Open Source Bridge

If you've ever written any code to authenticate wtih Twitter, you may have been confused by all the signature methods and base strings. You'll be happy to know that OAuth 2 has vastly simplified the process, but at what cost?

A look at the tools and practices used at Facebook to support the #2 site in the world.

It may seem obvious to some, but the socialist imagery that Mozilla uses isn't accidental. Nor is the grounding of Activity Streams in socialist theory. What do these things have to do with open source an its future? A lot, and I'll paint a picture to tell you how it should play out.

Agile processes can be very successful for both clients and developers, but the rapid pace and the lack of detailed long-term plans can make it difficult to design and build high quality user experiences. We'll talk about good ways to do that.

The problem: My HVAC system is not balanced. Easy but boring solution: Hire a qualified contractor to fix it. More interesting solution: Use knowledge from dusty undergrad degree in electronics to cobble together some simple wireless temperature sensors using XBee modules and distribute them around the house. Then use Java programming knowledge to build up a monitoring system using open source software. Attempt to use readings from temperature sensors to figure out what's going on and fix it. This presentation will delve into the hardware and software aspects of the system, although with more emphasis on the software and the role that packages such as Apache Felix and Apache Mina play in the system.

Touchscreen is a platform for creating interactive kiosk and dashboard displays. It powers presentations for visitors to the Open Source Lab's data center and the network operations center. Come learn how touchscreen works and how to use it for your own display screens.

Interested in setting up your own test automation infrastructure? This is what you need to know.

From creating remote-sensing CubeSats to analyzing aerogel: how the public is hacking into open source space exploration.

Thomas Jefferson envisioned a nation of self-sufficient citizen farmers; programmers like Alan Kay and Bill Atkinson tried to help us code as easily as we might hang a poster on the wall. What happened to the HyperCard ideal? Have we settled for consumption over creation? I will explore the question through a case study, surveying the state of citizen programming in 2010 — from CouchApps to Shoes to plain-jane HTML5+JS to HyperCard 2.4 — and try to convince all comers that realizing the dream of the citizen coder is vital to continuing the ideals of open source.

You've launched your new web site and it's starting to get some attention. You've tuned your database and optimized your HTTP daemon, but what if it's not enough to keep up with all the hits you're getting? We'd like to introduce you to your two new best friends: Varnish and Pressflow.

Augmented Reality and Geolocation have been hot topics this year, but there has often been a confusion between aesthetics vs. practicality, and fantasy vs. reality. This presentation will highlight the advantages and disadvantages of visual and non-visual augmented reality. We'll tell stories from our experiences building location-aware social networks with custom proximity notification.

Facebook are full of juicy information about your friends and strangers alike! Learn how to use some simple open source tools and techniques to learn more about them.

Using your computer on a public network is like having a conversation on a city bus: people you don't know can hear everything you say. They'll probably be polite and ignore you, but you still might not want to shout out your credit card number. Yet this is what your computer does. All the time. And you don't know it.