I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.

It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.

Filed under 'opensource'

April 17, 2012

zxcvbn: realistic password strength estimation

Thoughtful article explaining Dropbox’s new open-source password-strength-estimator. Good stuff.

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June 21, 2010

Slide, Inc. - open source

Some Python libraries opensourced from the Slide codebase. “wirebin”, the superfast object serializer, is my favourite.

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May 3, 2009

Miro Adoption Center

Brilliant marketing of donating to an open source project: You get to “adopt” a line of code in the codebase.

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March 15, 2009

redis

Key-value datastore. Fast like memcached, but persists to disk and can deal with pushing and popping with lists and sets. Just the thing to solve some of the problems I’ve been having with my RDBMS on a project I’m hacking on.

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January 28, 2009

ReactOS

ReactOS

Man, those ReactOS developers have really done a stellar job of replicating the Windows NT fundamentals.

(Okay, not really their fault! I chose to "upgrade" their demo VM when VMware prompted me. If you don't do that, it works OK)

(Also, the video is sped up by Flickr. Bug reported here.)

September 12, 2008

Dopplr Blog: Find and invite your existing social networks

Dopplr have open-sourced their Ruby code to find your contacts and friends on social networks. They do a great job with it, so this’ll be worth keeping an eye on until “Portable Contacts” takes off.

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June 18, 2008

reddit goes open source

Reddit release (most of) the source for the site, allowing anyone to host their own reddit. Excellent video announcement from the mascot too.

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May 30, 2008

TypePad AntiSpam

SixApart launch an Akismet-compatible anti-comment-spam system, with a GPL’d open-source backend available for customized installs. I’ve tweaked my blog to run it, so we’ll see how it does.

February 6, 2008

TrueCrypt - Free Open-Source On-The-Fly Disk Encryption Software

The excellent TrueCrypt now runs on OS X, as well as Windows and Linux. I’ll definitely be shunting some of my files onto an encrypted thumbdrive later.

November 6, 2007

Synthesia, Piano for Everyone

The project formerly known as “Piano Hero”.

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August 20, 2007

BBC Olinda digital radio: Social hardware

Schulze & Webb are working on an open, social digital-radio-plus-wifi prototype for the BBC. Fascinating the way they hope to apply “open source” to hardware design.

August 3, 2007

Welcome to Hadoop!

Open-source project to allow the creation of massive massively-parallelized systems. I’m so glad my CompSci course taught me about parallel programming in 1997, because it’s only going to become more important.

Ohloh, the open source network

Open-source-software social network, tracking both projects and people.

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June 21, 2007

Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days - Miguel de Icaza

Wow! The Mono team produced an open-source implementation of MS’s Flash-killer(TM) in 21 days.

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June 5, 2007

movabletype.org: Welcome to MTOS: the Movable Type Open Source Project

MovableType to be GPLed. I’ll take “Two Years Too Late” for $400, please, Alex.

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May 7, 2007

MogileFS

Open-source distributed filesystem from Brad Fitzpatrick. Looks to be as wicked-cool and game-changing as memcached.

May 6, 2007

MailActOn

Plugin for Apple Mail which allows you to quickly tag/file/act-on your emails with a couple of keystrokes. I’d been looking for something like this for a while.

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May 1, 2007

Frets On Fire

Open source Guitar Hero-a-like.

January 4, 2007

Wormux

Open source Worms-a-like. Far too many of my student hours were taken up playing “Worms 2” against my flatmates. Admittedly, most of that time was taken up by giggling as we named our worms things like “Sean Is A Virgin” and “Jim’s Cock”, but I think the game was fun too.

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January 2, 2007

Vienna

Open-source newsreader for OS X. Looks to be worthy competition for NetNewsWire.

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October 10, 2006

Open Source madness!

Good commentary of the unpleasantness that’s about to unfold with this Firefox/Iceweasel fork. The two new “features” which will now ship with Debian, Ubuntu, et al are just the tip of an iceberg of confusion and incompatibility.

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April 5, 2006

DOSBox, a x86 emulator with DOS

Tool for running olde DOS games (Soundblaster emulation and all) in Windows/Linux/OSX. I’ll have to try getting “Jones In The Fast Lane” up and running with it.

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March 19, 2006

Darik's Boot and Nuke

Bootdisk that fits on a 1.44Mb floppy which securely nukes every scrap of data off of hard drives. Handy to have if you’re about to sell an old computer.

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December 28, 2005

TrueCrypt - Free Open-Source On-The-Fly Disk Encryption Software for Windows XP/2000 and Linux

Open-source whole-disk encryption package for Windows. Perfect for keeping your USB keychain drive safe from prying eyes.

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November 27, 2005

Paint.NET

New version of the excellent free^2 Windows image editing software.

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November 2, 2005

Producing Open Source Software

Free ebook on the hows and wherefores of running an open source project, from someone who’s been round the block a couple of times.

October 7, 2005

the electric sheep screen-saver

My screensaver-of-choice — Collaboratively generate frames for gorgeously-trippy animations.

September 11, 2005

Reduce the risk, hire from open source (Loud Thinking)

There is much I agree with here. Maybe this weekend I’ll finish off a draft blog entry I’ve been meaning to do for months on hiring.

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About This Site

This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.

I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.