Tag Archives: API

Linux

KDAB at Qt Contributor Summit

Leave a comment
Transport in Bilbao

On the 15th and 16th July this year, KDAB attended the Qt Contributor Summit, which was co-located with the KDE Akademy conference in Bilbao, Spain.

Transport in Bilbao

The program of the Qt Contributor Summit was mostly determined by who was attending and what the important topics at the time were. KDAB attended the summit with strength, and participated in many relevant discussions.

Some pre-scheduled talks were held, including a ‘State of the Union’ from Lars Knoll, where he talked about recent additions and developments in Qt and the focus of Digia for the coming releases. The focus on advancing the mobile platform support in the next releases is well known. Challenges resulting from that focus and other known standing challenges were also listed and were part of the discussions at the summit. These included the ICU Problem, Evolution of the QML language and Bug management discussion, all relevant issues for the community and for the ongoing adoption of Qt.

The QtCore session included some future-looking considerations of how Qt will deal with C++14 and C++17 – what does Qt need from those standards, and what can Qt provide to them in terms of feedback and use-cases. Some of the recent work on the QVariant/QMetaType by Stephen Kelly of KDAB relates to type-erasure, which is a growing topic in C++ standardization discussions. The command line parser, a long requested part of Qt, has been worked on by David Faure, and there were updates about what remains to get it into the next release, and porting existing Qt tools to the new API.

C++11 lambda syntax is gaining adoption

QML and QtQuick were obviously also large topics for the entire summit, with many sessions relating to the technologies. Among the sessions were one dedicated to the Model-View APIs in QtQuick. A new design could be utilized to increase the flexibility and re-use of components for creating new views. Some discussions were had on how to represent hierarchical or tree structures in QML.

Recent developments in the Linux kernel for adding generic multicast local socket support are gathering momentum, and the implications of that for the QtDBus module were discussed. This could reduce the dependency of QtDBus on an external libdbus-1 on Linux. QNX also has a native message passing system which may also be usable to bypass the libdbus-1 dependency on that platform.

Both QBS and CMake were represented with sessions at the Qt Contributor Summit. The QBS session was an introduction to qbs for those who have not worked with it before, and a tour through its capabilities. The CMake session included a summary of recent and future developments in CMake which benefit Qt users, and plans for better CMake integration in QtCreator.

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

Do it yourself

Oilzum

Leave a comment

By peterr

Hello
My service station changed my oil and filter for my 2007 Corolla.
He put 5w-30 Oilzum in the car. I cannot find anything about this except memorabilia.
I did find a link where the mod said this is an excellent oil and is highly recommended by the API.
I know it was made I Worcester MA in the 50’s but that is all I can find.
What can you tell me about it and is it safe for my car?
Thank you
Peter

…read more

Source: DoItYourself.com

Linux

Paul Tagliamonte: The Deprecation of Google Latitude

Leave a comment

I’m a bit disappointed Google is shutting down Google Latitude – I’ve been an avid user of latitude since it came out – I always found it really quite neat.

It was a bit creepy knowing the last few years of my exact location every day were sitting on a Google server, but at the same time, the API let me use this data for all sorts of personal projects. In fact, all my machines use my current latitude data in some form or another.

As a result, I’m looking for a replacement. Anyone know of a good Free Software application I can install on my Android (Nexus 4) phone, and push real-time latitude and longitude data to my server?

Any advice at all would be great.

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

A Nicer Query Builder Widget

Leave a comment
The widget

After 10 days of vacations, I’m now back at work for the rest of the GSoC period. Before my departure, I presented a syntax-highlighted query builder widget. It was based on a QTextEdit made to look like a QLineEdit, and a QSyntaxHighlighter subclass was responsible for the highlighting.

The result was quite nice, but not as nice as what Ivan Čukić imagined for this control. Since the first instant I saw his mockup, I wanted to have a widget like that in Nepomuk. The problem is that such a widget is very difficult to implement (and even more to implement correctly), and that I haven’t found any existing code on Google, and the only application using this widget I know of is Yahoo! Mail. I therefore decided to implement this widget myself.

