Wednesday Apr 22, 2009
Here's a contest especially for youth 17 and younger. Our friends at the Institute For the Future just launched The Digital Open, an innovation expo for global youth. The Digital Open is an online technology community and competition for youth around the world, to demonstrate how they are using technology that will change the world - or just make life a little easier or more fun.
Students can share their experiences, expertise, and projects through photo, text, or video. There's great prizes for the winners including an PeeCee Mini Laptop running OpenSolaris, a Flip pocket-sized video camera or other cool stuff.
The Digital Open is all about Free and Open Technology. In this spirit, all submissions must make use of
existing free and open platforms and/or licensing your project under
one of the Digital Open-approved licenses.
There is lots of opportunity for creativity. Submissions can be in one of the following
Resources for each category have been posted to allow young students to get started quickly.
If you're not 17 or younger, please share info on the Digital Open with youth in your community and encourage them to sign up and start participating.
Wednesday Apr 15, 2009
Sun just launched the OpenSolaris Apps of Steel
Challenge. This is a great opportunity to learn about developing and porting packages. Then use your talents and
participate for a chance to win a Toshiba OpenSolaris laptop! The winning packages will also be showcased at the OpenSolaris Install Lounge at CommunityOne West, in San Francisco on June 1-3rd, 2009.
Apart from the prizes and recognition, contributing OpenSolaris packages benefits the entire OpenSolaris community by building out the package eco-system. Need help getting started? Check the OpenSolaris Software Porter's Community.
Packages must be submitted by 12:00 pm midnight PDT on May 8, 2009. Packages will be judged on the following criteria:
- Complexity of the Port
- Use of unique OpenSolaris features, such as ZFS, DTrace, SMF, and FMA
- Number of dependent packages ported
- Usefulness to the end user
For all the details, please see the Official OpenSolaris Apps of Steel Challenge Rules and Restrictions.
Good luck!
Monday Apr 06, 2009
JavaFX provides developers, designers and students with unparalleled freedom and flexibility to
create the next generation of rich internet applications (RIAs) for mobile
devices, desktops and other devices. The Java FX Coding Challenge was recently launched, providing a new opportunity for developers, designers or students to submit an innovative rich internet application using JavaFX 1.1 and NetBeans 6.5, and win big bucks:
- 1st Place: $25,000
- 2nd Place: $10,000
- 3rd Place: $5,000
I have no doubt that students will be have some great submissions and will be in contention for these top prizes, but just in case, three additional prizes of $1,500 each will be awarded to the top three applications
submitted by students.
As with all contests, there are Contest Guidelines and Rules so make sure you review these before you get started. Then get to work on your own JavaFX application and submit before the deadline - May 29, 2009.
Thursday Feb 12, 2009
Nominations are being accepted for the seventh edition of the Duke's Choice awards, which honor the best and most innovative uses of Java technology. Winners will be recognized at the 2009 JavaOne Conference, June 2-5 in San Francisco. Entries must be submitted by March 27.
Submit Nomination
This is a great opportunity for students to showcase their Java
projects. Each year, it's great to see students up on stage with James Gosling
accepting their award. This year it could be you.
Sunday Jan 25, 2009
Lalith Suresh a student at the Malaviya National Institute of Technology in India, just contributed his second bug fix to Open High Availability Cluster. This is a great example of the kind of contributions that students are making to the open source world.
Both of Lailith's contributions will be included in the next OHAC release. Check out the blog by the engineer who sponsored these bug fixes for all the details..
Great job Lalith!
Sunday Jan 11, 2009
NetBeans 6.5 has been out for a couple of months now and much of the focus has been on the support for dynamic languages such as PhP. However, in this article, Geertjan Wielenga does a great job of outlining all the improvements in NetBeans 6.5 for the Java developer.
Geertjan starts by posing the following questions, "Which, of the many cool new things, would be particularly appealing to
a Java programmer? And why should a Java programmer now consider
NetBeans IDE 6.5 above its competitors?" His answer to these questions are straightforward and a must read for java developers who are considering NetBeans or used previous versions.
Read Geertjan's article by clicking here.
Tuesday Jan 06, 2009
We all know that MySQL
is the world's most popular open source database. So it should come as no surprise that MySQL is huge in academia, both for back-end databases such as Ladok, a national system used for the documentation of academic information in Sweden, and as a platform for instruction in the classroom.
Here are a couple of MySQL resources that will be of interest to professors, university DBAs and students:
MySQL University is an ongoing series of free educational online webinars offered each Thursday. An individual Wiki page is created for each session containing links to the presentation
slides, the presentation recording (slides and audio), and the chat
transcript.
MySQL Conference & Expo 2009, is scheduled for April 20-23, 2009 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. There are special discounts available for professors (50%) and full-time students (65%).
Change (Y) Our World.
Monday Jan 05, 2009
It's amazing what gets done when people (and institutions) work together. A good example is the innovation that comes out the collaborative efforts that Sun formalizes with academic institutions through the Center of Excellence Program (COE). Here are some good examples:
- Saint Paul College COE for next-generation immersive learning systems based on Project Wonderland. Check out Kevin's blog for info on the upcoming COE launch event;
- The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi Centre of Excellence
in E-governance which is conducting research to advance the eGovernance field to contribute to better social infrastructure, provide enhanced security and a better quality of life for the citizens of India; and
- The growing community of COEs adopting OpenSPARC to execute chip design research
and course work based on Sun's chip multi-threading (CMT) design.
Of course, there are many more outstanding collaborative efforts underway in a variety of fields.
