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Campware Good Gnewsletter #2
October 2006
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This newsletter is sent out every few months giving you a recap of the
latest events in the Campware world. To subscribe or unsubscribe,
visit this page:
https://www.campware.org/mailman/listinfo/campware-newsletter
To learn more about Campware, visit our website: https://www.campware.org
To stay up-to-date with all our latest news, subscribe to our RSS
feed: https://www.campware.org/en/camp/rss
In this issue:
1) Announcements & News
* Campsite Guaranteed Support Now Available
* Campsite 2.6 "Eli" released
* LiveSupport Renamed to Campcaster, 1.1.0-beta released
* LugRadio Interviews Campware Chief Sava Tatic
2) Events
* LiveSupport In Sierra Leone
* SummerCamp Recap
3) What's Coming
* What's Coming in Campsite 3.0
* The "Radio Package"
4) People
* New Developers!
* Volunteers: Good Karma Guaranteed (and Maybe Money Too)
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1) Announcements & News
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Campsite Guaranteed Support Contracts Now Available
===================================================
Campsite is now available with guaranteed support contracts! Guaranteed
support means having priority over free support, and a response to your
problem guaranteed within 24 hours of you filing your problem. If
necessary, the developers will log into your server to find or fix the
problem. Any bugs in the software are covered - you have it in writing
that we'll fix them.
Open source is a great thing - but often with open source applications
you are forced to upgrade to the latest version in order to fix a bug
that's bothering you. The only problem is, the latest version usually
has a bunch of new features and those new features usually introduce
new bugs. You want to keep your older, stable system, but with the bug
fixed. If you have a support contract, you don't have to worry about
forced upgrades - all bug fixes will be backported to the version you
are running. You also don't have to wait for the next version to come
out to have a bug fixed - the team can issue a release just for you
that fixes your particular bug.
Contracts are available for 1, 3, 6, and 12 month durations.
For more information or to sign up for a support contract, visit:
https://www.campware.org/en/camp/about_campware/677/
Campsite 2.6 "Joey" Released
============================
Campsite 2.6 is our first release that is available with guaranteed
support. We poured extra hours into testing and making this a stable
and solid release. We used the system like power users and ironed out
a lot of usability issues. Here are some of the new features:
* Article Comments: subscribers can now comment on articles. Now you
can make your news site more interactive by getting feedback from
your readers. You can set this feature so that only subscribers can
comment on articles, with the potential to sell more subscriptions
this way.
* Increased Security: If you fail to type in your username and password
three times, you will be presented with an image with letters in it.
You will asked to type in these letters along with your username and
password. This is to prevent someone running a script against the
login page that continually tries to guess usernames and passwords,
because an automated script is unable to read the letters in the
image. Another security measure we have put in place is the
encryption of your password when it is sent to the server - even if
you aren't using SSL on your server. This is important for the case
where you use the same password in many places. Also, inside the
database, the passwords are now stored in a more secure format(SHA1).
* Flexible Article Types: "Article Types" define the structure of your
articles in Campsite. We have made these much more flexible than
they used to be, for example, you can now hide old Article Types
that are no longer in use. This is useful if you have some articles
in an old format that you don't want to delete, but you don't want
anyone to use the old format. You can also merge article types -
this is for the case where you have some articles in an old format
and you want to convert them to the new format. Finally, you can
rename and translate Article Types. "Translating" in this case can
also mean giving an Article Type a more human-readable name.
Previously, an Article Type name could only have letters and numbers
and no spaces, such as "news_sports_2". Now you can give it a more
readable name like "Sports - Week in Review".
* Status Messages: The admin interface now informs you of each action
it has just taken. This is quite helpful if you happen to get
interrupted in the middle of something you are doing - when you come
back to the screen you can see what you just did. This also gives
you a verification that your changes have been saved.
* Automated Bug Reporting: If there is an error in the Administration
interface, you have the option to automatically send feedback about
it to the Campsite team. Already, eight bugs have been found and
fixed using this method (all fixes are in 2.6.1). Please report any
bugs you find using this method - don't be shy!
* Send Us Your Feedback: Suppose you are using the admin interface and
you realize something would be easier if the interface worked in a
different way. You can now submit your suggestion by going to Main
Menu -> Help -> Feedback and filling out and submitting the form
there.
LiveSupport Renamed to Campcaster, 1.1.0-beta Released
======================================================
Following a lengthy and, at times, heated discussion, our radio
automation suite LiveSupport has been renamed to Campcaster, as a short
form for CAMP Broadcaster. At the last Summercamp, the consensus emerged
that we needed to drop LiveSupport as a name, because several other
products (mainly for online product support) existed and because the
name was not descriptive enough.
Meanwhile, we had suffered a major setback when one of the contractors
pulled out from the project. We have regrouped and gotten things back
on track. The 1.1.0-beta has been released (still under the old name),
and we encourage you to download and test it.
New things you can do in the 1.1 release include:
* Share audio files with other stations in your network
* Save and share playlists. You can save a playlist to disk and send
it to member stations over the Internet or over the road.