General Idea

The code of the widget lives in my branch of the nepomuk-widgets repository. Even though I tried to keep the widget general (the GroupedLineEdit class does not reference any Nepomuk class), I don’t think it can already be useful to other projects. Don’t hesitate to prove me wrong, though. If this widget one time becomes general enough and more sane than it is currently, I would like to have it merged into Qt (the widget doesn’t use any KDE class).

The widget

The idea of the widget is to “group” terms into blocks. A block is a rounded rectangle, each of a different color, and having a small cross. When the user clicks the cross, the group is deleted. The blocks must be completely cosmetic for the user. That means that the full query builder still needs to behave like a QLineEdit: the user must be able to move the cursor using the arrow keys of his or her keyboard, and the cursor must not be stuck at one end of a block. It must be able to flow from a block to the next or the previous. The user must also be able to add text anywhere, even between blocks.

Blocks are added to the widget by the application, one at a time. Blocks cannot be removed, but the widget can be cleared (every block is removed, the text being preserved). When blocks need to change, the application thus clears all the blocks, then re-add the ones it needs. This is not the most efficient operation, but doing otherwise would have greatly complicated the API and the code itself.

Flowing From a Line Edit to Another One

“Flowing” is an operation needed when there is two line edits next to each other. When the user presses the arrow keys, the cursor moves in one of the line edits. What I want is to detect when the user tried to move left/right when the cursor was already at the left/right of one line edit. When that occurs, the cursor is placed at the right/left of the previous/next line edit. [ ][| ], with the vertical bar representing the cursor, …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

Linux

ownNews Small Update

Leave a comment

Last time i showed off the ownCloud-News client i’d written for Blackberry 10 using QML/cascades. After i did that, the API for the news client changed in the development version, meaning that if I released it, it wouldnt work once people upgrade to the latest version.

AFAIK, the next version of the news app will be released mid-august, so im holding off releasing to Blackberry World until then. That doesnt mean ive done nothing though!

Blog tags:
ownCloud
QML
Qt
kde
Android

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

Linux

String concatenation in Qt5/KF5

Leave a comment

Question

What is the output of the following code:

    QString separator = "/";
    auto date = "14" + separator + "7" + separator + "2013";
    separator = " ";
    auto datetime = date + separator + "17:32";
    qDebug() << datetime;

scroll down…

Expected output: "14/7/2013 17:32"    
Actual output:   "14 7 2013 17:32"

…

What happened?

In his great talk, Volker mentioned the optimizations of QString concatenation via the auto, expression templates and QStringBuilder that allow to do a single memory allocation for *all* the concatenations in the example above.

I just wanted to repeat a warning I gave to the audience – for the people who were not present.

In this case, auto allows the lazy evaluation of the result (which provides the actual optimization). “Lazy” means that the separator value is only taken at the point of the actual evaluation which happens only when the QStringBuilder is being converted to a string in order to be able to output it via qDebug. At that point, the value of separator is " ", and the old value "/" has been forgotten.

The lazy evaluation is usually a trait of pure functional languages (Haskell) where there is no mutable state. When you have the mutable state, you need to really pay attention whether you are using an expression template-based API.

When?

This mechanism is only used when either QT_USE_FAST_OPERATOR_PLUS or QT_USE_QSTRINGBUILDER are defined. And those are, by default, in KDE Frameworks 5.

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

Linux

The History on Wayland Support inside KWin

Leave a comment

Ever since a certain free software company decided to no longer be part of the larger ecosystem, I have seen lots of strange news postings whenever one of the KDE workspace developers mentioned the word “Wayland”. Very often it goes in the direction of “KDE is now also going on Wayland”. Every time I read something like that, I’m really surprised.

For me Wayland support has been the primary goal I have been working on over the last two years. This doesn’t mean that there is actual code for supporting Wayland (there is – the first commit for Wayland support in our git repositories is from June 11, 2011 (!)).

The Wayland research projects two years ago had been extremely important for the further development of KWin since then. First of all it showed that adding support for Wayland surfaces inside KWin’s compositor is rather trivial. Especially our effect system did not care at all about X11 or Wayland windows. So this is not going to be a difficult issue.

