The conference schedule for EuroPython 2010 (Monday July 19th until Thursday July 22nd) has now been made available, along with a convenient list of talks

Check out the program and register for PyCon Australia 2010, held Saturday 26th June and Sunday 27th June in Sydney, Australia.

Scientific computing conference comprised of tutorials, a general conference, keynote talks from David Beazley and Travis Oliphant, commercial tracks, and developer sprints. June 28 - July 3 on the University of Texas campus. See the conference website for details.

There will always be a place for relational databases, but non-relational solutions are proving to be fast, flexible, and scalable for many tasks.

Emacs+ - Eclipse Extensions for Emacs Expatriates - provides an enhanced Emacs-like experience in the Eclipse text editors. Includes:

• Keyboard Macros (including C-x C-k b)
• M-x command execution
• C-u universal-argument
• C-x b with search
• Emacs style point/mark selection with both global and buffer-local mark rings
• Emacs style search and query/replace with regular expressions
• A kill ring for deleted text

Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE) 11.1.1.5 for Galileo provides tools that make it easier to develop applications that utilize Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Database.

A while back, we noticed that lots of sites were starting to show 360 degree views of their products.

So a few months ago we added a feature to Picasa Web Albums that lets you flip through the photos in an album in “Full Screen View” or “Slideshow” mode by dragging left and right on the current photo. This works especially well if you put an object on a turntable, but it also works fine for other albums, like our featured shots from the 2010 Winter games.

The embedded album viewer also supports this feature:



So any albums you've embedded already support swiveling.

If you prefer to host a viewer and images on your own site, check out
the Swivel Viewer site at code.google.com, where you'll find an open source embeddable album viewer that also supports zooming and panning. Alternatively, you can go directly to the page about hosting your own viewer, or check out these other albums from the gallery:




We also posted tips on how to take your own 360 views, and even some sketches for our experimental high-volume object scanner:


Swivel viewers are fundamentally simple, but it’s tricky to communicate to the end user what they can do. I actually used the viewer for several weeks without realizing I could shift+drag to pan around while zoomed in! So we’re excited to see what UI enhancements you can come up with.

By Jason Holt, Google Street View Team

All good things come to an end, and so it is with my tenure at SourceForge and parent company Geeknet. I’ve enjoyed learning about the projects I’ve been writing about every day on the community blog, and I’m sorry I won’t be around to share the excitement as the developers debut new features as part of a total revamp of the forge. From now on you can expect to see fewer blog entries – probably mainly writeups of the projects of the month and the occasional news development.

As for me, I’m not certain yet what my next venture will be. (If you know of an organization that’s hiring an editor or community manager, or someone who needs freelance writing or editing, let me know!) I’ve had a great seven years at this company, working with many exceptionally talented individuals. So long and good luck to all my colleagues.

And to everyone: If you’d like to stay in touch, follow me on Twitter.

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Reproducible research is, or should be, a tenet of any scientific endeavor. In today’s world, it means integrating results of published computational experiments with software and the data necessary for reproducing the experiments. Madagascar, an open source software package for scientific analysis of large digital datasets such as those occurring in geophysics, focuses on promoting reproducible research. Madagascar is used primarily by exploration geophysicists, but it can be employed for other scientific applications as well.

Madagascar comes from the Stanford Exploration Project. With the help of his students, including Madagascar project leader Sergey Fomel, geophysicist Jon Claerbout created an environment for reproducible computational experiments at his lab there. The environment worked at Stanford but was too complicated and clumsy to be shared with other groups, Fomel says. In addition, published results quickly lost reproducibility because nobody maintained them. “During my Ph.D. studies at Stanford in the late 1990s, I was inspired by the free and open source software movement and decided that the proper way to promote reproducible research was by turning it into an open source project,” Fomel says. “I started working on Madagascar (previously named Regularly Sampled Format) in 2003. The project got publicly released under the GPL in 2006. Since then, around 25 people have joined the community and contributed to development.

“We use C in the number-crunching part of Madagascar for optimal efficiency and for staying close to the hardware. We provide APIs for users who want to develop scientific codes in other languages, including C++, Fortran, Matlab, Python, and Java. We use Python for gluing the number-crunching code together into data processing workflows and for integrating them with publications. SCons, a Python-based open source replacement for make, provides a particularly useful environment. Python is a clean and easy-to-learn scripting language, which seems perfect for the task.”

