Some Eclipse plugins, I use (with Eclipse Classic SDK), are:
There are bunch of plugins for network monitoring and debugging, don't remember their names. BTW! I have got two separate installations (32bit Carbon and 64bit Cocoa) of Eclipse. I hope, Adobe would port Flex/Flash Builder to work with 64bit and Cocoa.
Plogger is an open-source photo gallery system built using PHP. It successfully maintains the simplicity while providing so many features, it’s just beautiful piece of work.
Withing five minutes, I got Plogger running on my machine. In another hour, I created a new theme with different visualization (CoverFlow) to display thumbnails.
Having worked many different photo gallery management software/scripts, I find, Plogger is the most beautiful. I might be ignorant about other better systems, please share if you know.
I bet, web designers would find it very handy because they can easily customize and deliver solutions without dealing with complex programming required behind file upload/management.
A few days back, Adobe announced Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), which was known as Strobe earlier.
A few minutes back, I received an email confirming that Open Source Media Framework website is up with all the information, specification, developer-documentation, source (Subversion repository), downloads (binary and source) and bug-database.
Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) has an interesting list of features and goals. I like it’s plug-in architecture, that would allow a lot of extensibility and various amazing plug-ins from different providers in coming time.
If you are a developer spending a lot of time developing various work-flows around online media-players (audio, video, images – players), I strongly recommend you to check out Open Source Media Framework (OSMF). I am sure, you would find it worth start using it and also contribute back whatever you can.
Following are the reasons, I am going to use OSMF and give up my existing frameworks:
- It’s open-source
- It would solve core issues (video playback, delivery and workarounds for various limitations in Flash Player, etc)
- It would adopt various standards (playback, cdn, advertising, etc)
- Larger developer base, that means bug fixes and various features would be available very often
- I love open-source and see myself contributing to OSMF in future, beyond my current projects.
We wanted to have a scalable storage system. So I went ahead and checked out the cost of buying NAS from various vendors (NetApp, Dell, etc). I figured out, it was going out our of budget. Then I started learning, what it takes to build a NAS for a small teams like ours.
I started evaluating various FOSS NAS options for our office. I checked out FreeNAS and OpenFiler, finally decided on OpenFiler.
I chose OpenFiler for simple reasons – stability and production-quality. Whereas, FreeNAS has a lot more features, than OpenFiler, but doesn’t look that stable. Perhaps, in future I might go for FreeNAS for it’s various cool features (UPNP, iTunes streaming, etc).
We are using an old server based on Intel’s Server Entry Board, Pentium 4 processor, one Gigabyte memory, one IDE drive and two SATA drives. Both SATA drives are under RAID 1 configuration using OpenFiler’s software RAID. I am planning to get RAID controller card so we can use more disks.
OpenFiler boots from USB flash-drive, to make this happen it took some extra effort, Thanks to h@nnes. FreeNAS provides images for flash-devices, so it’s lot easier to boot FreeNAS from USB flash-device. BTW! Booting OpenFiler or FreeNAS from USB flash-drive would save one IDE/SATA port on motherboard, which can be used to plug-in another harddrive for better purpose (not for booting small NAS OS).
Anyway, we are using Intel NAS Performance Toolkit to benchmark our NAS server. We are also doing a lot of tests (semi)manually. The idea is to cover all cases and also come up with disaster recovery strategy.
I would post more details on our findings/benchmark-tests, so it helps you, if you plan to go for it.
Technorati tags: openfiler, NAS, freenas