The more important result from this research project was that it’s impossible to work against an always changing target. At that time Wayland had not yet seen the 1.0 release, so the API was changing. Our code broke and needed adjustments for the changing API. It also meant that we could not merge the work into our master branch (distributions would kill us), we needed to be on a different branch for development. Tracking one heavily changing project is difficult enough, but also KWin itself is changing a lot. So the work needed to be on top of two moving targets – it didn’t work and the branch ended in the to be expected state. Now with Wayland 1.0 and 1.1 releases the situation changed completely.

The next lesson we learned from that research project was that the window manager part is not up to the task of becoming a Wayland compositor. It was designed as an X11 window manager and the possibility that there would not be X11 had never been considered. We started to split out functionality from the core window manager interface to have smaller units and to be able to add abstractions, where needed, to support in future more than just X11. That had been a huge task and is still ongoing and it comes with quite some nice side-effects like the rewrite of KWin scripting (helped to identify the interface of a managed Client inside KWin), the possibility to run KWin with OpenGL on EGL since 4.10, the new screen edge system in 4.11 and many many more. All these changes were implemented either directly or indirectly with Wayland in mind. That means we have been working on it for quite some time even if it is not visible in the code.

My initial plannings for adding Wayland support around October/November last year was to start hacking on it in January. I was so confident about it that I considered to submit a talk for FOSDEM which would demo KWin

From: http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/04/the-history-on-wayland-support-inside-kwin/

Linux

Zhu3D 4.2.4 (KDE Scientific)

Leave a comment

Zhu3D 4.2.4
(KDE Scientific)
Zhu3D is an interactive OpenGL-based mathematical function viewer. You can visualize explicite functions, parametric systems and isosurfaces. The viewer supports zooming, scaling and rotating as well as filed lighting or surface properties. Special effects are animation, morphing, transparency, textures, fog and motion blur. Equation systems can be solved with a fast adaptive random search.

You have up to 8 lights, background settings, wire-modes or different illumination models. For picture rendering and textures all common pic-formats are recognized. You can define your own customized functions to any desired complexity level, nested or even recursive functions inclusively. For special purposes if-clauses and boolean operators are supported. Isosurfaces can use different volume-based algorithms.

Zhu3D is originally designed for *nix-systems, but runs as well under Mac OS X or Windows 2000-Vista in all 32/64 bit-flavours. It is fully localized for English, German, Spanish, French and Chinese and partially for Czech (Gui only). API‘s like KDE, Gnome, Motif, Mac OS or Windows XP/Vista are supported natively. All these settings as well as most others can be changed dynamically at runtime. The application comes with extended help files and a lot of examples. A precompiled and ready-to-go Windows version is available.

HARDWARE:

For basic tasks even a really slow and ancient PC without HW-OpenGL may be sufficient. However, neat things like motion blur, morphing or isosorfaces are a challenge for every GPU/CPU out there. Zhu3D automatically utilizes up to 16 highly optimized parallel threads therefore. When compiling by yourself, you easely can enable vectorizing with SSE3 as an additional boost-option.

COMPILING:

All unnecessary dependencies are strictly avoided. So compiling is a mere child’s play at your fingertips. Everything you need is Qt >=4.3 and OpenGL >=1.4 whereas OpenGL may even be a pure software implementation like Mesa. The qmake easily can be taylored for special needs, what supports packagers.

Have fun, Heinz van Saanen

changelog:
What is new in 4.2.6

– Removed loading of real ancient Zhu3D-files
– Workaround for ‘gluPerspective’ error in Qt4 4.8.4
– Fixed compile error on older Suse/Mandriva i686. Special thanks to Pavel for reports
– Fixed tsc-compile error on older Mandriva i686. Special thanks to Pavel for reports
– Fixed tsc-compile error on newest ICC
– Improved Makefile for compilations for newer Intel ICC
– Improved Czech translation. Special thanks to Pavel
– Cosmetic improvements/updates or typo-fixes elsewhere

What was new in 4.2.4

– Fixed a very unlikely but possible memory-bug in the XML-file saving/loading-part
– Fixed a very unlikely but possible memory-leak in speedit.cpp
– Fixes for the timestamp-counter on newer platforms
– Slightly optimized some default window positions after the 1.st start ever
– Made settings-stuff more elegant throughout the code what shrinks the executable size too
– Enabled strip option -s as default compiler switch, what leads to slightly smaller executables
– Disabled senseless -ffast-math switch for GCC
– Switched icons to more modern KDE4-style where this seems optically

From: http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Zhu3D?content=43071

Linux

Ayrton Araujo: Amazon AWS OpsWorks

Leave a comment

Amazon released a platform as service like appfog/heroku for be more attractive to web developers.

