OStatic

I admit that BaconMap initially caught my eye because of the name (who doesn't like bacon?), but I gave it a second look once I saw what it was about. BaconMap is an nifty open source Web-based tracking tool designed to help IT departments better monitor their resources.

The idea for BaconMap was conceived by New Mexico State University's IT manager, Abel Sanchez, when he realized there had to be a better way to keep track of the department's servers, programs, databases, and service contact information than the giant whiteboard they were using at the time. He and his team decided to put together an application that would manage their deluge of cumulative information and calculate the relationships between the department's existing resources along the way.

Part of the high cost of attending a college or university is due to the exorbitant fees for textbooks. It's an $8 billion dollar market and schools often pass on the high cost of textbook purchases to their students. Once a school selects course books, it's up to professors to mold their curriculum accordingly, rather than offer reading material that suits their teaching style and course content.

In an effort to make curriculum content more accessible to both students and teachers, New York-based startup Flat World Knowledge is going after the textbook industry by offering expertly-written books that educational institutions are free to modify to meet their needs.

Whether you think that open source is gaining traction in the U.S. government or losing its foothold depends on which Web site post you read first today. ZDnet's Dana Blankenhorn makes a great case for why the recently formalized arrangement between the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI) and the Department of Defense is a huge deal for the advancement of open source at the government level. However, Tod Newcombe, editor of GoV-log: Editor's Video Blog, says government IT executives' enthusiasm over open source is waning.

Who's right?

The skyrocketing success of Apple's App Store and the recent launch for Research In Motion's (RIM) App World for BlackBerry is clear proof that people want third-party apps for their mobile phones. Unfortunately, developers with a brilliant idea for the next blockbuster app typically have to decide which platform to choose before they write their first bit of code -- iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile, etc.

The creators of PhoneGap think it's nonsense that developers have to write the same app in several different programming languages to reach the widest swath of mobile phone customers, so they developed an open source, cross-platorm framework that bridges the gaps among them.

Documentation is a vital part of any open source project but it's often overlooked because it's not very glamorous. It's difficult to find the time to keep up with a project's constant changes and find people to come up with skillfully-written material. While bigger projects like OpenOffice and Eclipse can afford to hire documentation specialists, in most cases it's a job that's left to the FOSS community at large.

Documentation is a topic that's touched on often at large open source conferences but now it's getting a turn in the spotlight. Registration is now open for the Writing Open Source Conference slated for June 12-14, 2009 in Owen Sound, Canada.

If the terms next action , someday/maybe list , and tickler file mean something to you then you know about David Allen and his popular productivity how-to book, Getting Things Done (GTD). Predictably, the book has spawned loads of computer-based applications to help you organize your life based on Allen's methods and principles.

Thinking Rock is a great open source app for implementing the GTD system. Licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), it works on Linux, Windows, and Mac -- perfect if you run different operating systems at work and home. Once you set up your contexts (@home, @work, @market), it's dead simple to process your actionable items and create to-do lists. A large empty window helps you collect your thoughts and ideas, then plug them into the correct lists via a drop-down menu.

Songbird, Mozilla's cross-platform media player, got a nice update this week. Aside from a few great performance enhancements like reduced CPU usage during playback, a smaller Mac download size, and configurable library caching, this point release has some dandy new features as well.

I love the tabbed browsing feature in Firefox so much that it's not uncommon for me to have upwards of 20 open at a time. Unfortunately, several of them are often blank pages because I've forgotten where I was planning to go once I open them.

I've always wished that Firefox would intuitively know that if I highlight an address on a Web page and open a new tab, it's probably because I want to map it. Apparently, I'm not the only one longing for that feature. Mozilla is developing an extension that takes its best guesses about why you've opened a new tab in your Firefox browser.

The next time someone tells you he or she is an open source enthusiast from head to toe, believe it -- that person might have collaborated on the creation of the very shoes they're wearing. Shoe designer John Fluevog devised a project called Open Source Footwear where shoe lovers comes together to develop the ideal shoe. If Fluevog likes your design, he'll add it to his product line and name it after you.

There are loads of terrific general Web publishing tools available these days, but some industries require specific features to meet unique needs. Omeka is a free and open source Web-based publishing platform designed with libraries, higher-level learning institutions, and museums in minds. Funded by philanthropic organizations and licensed under the GPL, Omeka makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog and is perfect for groups that don't have IT-specialists on the payroll.