* Stop a playlist that is currently running in the scheduler
* View the network file transfers currently in progress
* Search both local and remote station archives using the same user
interface
* Search for playlists and audio files together or separately
* Easily configure your sound card, keyboard shortcuts and server
locations from within LiveSupport (Campcaster) Studio
* Backup both the playlists and the audio files in your station's
library. You can choose what to back up using various search
criteria. Write the backup to a DVD and then send it to member
stations who can then import the material.
LugRadio Interviews Campware Chief Sava Tatic
=============================================
The incredibly popular Internet radio show LugRadio has done an
interview with Campware Chief Sava Tatic about the history and goals of
Campware, how we develop our software, and how we influence the
adoption of free software all over the world.
Download and listen to the show here:
http://www.lugradio.org/episodes/60
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2) Events
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LiveSupport in Sierra Leone
===========================
Douglas Arellanes took a trip to Freetown, Sierra Leone to bring
LiveSupport to the Sierra e-Riders. E-Riders (http://www.eriders.net/)
help to bring IT expertise to NGOs around the world. Here are a few of
his experiences from the field:
*** Tuesday August 29th 2006 ***
Today I'm in the offices of the Sierra e-Riders in Freetown, Sierra
Leone, practicing installations of Ubuntu Linux and helping them to get
ready to install it in other places, to troubleshoot potential problems,
and to lay the groundwork to install our LiveSupport software in
community radio stations around the country.
It's important to get an idea of the amount of complications such a task
can face in a place like Freetown. Doing anything becomes pretty
complicated. For one thing, there's no electricity grid to speak of, so
everything that needs electric power needs its own generator. I found
this out because in the middle of partitioning disks, our generator ran
out of gas. We were out of commission until a neighborhood boy, Salia,
maybe 10 years old, could run to the local petrol station with a full
5-gallon can. He returned, the generator started, and luckily the
disks weren't wrecked in the process.
There is a cacophony outside the office's window: The drone of the
generator, the screams of an angry woman, a crying baby, a hundred
discussions in the neighboring tin sheds, and floating above it all, the
call to prayer from the nearby mosque.
We're in the rainy season now, and the downpours are strong. When they
happen, the red dirt road in front of the e-Riders' office turns to mud,
and it would get tracked into the office if another neighborhood boy
wasn't hired to periodically sweep and mop the floor.
It's the next morning and it's raining again. The generator isn't
running, and the UPS unit is beeping insistently like an EKG. We're
going to continue our work with Linux installs today, getting more
familiar with the terminal environment and working our way up to a
LiveSupport installation. The boy with the diesel canister just came
in, so I guess that means we'll be starting up again.
*** Wednesday August 30th 2006 ***
I'm happy to report success on a number of fronts today. My colleagues,
the Sierra e-Riders, have successfully installed Ubuntu on a number of
different machines, and they're now moving around the command line
pretty well.
But the big news for me is this: As of 6 pm today, we have successfully
completed builds of LiveSupport's development environment on the
computers here. To celebrate, we started up LiveSupport, and, using a
tiny USB FM transmitter, are now broadcasting on 87.7 FM in the
immediate neighborhood of Victoria Street, Freetown!
Now that the e-Riders have the software installed and running, the next
step is to try to practice their broadcasting, as our upcoming task will
be to install the entire package at community radio stations, starting
in Freetown and then moving outward to more remote locations.
*** Thursday August 31st 2006 ***
I visited two community stations today, Radio Mount Aureol, located on
the Fourah Bay University campus in the steep hills overlooking
Freetown, and Radio Citizen, located in the east of the city.
Citizen FM was inspiring to visit. It's a community radio station in one
of the poorest parts of Freetown, a district called Kissy, in the east
of the city, where more than 700,000 live in what is essentially a
shanty district. Citizen FM is very popular here - on the drive in,
every stall had their radios tuned there - and they make it a point
of being by and for the community.
I got to visit with David Tam-Baryoh, the station's director, who
explained that their studios are equipped only with things they've
bought themselves - there must have been 8 old cassette players around.
I was really relieved and happy tonight to get the LiveSupport
installations completed today. It really wasn't a sure thing, given the
number of potential complications that could have come up - gas in the
generator being one of them - but it turned out fine.
It was really cool watching my colleagues' excitement as they started to
make their practice broadcasts - we're only broadcasting in a radius of
maybe 50 meters at best - but it's becoming real to all of us that this
LiveSupport project, which began three years ago, is about to bring
about a major shift for community radio, starting here.
Summercamp Recap
================
The annual Campware conference was held in Prague at the end of July,
you can read a recap of the first two days of the conference here:
Day 1
https://www.campware.org/en/camp/campware_news/674/
Day 2
https://www.campware.org/en/camp/campware_news/676/
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3) What's Coming
***********************************************************************
What's Coming in Campsite 3.0
=============================
We've already started work on the next version of Campsite - version
3.0. The major change will be that the C++ template parser will be
replaced with a PHP parser. This will allow Campsite to be installed
on any platform that supports PHP, which includes Windows. It will
also give you a more powerful template language, with variables, boolean
expressions, and ability to include PHP directly in your templates - in
other words, no more PHP-Wrapper. This should massively increase
Campsite adoption because Campsite will be 100% PHP and installable on
any hosting provider out there.