They are calling it by OpsWorks, supporting deployment and scale wep apps and setup load balancer layers with a few clicks. Initially the list of stack scripts is not too big, supporting only the following:

  • Load balancer 
  • HAProxy 
  • App Server 
    • Static Web Server 
    • Rails App Server 
    • PHP App Server 
    • Node.js  
  • DB 
    • MySQL 
  • Other 
    • Memcached
    • Gangila
    • Custom (Not tested. I don’t know what is it) 

    Except missing python apps and other dbs, I think this have a lot of potential.

    The cool stuff is the possibility of choose between Apache 2 or Nginx and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS instead Amazon Linux.

    The service if free, but use carefully because it automatically setup EC2 machines, load balancers and other AWS related features to make your stack run. It is also interesting because you can access your machines remotely via SSH and manage it via your AWS panel or API, as a normal EC2 machines.

    If you choose to use Ubuntu Server, you could set up juju for make your stack more powerful, but avoid conflicts with OpsWorks.

    See it in action: 

    And, of course, to test it:
    https://console.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/home?#firstrun

    What do you think about?

    From: http://blog.ayrtonaraujo.net/2013/04/amazon-aws-opsworks.html

    News, Politics, Government

    Crowdtilt Raises $12 Million From Andreessen Horowitz And Sean Parker (For Real This Time)

    Leave a comment

    By J.J. Colao, Forbes Staff

    Crowdtilt, a San Francisco-based crowdfunding company, raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Andreesen Horowitz and joined by Sean Parker and SV Angel. Since launching last February, the Y Combinator company founded by James Beshara, 27, and Khaled Hussein, 28, has found quick traction in a crowded marketplace. The company helps groups collect payments for a wide variety of causes, including weddings, party buses and local projects. Those who donate aren’t charged unless their project “tilts” or reaches its stated goal of fundraising. The company released an API to power group payments across ecommerce and travel booking websites in December.

    From: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2013/04/18/crowdtilt-raises-12-million-from-andreesen-horowitz-and-sean-parker-for-real-this-time/

    Computers

    Intel acquires Mashery for planned services suite

    Leave a comment

    Intel has purchased Mashery, a provider or API management tools, in the chip maker’s latest move to expand into software and services.

    The Mashery API management service will become a core element of a suite of cross-platform services that Intel plans to offer to enterprises, an Intel spokesman said Wednesday.

    Mashery offers a set of tools for managing APIs (application programming interfaces) that can be deployed on-premise or used as a service in the cloud. The package includes a portal that external parties can use to access APIs, as well as caching, security tools, a user dashboard and usage reports. Mashery products have been used by organizations such as USA Today, Expedia, Aol’s Patch, Aetna and Best Buy.

    An API provides a set of machine-readable instructions that one software program can use to interact with another over a network. By providing an API for its services, a company can encourage wider usage of those services by other parties. Most big online companies like Facebook and Twitter expose their APIs, but smaller organizations do not have the expertise to build and maintain a set of APIs for external use.

    To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

    From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2035649/intel-acquires-mashery-for-planned-services-suite.html#tk.rss_all

    Computers

    OpenDaylight is building on our work, SDN group's director says

    Leave a comment

    The OpenDaylight Project may have won attention last week with a founding list of vendors including Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks, but it’s standing on the shoulders of others, according to the head of the Open Networking Foundation.

    OpenDaylight will be building part of its planned framework for software-defined networking on the OpenFlow protocol that ONF introduced in 2011, ONF Executive Director Dan Pitt said on Tuesday at the Open Networking Summit. The standing-room-only conference is ONF‘s annual gathering to discuss SDN (software-defined networking), which is intended to place the control of networks in software apart from dedicated hardware.

