Introducing WinSCP

WinSCP is an open source free SFTP client, FTP client, WebDAV client and SCP client for Windows. Its main function is file transfer between a local and a remote computer. Beyond this, WinSCP offers scripting and basic file manager functionality.

via Introducing WinSCP :: WinSCP.

This is a very useful program to get files off a PC and onto a Linux server which supports these services out of the box.  I find Samba to be too clunky, unreliable, and very noisy on an open network by broadcasting packets to everyone.  Only now did I have a need for something like this and SCP solves my problem and is more secure and easier to use than standard ftp.   I still map drives using Samba on my closed network but I may try out the windows version of sshfs sometime in the future.   The user interface on this tool is very intuitive and works well.

Web app open source alternatives

You can replace a number of popular web apps with solid open source alternatives. If you want to embrace your inner geek, you can even run many of them on your own web server. Or, you can use hosted versions of those apps which will only set you back a few dollars a month.

Let’s take a look at 5 open source alternatives to some popular web apps.

via Web app open source alternatives | Opensource.com.

I have been pleased with Owncloud which he lists as one of the five.  Its install was straightforward and it works allowing for easy file sync with my android tablet using their app as a client and their software on a specified server.

Here’s another one of the five I hadn’t heard before which prompted me to repost this article here:

ownStaGram is a self hosted replacement for Instagram. All you need is a web server that runs PHP and mySQL, and you can install it in a few minutes. From there, you can upload photos from your computer to your instance of ownStaGram. Or, you can use the Android app (which includes several of those hackneyed Instagram-like filters).

I will give ownStaGram a try and post my thoughts soon.

Update:  I ran ownStaGram on a Fedora 19 build running php 5.5 and a warning message popped up about a deprecated mysql connect method.  This is clearly a problem that hasn’t been fixed in quite awhile.  Tried to download their app from Google Play but couldn’t find it.  Some of the comments on the web version of Google Play suggested it was a buggy app which may be why it got pulled.

ownStaGram is a good concept.  I’d love to be able to snap a pic and have it automatically upload onto my local “cloud” device connected only to the local wifi.

RStudio – About

RStudio provides open source and enterprise-ready professional software for the R statistical computing environment. We started RStudio because we were excited and inspired by R. RStudio products, including RStudio IDE and the web application framework RStudio Shiny, simplify R application creation and web deployment for data scientists and data analysts.

via RStudio – About.

7 open source control-panel

We have collection of more than 1 Million open source products ranging from Enterprise product to small libraries in all platforms. We aggregate information from all open source repositories. Search and find the best for your needs.

via 7 open source control-panel.

This site looks like an interesting resource to find useful open source packages.  Webmin is listed as second in this list of 7 control panels.  I have been using Webmin forever but might try out ISPConfig.  Although something is listed on this site I always download packages from sourceforge.net.

MediaGoblin

MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc. It’s also:

  • The perfect tool to show and share your media!
  • Building tools to empower the world through decentralization!
  • Built for extensibility. Multiple media types, including video support!

via MediaGoblin.

ClipIt

ClipIt is a lightweight, fully featured GTK+ clipboard manager. It was forked from Parcellite (http://parcellite.sourceforge.net), adding additional features and bugfixes to the project. Please also see http://clipit.rspwn.com/

via ClipIt | Free Development software downloads at SourceForge.net.

Clipboard managers can be useful when doing a lot of copy/pastes.  I noticed Clipit as part of the standard Fedora 19 install in one of my virtual machines.  They had no rpm package for Fedora 14 so I compiled the source and it works great.  It’s a nice no nonsense useful tool.

Open Source Programming to the Software-Defined Network

Today, OpenDaylight is an open source platform for network programmability to enable SDN and create a solid foundation for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) for networks at any size and scale. OpenDaylight software is a combination of components including a fully pluggable controller, interfaces, protocol plug-ins, and applications. The Northbound (programmatic) and Southbound (implementation) interfaces are meant to be clearly defined and documented APIs for network applications.

via OpenDaylight: Open Source Programming to the Software-Defined Network.

OpenDaylight delivered its first developer release, Hydrogen, on February 5th, 2014.

Unison File Synchronizer

Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.

Unison shares a number of features with tools such as configuration management packages (CVS, PRCS, Subversion, BitKeeper, etc.), distributed filesystems (Coda, etc.), uni-directional mirroring utilities (rsync, etc.), and other synchronizers (Intellisync, Reconcile, etc).

via Unison File Synchronizer.

Opus Codec

Opus 1.1 includes:

  • new analysis code and tuning that significantly improves encoding quality, especially for variable-bitrate (VBR),
  • automatic detection of speech or music to decide which encoding mode to use,
  • surround with good quality at 128 kbps for 5.1 and usable down to 48 kbps, and
  • speed improvements on all architectures, especially ARM, where decoding uses around 40% less CPU and encoding uses around 30% less CPU.

These improvements are explained in more details in Monty’s demo (updated from the 1.1 beta demo).

via Opus Codec.

From the Xiph.org developers

Opus is a codec designed for interactive usages, such as VoIP, telepresence, and remote jamming, that require very low latency. In this test Opus is running with 22.5ms of total latency but the codec can go as low as 5ms. Making a codec for low latency requires serious tradeoffs which reduce efficiency, so it might seem a bit strange to test it against a collection of state-of-the-art codecs which are completely unsuitable for these low-latency applications.