(FOSS) From the Open Source Shelf : CDAC Monthly Seminar Series

CDAC Mumbai, Kharghar centre, has been conducting a series of lecture demos to introduce you to the wide range of high quality software available in open source. A list of upcoming seminars is given below. Please let us know if you want specific software to be taken up at a future seminar. If any of you are expert on any open source software and would like to demonstrate it, please write to the address below with relevant details. You may also send this information by posting a comment to http://www.ossrc.org.in/forum .

Time & Venue: 9:30 to 12:30, on third Saturday of every month at Kharghar campus of CDAC.

Upcoming Seminars -

February 20th, 2010

• GIMP - GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is used for tasks such as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. It is a very good alternative to proprietary programs like Adobe Photoshop.

• SuTra – SuTra, an Intelligent Suggestive Translation assistance tool , developed by CDAC Mumbai, is aimed at assisting translators by making intelligent suggestions on possible reuse of other earlier translations. In addition, it has an in-built glossary which provides context-specific translation of terms, which can be used and updated. Thus, with its translation reuse suggestions and built-in glossary, Sutra enables the translator to translate a new string with just a few mouse clicks, reducing the translator's efforts in translating new sentences.

• Orca – Orca is a free, open source scriptable screen reader. Using various combinations of speech, Braille, and magnification, Orca helps provide access to applications that support the AT-SPI. This enables visually disabled people to use common applications such as desk top, file manager, word processor, acrobat reader, spread sheet, web browser etc.

March 20th, 2010

• NLTK - NLTK [Natural Language Processing Toolkit] is a complete Open Source suite of Python modules, linguistic data and documentation for research and development in Natural Language Processing. It provides utilities for many NLP tasks like chunking, stemming and parsing to name a few. It is a useful tool for students, professionals and researchers interested in Natural Language Processing and is widely used by NLP community all over the world.

• GNU Build System - The GNU build system provides an environment to a computer programmer that helps them make their software/packages portable across platforms (at least for Unix-like operating systems). It also makes the build process easier for the user, allowing him/her to use just a small set of commands to build the software/package from its source code and install it.

April 17th, 2010

Bug tracking systems MantisBT and Bugzilla: A bug tracking system is a very important tool in the software development process. Programmers and quality assurance people rely on it to keep track of reported bugs in their work. A database storing the bug data is a vital component of a bug tracking system. In a more general sense, a bug tracking system can be used as an issue tracking system to keep track of important issues in any project. Both MantisBT and Bugzilla are free, open source, web based bug tracking systems.

• MantisBT is written in PHP, uses MySQL/ MSSQL/ PostgreSQL database, and works with Apache/ IIS webserver. It can be installed on Windows, Linux, Mac OS and OS/2.
Easy to set up and use, it is very popular.

• Bugzilla is written in Perl, uses MySQL/ PostgreSQL/ Oracle database, and works with Apache web server. It is recommended to be installed on Linux or Solaris, but can be installed on Windows (with some efforts). With powerful features, it is used by many well known open source and proprietary softwares.

On the horizon

• Eucalyptus
• Hadoop
• Drupal

For more information on this please visit: http://www.cdacmumbai.in/index.php/news_and_events/foss_from_the_open_source_shelf_cdac_monthly_seminar_series