    “It’s sort of an evolution of what we were doing,” Pitt said in answer to an audience member’s question at the conference in Santa Clara, California. “I don’t think you would be able to start this … OpenDaylight consortium if you didn’t have a foundation to build upon.”

    Specifically, OpenDaylight’s planned API (application programming interface) for communication between its controller software and network devices will be built on OpenFlow, Pitt said. That’s despite the fact that ONF is not a member of OpenDaylight, which includes a long list of major IT and networking vendors including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Ericsson.

    To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

    From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2035347/opendaylight-is-building-on-our-work-sdn-groups-director-says.html#tk.rss_all

    Computers

    Google discloses tech specs and developer API for Glass

    Leave a comment

    The Google Glass wearable computer will have a high-resolution display equivalent of a 25-inch high-definition screen from eight feet away, and will capture 5-megapixels images and video at a resolution of 720p, according to technical specs disclosed on Monday.

    The device will also support Wi-Fi compliant with 802.11b/g standards and Bluetooth, and has 12GB of usable memory, synced with Google cloud storage. It has 16GB flash memory in total.

    Google has notified some users selected under its Glass Explorer testers program that some of the US$1,500 glasses were being produced and shipped in phases, according to reports.

    The battery will support one full day of typical use, though some features like video recording are more battery intensive. Charging is through an included Micro USB cable and charger, and Google recommends the use of the charger that ships with Google Glass, rather than the “thousands of Micro USB chargers out there,” according to a document on the Google Glass support page.

    To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

    From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2034722/google-discloses-tech-specs-and-developer-api-for-glass.html#tk.rss_all

    Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

    SM Energy Announces Exploration Success in East Texas; Amended Credit Facility with Increase in Borr

    Leave a comment

    By Business Wirevia The Motley Fool

    Filed under:

    SM Energy Announces Exploration Success in East Texas; Amended Credit Facility with Increase in Borrowing Base

    DENVER–(BUSINESS WIRE)– SM Energy Company (NYS: SM) announces today the successful completion of an exploratory test well in San Jacinto County, Texas. The Horizon Properties 2H (SM 100% WI), a horizontal completion in the Woodbine interval, produced approximately 740 BOE/d in a 24-hour test, flowing at 1,520 PSIG casing pressure on a 27/64ths inch choke, while cleaning up after fracture stimulation. Production consisted of 305 Bbl/d of 42 degree API gravity oil and 2,600 MCFD of rich gas (approximately 1250 BTU/scf). The well will be shut-in to await construction of a gathering system.

    The Company has increased its acreage position in East Texas to approximately 105,000 net acres and expects to drill additional test wells targeting the Woodbine formation as well as other intervals of interest beginning in the third quarter of 2013. SM Energy expects to construct the necessary gathering system once several of these wells have been drilled. Capital for the 2013 delineation program will be funded largely from the Company’s existing New Venture budget.

    SM Energy also announces that the borrowing base under the Company’s existing revolving credit facility has been increased to $1.9 billion, from $1.55 billion, as a result of its lenders’ regularly scheduled semi-annual redetermination process. The Company also amended the terms of its credit facility to increase the commitment amount from the bank group to $1.3 billion, from $1.0 billion, and to extend the maturity of the facility by approximately two years to April of 2018.

    Tony Best, CEO, commented, “We are excited about the initial results in our first Woodbine test in East Texas. The Horizon Properties 2H well was a science well with approximately 2,500 feet of effectively stimulated lateral length. We expect to be able to improve our results on subsequent wells in this play. We have recently added approximately 10,000 net acres to our position and are still working to further expand our acreage position in this exciting play. I am also pleased by the increase in our borrowing base, as it reflects the growth in our proved reserve base.

    “Success in our New Ventures program allows us to add inventory to our portfolio, which provides opportunities to create value for our shareholders through high-grading, increasing activity, or asset monetization. As always, we remain committed to a disciplined allocation of capital that creates long-term value for shareholders and maintains the financial strength of the Company.”

    From: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/04/15/sm-energy-announces-exploration-success-in-east-te/

    Linux

    new network KCM

    Leave a comment

    Stop me if you can

    If you followed my last post about sessionk you might be wondering “what the hell…”, well I like to code on stuff I’m in need, about sessionk I hope soon I give it an update now that I have more or less the whole picture.

