deployed on the development version of the Tomcat ready to run. A tiny library of Ext JS components accompanying CDBExt – Clear components – enables transactional data sync with the application server, including deeply nested hierarchical data transaction, features not supported in native Ext JS 4.

Google's Chrome OS Aura

This new interface, Aura, is both a new desktop window manager and shell environment. Aura is an optional replacement for last year’s Chrome OS single Web browser interface. With it you can have multiple, small browser windows, each with its own set of tabs, against a desktop screen background. These windows can be overlapped like the Windows on older desktops such as GNOME 2.x, Windows 7 or Mac OS X.

You also get, like OS X’s dock, a status bar on the bottom of the screen with icons for each of the open windows and system status displays for as the clock and battery. When you maximize a window to full screen, the task bar vanishes. You can always bring it back though by moving your pointer down to the screen’s bottom.

You can also tear off browser tabs and drag their windows to new positions or merge tab with another window’s tab strip. Each window also gets a rectangle in the upper right that you can toggle to switch between its maximized and smaller displays. You can also resize windows by dragging any edge. If you click on an icon in the dock you’ll see icons for all your installed apps and bookmarks. You can also find these on Chrome OS’ new-tab page.

If Aura sounds familiar, it should. While so many of the new operating systems want to force you to have only one application at a time in front of your face, Chrome OS is returning to the older way of enabling you to have multiple windows up at once. This is a win as far as I’m concerned.

This latest edition of Chrome OS, 19.0.1048.17, includes numerous security fixes. In addition, it now includes better support for multiple monitors and it provides native support for the tar, gz, and bzip2 compressed file archive formats.

This is a developer’s release, so it’s for power-users only. While technically it’s only available for users who already own a Acer AC700 or Samsung Series 5 Chromebook–the first Chromebooks, the CR-48s, are not supported in this release-you can also run Chrome OS from a USB stick or in a VirtualBox virtual machine.

Red Hat warily hopeful about Microsoft's Open Technologies Inc

Linux leader Red Hat today applauded Microsoft’s recent launch of an open technologies subsidiary but is clearly taking a wait and see attitude.

Naturally. In the past, Microsoft described Linux and open source as a “cancer” on the software industry. Red Hat pointed out that the path to openness was not without opposition. With that it mind, Red Hat today penned a warily hopeful response to the news.

Citrix Throws a Spanner in the Cloud Market

Citrix has announced that it is submitting the popular CloudStack platform to Apache Foundation. This comes as a surprise as Citrix has acquired Cloud.com only last year by investing a few hundreds of millions of dollars!

With this, Citrix is also dumping its own distribution of OpenStack called Project Olympus. This move has shaken the industry and the analysts. Till now, OpenStack enjoyed all the attention and is aiming to become the Open Source Cloud monopoly. Though Eucalyptus has been around for a while, it failed to garner as much industry support as OpenStack. With CloudStack moving to Apache Foundation’s stable, there comes a credible and serious open source Cloud offering which can be a true alternative to OpenStack. This announcement will certainly force Rackspace to relook at their strategy. Rackspace has been successful in rallying the bigwigs of the industry including NASA, AT&T, HP, Dell, NetApp, Akamai, SoftLayer and Internap around OpenStack with a hope to take Amazon Web Services head on. But the latest announcement from Citrix changes the whole equation!

Open Source CloudStack 3.0 Is Coming

Over the last year I have been working on the CloudStack Open Source Cloud Computing project. This month we are getting ready to launch CloudStack 3.0 which really raises the bar for cloud computing platforms.  So what is CloudStack? It is an infrastructure-as-a-service(IaaS) platform that orchestrates virtualized servers into an elastic compute environment. The project was originally developed by Cloud.com and is now sponsored by Citrix since they acquired Cloud.com in July of 2011.

How Open Source Comments (by Programming Language)

We recently looked at the commenting practice of active working open source projects. It is quite impressive: The average comment density of open source is around 19%. (Comment density = comment lines / (comment lines + source code lines)). That is much more documentation than most people thought!

However, such a rough number needs discussion. Here, I look at the comment density on a programming language basis. As it turns out, the comment density of active open source projects varies by programming language. Java is leading the bunch, but that needs further discussion.

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