Sunday Jan 04, 2009
I'm sure many student developers have made New Year resolutions and I'm willing to bet that at least some of them have resolved to become better coders. Check out this great article from the Sun Developer Network (SDN) in which some of the best Java developers offer their advice for students. Here's a summary of their advice:
- Write lots of code. Have fun with it!
- Learn to use your tools.
- Don't put your entire application in one method
- Trust the garbage collector to do its job
- Start simple. Learn the basics of the language
- Don't panic (when you first see the API with thousands of classes)
Read the full article.
Thursday Nov 20, 2008
One of the great things about open source technologies and communities is the transparency associated with development and release cycles. So the release of NetBeans 6.5 does not come as a surprise. Yet, it's still fun to proclaim that NetBeans 6.5 has been officially released and is available for download.
NetBeans IDE 6.5 offers simplified and rapid development of web, enterprise, desktop, and mobile applications with PHP, JavaScript, Java, C/C++, Ruby, and Groovy. Here's a summary of the new features in NB 6.5:
- Robust support for PHP and JavaScript
- Debugging for Firefox and IE
- Support for Groovy and Grails
- New enhancements for Java™, Ruby and Rails, and C/C++ development
- Built-in support for Hibernate, Eclipse project import, and compile on save
If you're new to NetBeans, you'll also appreciate the IDE editing capabilities and the famous Swing GUI Builder (Matisse).
Here are some good resources for you to learn about NetBeans IDE 6.5:
Students will love all the time-saving features that will make coding your class projects so much easier. Have fun with NetBeans 6.5.
Download NetBeans IDE 6.5
Tuesday Nov 18, 2008
I want to share with you that Sun recently announced EduConnection.org, a social networking site for IT professionals in education. If you're interested in a short audio explaining more about it, you can check out this audio segment on Sun News Radio.
Designed as a neutral forum to connect and empower the global education community, EduConnection.org serves Sun’s education sector partners and customers. Focusing on Sun’s education customer community, including the more than 38,000 subscribers to Sun's Educonnection newsletter, Educonnection.org offers a platform for schools to exchange information and best practices that will help them to mitigate the challenges of purchasing and implementing new technology in an era of increasing budgetary pressure. It also provides another opportunity for Sun to directly energize, engage and support the education community.
We're shifting the conversation so community members can select the content they want, define useful content via connections with other members, contribute articles, linked blogs, videos, podcasts and more.
Share this as well with your instructors, your on-campus IT staff, and your administrators that joining will give them access to valuable Education industry content and conversations, whether they contribute or read.
Take a look around, sign up and participate. Join the Conversation.
Monday Nov 17, 2008
The latest Sun Studio Express release with updated features and enhancements is now available for download. Sun Studio Software delivers a high-performance, optimizing C/C++/Fortran developer toolchain for Solaris, OpenSolaris, and Linux OSs, including support for multicore x86- and SPARC-based systems. The toolchain includes parallelizing compilers, code-level and memory debuggers, and performance and thread analysis tools. With a NetBeans-based IDE developing parallel applications for the mutlicore era has never been easier!
Sun Studio is supported on OpenSolaris 2008.05, Solaris 10 and Linux (RHEL 5/SuSe 10/Ubuntu 8.04/CentOS 5.1)
Download a free unrestricted copy today!
If you register your Sun Studio installation, you will also receive access to the following content:
- Sample chapter from the book Solaris Application Programming by Darryl Gove titled, "Correctness and Debug"
- Guide to selecting the best compiler options
- Booklet on using Sun Studio to develop parallel applications
For more information on this latest release of Sun Studio Express join Ikroop Dhillon, Product Marketing Manager for Sun Studio and Vijay Tatkar,Senior Engineering Manager in the Developer Tools Organization, both with Sun Microsystems, as they discuss the feature highlights of Sun Studio Express 11/08.
Listen to the podcast.
Wednesday Oct 29, 2008
Sun announced the Open Source University Meetup (OSUM - pronounced "awesome") today at EduCause so I thought I'd share a few thoughts with you. If you're interested in an audio version, you can check the OSUM segment on Sun News Radio.
OSUM is a global community of students that are passionate about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and how it is Changing (Y) Our World. Before you ask, this is not a typo. We say that FOSS can Change Your World because it opens up great new opportunities for student learning, collaboration and career advancement. We say it can Change Our World because FOSS promotes digital freedoms, opportunities and innovation that benefits our global community. Hence, Change (Y) Our World. We call it a ‘Meet-up to encourage collaboration between student groups to create an even stronger open source community. I'll be blogging later on the Change (Y) Our World theme.
The OSUM Community lives online and on hundreds of university campuses around the world. These OSUM Clubs work to educate students about the benefits of FOSS. OSUM Clubs typically conduct monthly meetings through which they provide technical demonstrations of open source software and conduct hands-on labs and student projects. They also inform students about about free students resources such as the Sun Academic Initiative (SAI) which offers online web courses so that students can get trained and certified to prepare them for new careers in the IT industry.
The OSUM Community is also a social networking site that enables all of the OSUM Clubs to connect with tens of thousand student developers to learn, share and collaborate as a community. OSUM members also have fun making friends with other coders with the same passion for FOSS.
All students coders are invited to join this global social networking community and connect to thousands of students from around the world. Just go to osum.sun.com, register and get started with Changing (Y) Our World.
Friday Oct 24, 2008
The OpenSolaris Ignite is the new monthly newsletter by, for, and about the OpenSolaris community. OpenSolaris Ignite features news, how-to articles, tech tips and reviews. This is a great resource for students using or developing on OpenSolaris. Check it out.
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