    So what’s up with networking? If you didn’t see the new plasma network managergo take a look, the greatest thing about it in my opinion is to have new blood around, so when I look at it I decided I should stop complaining and do something I wanted for a long time.

    There’s nothing basically wrong with the NM plasmoids, it’s just that for the use case I’m interested in no plasmoid will ever fit it. The Mom’s use-case. If you have non nerd friends, wife, kids, parents that use Linux you know that they will someday call you. And when they do you need some sort of script to diagnose why isn’t “Facebook” opening. My script is like this:

    • First click on the (hmm) icon that looks like (hmm) a dot with semi-curves next to the clock
    • – There’s none.
    • Ok then try to find one that is a square with a smaller square inside
    • – There’s none.
    • Maybe a square with a black empty square in?
    • – Ah ok…
    • – But it says the cable is not connected and I just plugged on the power
    • ….
    • Do you have an wifi right?
    • – I have a Wifi…
    • …

    As you can it’s hard to describe a plasmoid UI by phone, also the user might have removed the plasmoid from the tray or might be using plasma-netbook (I took half an hour trying to explaing where the K menu was till I figured out it was netbook edition…). Also the current Network Manager KCM only handle connections which means you must have a plasmoid if you want to manage network.

    This is where System Settings comes in:

    • The user can’t screw the interface
    • The user can read labels like “networking”
    • It has regular buttons (not flat things that are transparent and hard todistinguish)
    • It offers the possibility of a more advanced user interface

    With this new plasma-nm I felt it was just the right time for me to do this, more people active on looking at NM means people can fix your code and the other way too. Last week then I started this and at the same time I tried to give some Qt/C++ classes toJayson Rowe and we immediately feel that some parts of the API was hard to use, like the IPv4 class was giving you an Int, when I saw this I had no idea how to convert that easily to an string, luckly there is a QHostAddress class that I never had used but it turns out I decided to make libnm-qt actually return a QHostAddress, and I started lot’s of changes on the lib, among them a change on how to handle pointers which has fixed some crashes here.

    And here is the first screenshot <img alt=":)" class="wp-smiley"

    From: http://dantti.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/new-network-kcm/

    Linux

    First Open Chemistry Beta Release

    Leave a comment

    We are pleased to announce the first beta release of the Open Chemistry suite of cross platform, open-source, BSD-licensed tools and libraries – Avogadro 2, MoleQueue and MongoChem. They are being released in beta, before all planned features are complete, to get feedback from the community following the open-source mantra of “release early, release often”. We will be making regular releases over the coming months, as well as automatically generating nightly binaries. A Source article from 2011 introduced the project, slides from FOSDEM describe it more recently, and the 0.5.0 release binaries can be downloaded here.

    These three desktop applications can each be used independently, but also have the capability of working together. Avogadro 2 is a rewrite of Avogadro that addresses many of the limitations we saw. This includes things such as the rendering code, scalability, scriptability, and increased flexibility, enabling us to effectively address the current and upcoming challenges in computational chemistry and related fields. MoleQueue provides desktop services for executing standalone programs both locally and on remote batch schedulers, such as Sun Grid Engine, PBS and SLURM. MongoChem provides chemically-aware search, storage, and informatics visualization using MongoDB and VTK.

    Avogadro 2

    Avogadro 2 is a rewrite of Avogadro; please see the recently-published paper for more details on Avogadro 1. Avogadro has been very successful over the years, and we would like to thank all of our contributors and supporters, including the core development team: Geoff Hutchison, Donald Curtis, David Lonie, Tim Vandermeersch, Benoit Jacob, Carsten Niehaus, and Marcus Hanwell. We also recently obtained permission from almost all authors to relicense the existing code under the 3-clause BSD license, which will make migration of code to the new architecture much easier.

    Some notable new features of Avogadro 2 include:

    • Scalable data structures capable of addressing the needs of large molecular systems.
    • A flexible file I/O API supporting seamless addition of formats at runtime.
    • A Python-based input generator API, creating an input for a range of quantum codes.
    • A specialized scene graph for supporting scalable molecular rendering.
    • OpenGL 2.1/GLSL based rendering, employing point sprites, VBOs, etc.
    • Unit tests for core classes, with ongoing work to improve coverage.
    • Binary installers generated nightly.
    • Use of MoleQueue to run computational codes such as NWChem, MOPAC, GAMESS, etc.