Fomel says he released the software as open source because the open source philosophy matches the thinking behind reproducible research. “Reproducible research is a way of communicating computational results in a scientifically meaningful way so that other people could reproduce, verify, and extend them. Open source software works on the same principle. It is a natural match.

“SourceForge.net was attractive for us because it has the reputation for hosting famous open source projects and because it provides all the necessary tools for organizing an open source community: the Subversion server, the file server, mailing lists, etc. However, we miss the Compile Farm feature, which was useful for testing installation on different platforms and was one of the original attractions.”

Madagascar reached a big milestone last week with its release of version 1.0. “We had a particular goal for 1.0,” Fomel says, “which was a system for automatic testing. Once a computational result is archived in a reproducible form, it serves as a regression test for further development. We wanted a system for running such tests automatically. When a system like that was developed (in a community effort, with invaluable contributions from Joe Dellinger, Jim Jennings, and Nick Vlad), we could release 1.0.”

But this version is just one milestone for the project, Fomel says. “The collection of reproducible research papers will expand. We hope to diversify from geophysics to other scientific fields that work with large multidimensional data. There will be better tools for large-scale parallel computations and better documentation for existing tools. We have been doing two releases per year, which seems to catch major improvements, but that rate might accelerate.

“We could definitely use some help. New scientific applications, graphical user interfaces, better visualization, a cleaner Python framework are some of the areas where someone could contribute. The best way to get in touch is by writing to the mailing lists for users or developers.”

SourceMate is the new must-have companion tool for serious Flash and Flex developers.

Features include code generation, refactoring, code templates (i.e. snippets), metadata tag support, and more.

See more at www.elementriver.com/sourcemate

Code Rocket Eclipse is a code visualization and documentation tool designed to reduce software development time and costs. It supports the Java programming language and integrates with Eclipse.

Excelsior JET enables developers to export Eclipse RCP applications in native code form and avoid the distribution of the easy-to-hack jar files altogether.

Test your power of persuasion. Grab your video camera, and convince your peers why you deserve to go to Oracle OpenWorld, JavaOne or Oracle Develop for FREE.The community will pick the top five finalists in each category (Oracle OpenWorld, JavaOne, and Oracle Develop), and a panel of Oracle judges will pick the final three winners (one for each category).Having trouble thinking of what to say? Tell your peers what session, track, or event you can’t miss out on. Explain how much Oracle OpenWorld, JavaOne, or Oracle Develop will help further your career and/or development skills. EXTRA Bonus - Everyone who submits a valid video entry will get a discount code for Early Bird pricing to use at time of registration for Oracle OpenWorld or JavaOne and Oracle Develop. This is a savings of $400 or more over the onsite price! Learn more or submit your video today! No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited. Open to legal residents of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, a European Union member state, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Malaysia, Panama, Peru, Russia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Thailand, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine, the United States, and Venezuela. 18 years or older. Entrants are responsible for complying with their employers' policies regarding acceptance of promotional items. Entries accepted from 7/27/10 to 8/09/10. One winners will receive a Oracle OpenWorld full conference pass (US$1595.00) and two winners will receive a JavaOne and Oracle Develop full conference pass (US$1395). For complete Official Rules, visit https://mix.oracle.com/events/videochallenge/rules. Sponsored by Oracle, Inc.

The VisualVM team would like to announce the availability of the VisualVM 1.3. VisualVM 1.3 introduces many new features, the most significant are: Sampler in the core tool, customizable Sampler and Profiler presets Taking remote heap dumps Monitoring remote hosts via a JMX-enabled application Tracer framework and probes for detailed application monitoring Using the latest NetBeans Platform and profiler 6.9 Further information about the release is available in the Release Notes, details about the new features are described on the Official NetBeans Profiler and VisualVM Blog. The bits can be downloaded at https://visualvm.dev.java.net.

This tutorial unit demonstrates how to implement transactional logic using EJB 3 in the NetBeans IDE.

GlassFish evangelist Arun Gupta's 5-part screencast shows how NetBeans IDE 6.9 provides comprehensive tooling for Java EE 6 & GlassFish 3.

Maven & OSGi support. Easy portability. Rich documentation. Developer Edvin Syse outlines reasons why switching to the NetBeans Platform was a no-brainer for his team.

Janitza Electronics, a German company, discovers the flexibility and power of using the NetBeans Platform for Swing applications.