OStatic

People attending day three of Ubuntu Open Week today were treated to a full day of of some of the most diverse sessions yet. We've been following the event this week, which consists of IRC sessions on many topics.

Today, from a Q & A session featuring Community Manager Jono Bacon, to a look at how to produce podcasts in Ubuntu, there were all sorts of cool things to learn about during the course of another busy program at the online conference.

If you find yourself increasingly working with video online, you're not alone. It's gotten much easier to add video functionality to applications, blogs, and much more. The open source community has created many excellent applications and utilities for working with video and animation. Over on WebWorkerDaily, I have a post up titled 6 Free Apps and Utilities for Working with Online Video. It covers top-notch, free applications you can look into, including Blender, Xvid, and more. Not all of them are open source, but most of them are. Check it out.

OStatic's sister, the GigaOm Network, has a special event coming up on June 25th, focused on cloud computing and the infrastructure behind it: Structure 08. Developed by award-winning tech writer Om Malik, the conference will help businesses plan future computing infrastructure needs. Structure 08 features top speakers, including Amazon VP and CTO Werner Vogels, Level 3 Communications president James Crowe, and Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos. OStatic staff will be on hand, there will be workshops on topics including Google App Engine, and the speakers will also include Larry Roberts, one of the fathers of the Internet. You can register for the event online. Hope to see you there!

Although it's still listed as a beta book on the Pragmatic Bookshelf web site, Mike Clark's Advanced Rails Recipes is finished and getting ready to ship. Thanks to Pragmatic's excellent beta program for books (you get to read in-progress PDFs while the author is finishing the book), I've had plenty of time to work with this one already.

My verdict: the book is a winner, and its very existence says good things about the growing Rails community.

There appears to be no stopping the success Asus is having with its Eee PC subnotebooks. The company is forecasting this week that it will nearly double shipments of the svelte, low-cost machines in the second quarter. Shipments will rise to between 1.2 million to 1.3 million units, the company says, and it expects to move a whopping 5 million units this year. To put that in perspective, Asus shipped 350,000 units in the fourth quarter. Originally all Linux-based, the company will deliver a Windows-based Eee PC in early May. Can we expect the Linux versions to stick around?

On the heels of our prediction, open source Java is quickly heading into Linux distros. Sun Microsystems, Canonical and Red Hat have announced the inclusion of OpenJDK-based implementations in Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support Server and Desktop editions.....Microsoft is using open source to extend systems management to Linux.....Sun Microsystems' chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, discusses his company's move to 100 percent open source software development.....Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth weighs in on MicroHoo.....

Insoshi, released yesterday as an open-source framework for creating social networks, represents another step forward not just for open source software, but also for the commoditization of what used to be difficult-to-implement, proprietary technologies.

With Insoshi (and other frameworks, such as Lovd by Less), anyone can create a social network on his or her own server.

Ubuntu Open Week continued today with a number of presentations aimed at developers and software engineers. As mentioned before here, the week consists of IRC get-togethers online on a whole range of different topics, many of them pertaining to the new release of Ubuntu.

As the event continued, there were also sessions that offered inside looks at teams within the Ubuntu community and how they work together to create server software and manage security.

By Nate D'Amico

For the Eclipse lovers out there, IBM has another free toy for you to experiment with. It's geared toward web application development, and is dubbed Project Zero. With Project Zero, IBM hopes to entice Java, PHP, and Groovy developers to use its platform for creating next generation web applications. Among the interesting aspects of Project Zero, developers are encouraged to compile PHP into Java classes to have it run in the same Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as the rest of Project Zero's Java code. The project leverages communities in ways that open sourcers will recognize.

Internet telephony startup Ribbit announced today that one of its long-standing proof of concept projects is now available: an integration with Salesforce.com's on-demand customer relationship management applications. Ribbit-handled voice messages can now be integrated with Salesforce in various ways, including having them converted to text, and much more. While there is proof of concept behind this integration for Ribbit and its commercial efforts, there is also proof of concept here for open source developers who have their eyes on the growing synergies between online telephony and open source.