    Avogadro is not yet feature complete, but we invite you to try it out along with the suite of applications as we continue to improve it. The new Avogadro libraries feature much finer granularity; whereas before we provided a single library with all API, there is now a layered API in multiple libraries. The Core and IO libraries have minimal dependencies, with the rendering library adding a dependence on OpenGL, and the Qt libraries adding Qt 4 dependencies. This allows us to reuse the code in many more places than was possible before, with rendering possible on a server

    From: http://blog.cryos.net/archives/265-First-Open-Chemistry-Beta-Release.html

    Computers

    Twitter OAuth feature can be abused to hijack accounts, researcher says

    Leave a comment

    A feature in the Twitter API (application programming interface) can be abused by attackers to launch credible social engineering attacks that would give them a high chance of hijacking user accounts, a mobile application developer revealed Wednesday at the Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam.

    The issue has to do with how Twitter uses the OAuth standard to authorize third-party apps, including desktop or mobile Twitter clients, to interact with user accounts through its API, Nicolas Seriot, a mobile applications developer and project manager at Swissquote Bank in Switzerland, said Thursday.

    Twitter allows apps to specify a custom callback URL where users will be redirected after granting those apps access to their accounts through an authorization page on Twitter’s site.

    Seriot found a way to craft special links that, when clicked by users, will open Twitter app authorization pages for popular clients like TweetDeck. However, those requests would specify the attacker’s server as callback URLs, forcing users’ browsers to send their Twitter access tokens to the attacker.

    To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

    From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2033830/twitter-oauth-feature-can-be-abused-to-hijack-accounts-researcher-says.html#tk.rss_all

    Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

    athenahealth Selects Mashery to Advance Openness and Innovation in Health Care

    Leave a comment

    By Business Wirevia The Motley Fool

    Filed under:

    athenahealth Selects Mashery to Advance Openness and Innovation in Health Care

    API toolkit will make it easy for developers to create web and mobile apps and improve the way patient care is coordinated, delivered and reimbursed

    WATERTOWN, Mass. & SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)– athenahealth, Inc. (NAS: ATHN) , a leading provider of cloud-based services for electronic health record (EHR), practice management, and care coordination, today announced the Company is working with Mashery to provide new web-services-based APIs (application programming interfaces) for the health care IT developer community. These new offerings strengthen partner access to athenahealth’s More Disruption Please (MDP) program, an initiative that brings together entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, developers, academics, and others who believe in breeding innovation and stoking disruption as a means to overcome the staid and broken processes within health care.

    Through its work with Mashery, the world’s leading provider of API management technology and services, athenahealth is unleashing turn-key connectivity to its cloud-based platform of HIT services and to its existing network of about 40,000 providers nationwide. This massive, open API initiative offers innovators an onramp to develop best-of-breed, HIPAA-compliant health care applications that can be easily introduced and integrated within health care provider workflows.

    “With Mashery, we are yet again putting a stake in the cloud; we’re lowering the point of entry for the best and brightest across the technology community to plug into our network, to engage our captive audience of tens of thousands of providers, and to innovate on their behalf. Come! Help us disrupt and improve health care,” said Jonathan Bush, CEO and chairman, athenahealth. “athenahealth is building a cloud-based, information backbone—similar to what Amazon.com is for consumers, our platform will serve as a one-stop shop for providers seeking solutions to help them meet clinical and business goals. Unlike traditional HIT vendors that operate in closed silos and are unwilling to connect beyond their existing client base, we are all about openness.”

    Kyle Armbrester, director of Business Development and head of More Disruption Please at athenahealth, added: “We are modernizing health care IT in a big way with Mashery by streamlining connectivity to our platform, and allowing the developer community to plug in and innovate. We’re providing the data and knowledge from our cloud-based network, a captive audience for developers to innovate for, and an online sandbox to do it all in. The bottom line is that there’s not enough innovation in health care; by

    From: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/04/11/athenahealth-selects-mashery-to-advance-openness-a/