The "Radio Package"
===================
Campware has started a new project code-named the "Radio Package"
which, among other things, will begin to integrate LiveSupport and
Campsite. Radio stations these days usually have their own web
sites, and often they want to put audio clips from past shows on the
web. So as part of the Radio Package, you will be able to attach
LiveSupport audio files to Campsite articles. We are also adding the
ability to have a single sign-on to both systems so you won't have to
remember two different user names and passwords.
The Radio Package isn't just about integrating the applications however,
there are two other sticking points preventing LiveSupport adoption:
1) most radio stations are required to keep an archive of their
broadcasts, and 2) all radio stations want Radio Data System (RDS)
functionality. RDS is the info that comes up on those modern radios
that tells you what song is playing and what station you are listening
to. So we are going to be adding tools that support these features in
the Radio Package.
Look for all of this stuff to be released before the end of the year...
***********************************************************************
4) People
***********************************************************************
New Developers: Holman Romero, Mark Kretschmann, Ian Monroe
===========================================================
We are pleased to announce that our developer teams have been boosted
with new recruits Holman Romero, Mark Kretschmann, and Ian Monroe.
Holman Romero joins us from Bogota, Colombia. Holman has been involved
in a number of open source projects and has given numerous presentations
about open source tools. A few projects he has been involved in include
porting GNU/Hurd to the L4 microkernel, helping with the Spanish
translation of the GNU documentation, and participating in the workgroup
that decides if a particular package should be included in the GNU
system. Holman will be helping us to develop Campsite.
Mark Kretschmann is the creator of the popular Amarok open-source music
player (see: http://amarok.kde.org/) which he was somehow able to
develop on a 350Mhz system. We don't know how he did that, but we're
glad that he is now upgraded to a dual core 2.6Ghz AMD CPU. Mark hails
from Dortmond, Germany and has a degree in Computer Science from the
University of Dortmund. He will be helping us develop Campcaster.
Ian Monroe is also an Amarok developer hailing from Kirksville,
Missouri, USA. He's currently working on his Computer Science Degree
at Truman State University and plans on graduating soon. He will also
be helping us develop Campcaster.
You can come chat with all of us on IRC:
irc.freenode.net / #campcaster and #campsite
Volunteers: Good Karma Guaranteed (and Maybe Money Too)
=======================================================
Would you like to become a free-software hero and at the same time
promote freedom of the press and human rights? Maybe even get paid for
doing so? Become part of the Campware volunteer roster.
If you are an open source advocate or developer willing to help
independent news media survive and prosper worldwide, look no further:
Campware needs you!
Campware's aim is to produce the best software tools for news media
battling government oppression and media-conglomerate dominance. This
is arguably one of the most important causes around because many
opinions, views, and assumptions are created by the media. Only by
having a diverse set of views can we have hope to have an open society.
As Campware software-development projects are largely funded through
project grants, we can't afford to keep large development teams on
long-term contracts. We also can't afford to pay for the period spent
getting acquainted with our applications (though our handful of core
developers will gladly provide a helping hand). At times, however,
urgent and exciting projects come our way, bringing in a sudden flood of
capital. At these times we need to bring in people quickly to implement
new features, and if we know who you are and know you do good work, we
will ask you if you'd like to be hired for the project.
HOW TO Earn Good Karma Points:
1) Choose an area that interests you:
a) Software Development - if you like to code in PHP, C++, or Python.
b) Testing - we can never have too many people poking at our
applications and trying to use them to their fullest potential, or
trying to break them.
c) Translation - if you know a language other than English, you can
help translate the applications
d) Documentation - help improve the manuals with screenshots, tips and
tricks, and HOW TO recipes
e) Support - if you become good at using the applications, you can
help other users on the mailing lists (most of the time you don't
need to be a developer to help people with this sort of thing)
f) Graphic design & Usability - if you are an artist or graphic
designer, even an amateur one, we desperately need your help! We
need icons and graphics for both the applications and our web site.
We also need help to improve the interfaces and improve the
workflow, as well as make things easier to use.
2) Get involved
a) Get acquainted with the application(s) you are interested in (and
if you are a developer, the code as well)
b) Ask one of our core developers (contact at campware.org) to assign you
one of the outstanding Campsite, LiveSupport, or Docmint tasks. You
may even suggest contributing something of your own.
c) Participate with the team in accomplishing your goal. Over time we
will see the good work you are doing and everyone will get to know
each other.
d) After we've seen your success and good work, we will ask you to
help us and pay you whenever a project comes up that needs some
extra hands.
If you like what you've read above, you can apply by writing to
contact at campware.org.
Invest in Press Freedom: Visit http://www.mdlf.org/support-free-press