Open Light Software Inc. News and Publications

The following publications and other items give you an idea of the quality of work that you can expect from Open Light.

Jan 29, 2007. The LinuxWorld article "BoSStats, FlightFeather and the Relative Static Web" describes the design philosophy behind the FlightFeather Social Networking Platform (see below).
Jan 18, 2007. First beta release of FlightFeather, a Free/Open Source social networking platform focusing on resource conservation and performance. The goal of FlightFeather is "social networking for everyone". The system keeps bandwidth utilization to a minimum, and should eventually support large traffic volumes with little hardware. This gives anyone a chance to run a popular social networking site.

Larger organizations will also benefit from increased fault tolerance and uncomplicated configuration of the FlightFeather architecture, while saving space and power requirements at the datacenter. Since a live site which appeals to many people is the best way to provide the real-world traffic needed to develop a project such as FlightFeather, Open Light also launched BoSStats. BoSStats is dedicated to improving the world of work -- there, you can discuss office politics, and what makes a good boss. Privacy protection is an important feature of FlightFeather, which is reflected on the BoSStats site. The application does not use cookies nor collect email addresses, and you can post anonymously.
December 2006. A Server (Almost) of Your Own is an article that describes how to set up a Virtual Private Server (VPS). It was published in the December 2006 issue of the Linux Journal, as well as online. The discussion focuses on email, because it is the most complex service that the typical VPS user would likely have to configure. The article provides highly detailed, step-by-step instructions on setting up a secure mailserver, and supporting various email clients, including web-based access to mail.
Oct 26, 2006. Wrap Your Mind Around Python is a half day (3 hours) workshop that was part of the Seneca 5th Annual Free Software and Open Source Symposium. Seneca is a very large college, with over 100,000 students. The presentation takes the audience from elementary interactive sessions with the Python interpreter (numbers, strings, etc.) all the way to metaclasses. It concludes with several example applications. See the workshop notes for more information.
Aug 15, 2006. This talk at LinuxWorld San Francisco described how to graphically show complex data in your web application. See the visualization page for live demonstrations and the presentation slides. You can also read the related article.
Feb 2, 2006. Black Box with a View, Part 2, an article published by O'Reilly. It covers advanced design and development techniques for microcontrollers, including layered architectures in resource-constrained environments, and Object-Oriented Programming in C.
Nov 10, 2005. Invited talk (scroll down to Nov 10, 2005 date) as part of the Seneca College Speaker Series. Note that Seneca is Canada's largest college, with over 100,000 students.

You can view the presentation notes or download the S5 presentation theme. Feel free to use the theme for your own presentations, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license.
Oct 24, 2005. Invited talk at the Seneca College Free and Open Source Symposium. You can also view the presentation slides.
Mar 10, 2005. Black Box with a View — an article covering embedded software development for microcontrollers (published by O'Reilly).
Jun 29, 2004. "Carmanah Lights the Way with Python" is a Python Success Story. It describes the effectiveness of Python (a programming language widely used at Google, Yahoo, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and many other prominent organizations) in the development of embedded systems. The story covers a project that Open Light performed for a client.

The story has also appeared in print, published by O'Reilly in their Part two of Python Success Stories.
Mar 25, 2004. A talk on Python and embedded systems, "Python and Real-World Devices", given at the 2004 Python Conference (PyCon 2004) in Washington, DC. The talk covered a project that Open Light Software Inc. performed for a client.
Feb 12, 2004 — Nov 6, 2003. A series of articles on Network I/O, published by O'Reilly. The first article provides everything that the reader needs to get started quickly. The second article discusses more advanced topics, including a guide to selecting the right I/O technique for your project.
Aug 7, 2003 — May 8, 2003. A series of articles on C++ memory management, published by O'Reilly. The first, second and third articles cover progressively more advanced aspects of this topic. The series made the publisher's best of 2003 list.
Mar 27, 2003. The Flightdeck-UI paper, published as part of the 2003 Python Conference in Washington, DC (PyCon DC 2003). You can also view the presentation slides from the conference talk.

Open Light Software Inc.

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