Stories by Rohan Pearce

The road to a successful open source project: Learning lessons from Drupal

By almost any measure, Drupal, an open source content management system/Web platform, should be a poster child for open source success. The PHP-based CMS, the first version of which was released by Dries Buytaert in 2001, powers the Web presence of a number of major organisations, including, since 2009, Whitehouse.gov.

Dries' vision for Drupal 8

In January last year the developers of popular open source content management system Drupal celebrated the release of version 7. Drupal 7
included significant architectural changes as well as usability enhancements.

Open Source Ecology: Can open source save the planet?

Ambitious open source projects are nothing new. After all, the free software movement started with the GNU project -- the creation of free tools to build a free operating system -- which at one point many would have considered an impossible dream.

R18 games and Australia's classification revolution

Australia is set to undergo a major change in its classification system that will finally resolve the vexed issue of the absence of an R18 rating for video games if proposals from the Australian Law Reform Commission are adopted.

Macquarie Uni puts R18+ classification, gaming under the microscope

Macquarie Uni will host a free public debate on the 'politics of play' as part of the university's GAME festival, organised by the Interactive Media Institute. The debate will look at the issues surrounding the creation of an R18+ classification for video games in Australia and how interactive entertainment is treated compared to other forms of media such as films, as well as the impact of games on society.

vividwireless ViViFi WiMAX modem review

The first thing you notice about vividwireless' portable ViViFi modem is just how cute it is. I had to wrest the diminutive device away from the CIO editor, who was sitting at her cubicle caressing it and making vaguely Gollum-esque noises. The modem looks vaguely like an Oreo, if the biscuit parts were removed and if Oreos were square, made out of plastic and designed by Apple. So perhaps the best way to describe the modem is: It's not like an Oreo.

Opera responds to Amazon's Cloud-powered 'Silk' browser

One of to features of Amazon's recently announced Kindle Fire tablet drawing attention is its WebKit-based 'Silk' Web browser. What makes Silk different from most browsers is its 'split browser' approach: Putting together complicated Web pages in Amazon's Cloud infrastructure before downloading the end result to the browser.

Michael S. Hart (1947-2011): The founder of Project Gutenberg

Michael S. Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg passed away on 6 September. Hart, born in 1947, started Project Gutenberg in 1971 with the digitisation of the US Declaration of Independence, which Hart made available to other computer users at the University of Illinois.

The Uzebox: An open source hardware games console

Anybody who has even a passing familiarity with IT — and even most who don't — encounters open source software on a daily basis. Whether it's Mozilla's Firefox Web browser, the Apache HTTP Server, which powers most of the world's Web sites, or Google's Android mobile platform, open source software has gone from being solely the domain of geeks to part of many people's everyday life — and it's become big business.

Bodhi Linux review

It seems that as yet there is no agreed upon acronym for Ubuntu-based Linux distributions -- Yet Another Ubuntu Derivative (YAUD), perhaps? Along with the 'regular' Ubuntu-derived distros -- Kubuntu and Xubuntu, for example -- you can get all manner of niche distros.

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