GoogleCL Linux CLI Tools

For all the command line addicts out there, Google has released GoogleCL a command line utility for accessing their online services such as YouTube, Blogger, Calender, Contacts, Google Docs and Picasa.

Jason Holt (Google Street View Team) and Tom Miller (former Google Street View Intern) write:

“Ever wanted to upload a folder full of photos to Picasa from a command prompt? We did, a lot, last summer. It made us want to say:

$ google picasa create --title "My album" ~/Photos/vacation/*.jpg

So we wrote a program to do that, and a whole lot more”.

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HotSSH

Useful applications you’ve never heard of – part # 1

There are many applications available for Linux that have not yet made the mainstream in terms of recognition, indeed there are many that never will. However, from the plethora of new applications floating around in the ether, there are some real gems to be found.

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Samsung GT-S8500

Although one could be forgiven for believing that the only mobile phone worth having is an iPhone, as it turns out there are better phones on the market and surprise! surprise! they run Linux! A new release by Samsung is the GT-S8500 which runs a mobile version of Linux called Bada.

To be realistic, many of these new phones are all very similar and differences often come down to hardware specification, which is generally good news for Linux based smart phones.  Once you have a fairly level playing field in terms of software, given the choice of Samsung, Sony or Apple hardware, I’m pretty sure my choice would be pretty foregone conclusion.

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UK Government and OS

The Tory party made noises prior and during the election about potentially using or even preferring Open Source as one of their money saving schemes, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that the ‘actual’ cost of software involved in IT projects is generally not one of the major costs involved. For example the new UK Supreme Court website reportedly cost £360,000 to develop (although you might be forgiven for thinking it was done with a free WordPress template in someone’s kitchen over a weekend)  and whether Open Source was used or not would have had little impact on the overall cost of the project.

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New website!

After many years of running on Plone we’ve finally made the break and are now working on this WordPress based version of the website. Initially it won’t have the same amount of content but hopefully ease of use and presentation will make up for this in the short term.

I’ve just managed to get the hang of buttons, feature boxes and columns using this new theme and hopefully the front page and slider is looking pretty reasonable, that just leaves the rest of the site to do!

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Google’s open codec arrives!

Google has now added it’s new Open Source VP8 video codec to the latest developer build of it’s Chrome web browser. The codec has been available to Mozilla and Opera developers for a while and hit Chrome in late may as of build 6.0.422.0.

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Novell on the rails again

It looks like Novell are in trouble again after their second quarter results slumped after just about breaking even in the previous quarter. Revenues for Q2 were down to $204m, a drop of 5.4 percent, which is bucking the trend for Linux sellers as Redhat are experiencing just the opposite with sales up to $195m, with an increase in net income of over 40 percent.

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