Open Source Daily Guide

Web Services for Remote Portal provides a pattern for the portal application to allocate portlets between portals. It is the facility to produce an interface to useful function that can be used throughout the enterprise with little or no changes to existing code. Almost all of the newest versions of commercial and open space portal products support it. The key procedure is similar to earlier web services – producer provides WSDL that directs the consumer on how to create a SOAP request. SOAP responses are obtained at the presentation level and the consumer then decides where to display them. Being simple, it provides whatever the enterprise needs to reuse portals across the enterprise.

• In no way guess a particular order of execution – thread execution order cannot be established and restricted by the OS scheduler. You cannot predict the sequence of threads flowing from one execution to the next, not even what thread comes next.
• If possible, use thread-local storage – to keep coordination to a minimum, use exclusive memory location.
• For better concurrency, you can change the algorithm – when programmers are given 2 or more choices of algorithm, they can rely on the asymptotic order of execution because it is almost always that the theoretic metric is connected with an application’s operation.

Following these rules, it will be easier to create strong concurrent solutions with less threading problems.

• Plan scalability to get the benefit of the increasing number of cores – write flexible codes that can handle an increase in cores because the more cores you have, the greater the possibility of expansion of data processing.
• Use thread-safe libraries – a hotspot computation can be executed through library call and should use a similar library function rather than a handwritten code. This ensures that library calls are thread-safe even if routines are called from 2 separate threads, you’re sure to get correct answers for both calls.
• Use of right threading model – if there is a need to use user-controlled threads, don’t use the more complex threads.

Creating a multithreaded application requires 4 major steps and of the four, the design and implementation part is not often discussed. The following rules will give you a better chance of writing the best and most useful threaded application:
• Identify accurate independent computations – simultaneous execution is not possible unless the executable similar operations can run independently of one another.
• Concurrent implementation should be at the highest level – during the analysis phase of the threading methodology, identify the hotspots – code segments that require the longest execution time – and if they can run parallel you will be able to get its maximum performance.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates is famously against open source software. While speaking about his upcoming plans to work on the Gates Foundation full-time, he was asked if he would consider open sources uses in health research, and he replied…

“There’s free software and then there’s open source,” he suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, “there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.”

Open source, he said, creates a license “so that nobody can ever improve the software,” he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business… He went back to the analogy of pharmaceuticals: “I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them,” he said, adding with a shrug: “That may seem radical.”

This great website can help you find open source alternatives to your favorite commercial products.

It also helps you decide whether to use open source or commercial software by offering these advantages: By choosing an open source product, the user obtains a number of advantages compared to commercial products. Besides the fact that open source is always available for free, it is a transparent application, in that you are invited exclusively behind the scenes to view all source code and thereby to suggest improvements to the product. Furthermore, every product is covered by a large dedicated network, or community, who is more than willing to answer any questions, you may have.

The prestigious Harvard Business Review recently published a case study called “Open Source: Salvation or Suicide” by Scott Wilson and Ajit Kambil of Deloitte Research. It features a fictional company whose CEO has never heard of open source and is a little frightened by the idea when it is presented to her. However their open source competitor proves that open source does have its advantages, such as faster development and testing of new features. The Linux Journal has a very comprehensive summary and review of the case study, including the comments of the four commentators: Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Eric Levin of Techno Source,  Gary Pisano, a professor at Harvard Business School, and finally attorney, Michael J. Bevilacqua.

Google recently closed the registration for its 3-month Summer of Code and announced that this year’s program brings together the talents of 1125 students who will be given stipends worth $5000 each to contribute to 175 Free and Open Source projects: Mozilla, GNOME, and MySQL, among others. The lucky students will even be allowed to use the work they did during the Summer of Code for course credit in their university classes, and of course they will be given free t-shirts.

If you’re interested in contributing or applying as a mentoring organization, it’s too late this year but try again next year!

If you work in IT security or are simply want to check out some computer security information you read about, OSVDB is a helpful site. You can browse their comprehensive database and even subscribe to categories you are interested in, such as wireless routers or Microsoft products.

The site’s goal is to provide accurate, detailed, current, and unbiased technical information on security vulnerabilities. It began as an ambitious project in 2003 and through the hard work of its many volunteers is now a very successful site, cataloging computer and internet vulnerabilities in an unbiased, open way, although this job is proving to be increasingly difficult because the amount of material to cover is simply too much for even the most devoted contributors. As with many open source projects, the site survives through donations and sponsors.

The huge global team behind the Open Office suite of products will be holding their annual conference in Beijing, China this year. The conference proper will be on October 15-17 with tours and activities on other dates. For the schedule of activities, location and other details, see this page.

According to their site:

This annual gathering is where representatives of all the community projects meet to celebrate and learn from the achievements of the past twelve months, and discuss how to meet the challenges of the next twelve. Come along and help the community make the world’s best open-source international office suite even better.