dimitris kalamaras

Last Friday, it was high time to release a new SocNetV version. The brand new v0.80, the first after six months, marked what I think the start of a more mature period for this tiny little project of mine.

What started as a personal desire to create a simple drawing tool for social networks has become a quite sophisticated tool for social network analysis (spare me, I am talking about mathematical sociology here, not facebook etc):

• It can read all major network file formats (GraphML, pajek, GraphViz, UCINET, csv, or adjacency matrix) and save the network in GraphML. In the next version, I plan to even add support for the older GML format.

• It can swiftly compute centrality measures (closeness, betweeness, eccentricity, etc) and layout the network actors accordingly, in radial or layered style, at least for small to medium sized networks (i.e. < 3000 edges). Moreover, it implements one of the fastest known betweeness centrality calculation algorithms. For the 0.90 release, I want to add a couple or more new centrality algorithms (i.e. power centrality by Gil-Mendieta and Schmid).

• Since 0.70, it can even crawl a given website and create the network of its outLinks. Later, I plan to add support for mailing list archives crawling…

In the new version, I added some social capital features. The software can compute a ‘triad census’, namely it counts all the different types (classes) of observed triads within a network. The triad types are coded and labeled according to their number of mutual, asymmetric and non-existent (null) dyads (this labeling scheme is called M-A-N). This new feature is complimented by a simple, naive (please note, this is a NP-complete problem) clique counting alrorithm.

Also, the speed of the network parser has been improved somewhat by removing some unnecessary checks and adding a simple control variable. And the GraphViz load method is a lot better now. I think.

As usual, at least a dozen of bugs have been reported and fixed. Of course, it’s not perfect, and certainly many improvements can be made, but the code is there, and is constantly evolving. I think that it deserves to be named 0.80. I am not sure though how easy will be to reach the other 0.20 to the first 1.0 release… If you have an idea about a possible feature, feel free to submit a blueprint.

As usual, source code and binaries for all major distros are available from the project website at SourceForge.

Filed under:
Open Source, SNA by dimitris

Yep. Or should I say, phew! After a whole week battling 8 hours the day with Bash script errors, package dependencies (to minimize the ISO size), PDFs, etc, and wasting any single moment of my vacation time, I managed to release Sxolinux 2009.1.

I know, it’s kind of hilarious: we call it 2009.1 just 4 days before the end of this year! But I couldn’t make it faster. Why? Because, for this release we prepared two flavors: the original High School version and a Junior one for Elementary school kids. They have different icon sets, different applications, and different ebooks (PDFs). That really doubled the time needed to test and build. Nevertheless, it was really fun. I hope the end products will be OK as well

So, download, and let your kids have fun! I am getting back to SocNetV, at last.

Filed under:
Open Source by dimitris

Η πρώτη beta του Sxolinux 2009.1 είναι γεγονός! Βασίζεται στο Ubuntu Karmic, με ανανεωμένο artwork, διορθώσεις, νέο σκριπτάκι εγκατάστασης εργαλείων, και φυσικά πολλά bugs! Δείτε στιγμιότυπα και λεπτομέρειες για να το κατεβάσετε εδώ στο www.sxolinux.gr ή στο forum του Sxolinux στο linuxformat.gr. Καλές δοκιμές!

Filed under:
Open Source by dimitris

Τις τελευταίες βδομάδες, έχω βρει ένα νέο …project: την «ανάπτυξη» του Σχολίνουξ. Το Σχολίνουξ ή sxolinux, όπως προδίδει το όνομά του, είναι ένα «σχολικό Linux» που στοχεύει στους μαθητές του Γυμνασίου. Γιατί ντε και καλά του Γυμνασίου; Επειδή η όλη ιδέα περί «σχολικής διανομής» ξεκίνησε από την παρατήρηση-πρόταση ενός φίλου στο φόρουμ του Linux Format, ότι εφόσον θα δοθούν φέτος κουπόνια για δωρεάν laptops στα παιδιά της Α’ Γυμνασίου, καλό θα ήταν να «φτιάξουμε μια διανομή που θα ενσωματώνει όλο το απαραίτητο λογισμικό και τα βιβλία»…

Σε αυτήν την πρόταση ανταποκρίθηκαν αρκετοί χρήστες, διαλέξαμε το όνομα «sxolinux/σχολίνουξ», κι εγώ προσφέρθηκα να φτιάξω ένα σκριπτάκι (μια εκδοχή του melux.sh) που κάνει remaster το εκάστοτε ISO του Ubuntu, δηλαδή του προσθέτει τα σχολικά βιβλία σε PDF και το αντίστοιχο εκπαιδευτικό λογισμικό της Α’ Γυμνασίου, μαζί με άλλες εκπαιδευτικές εφαρμογές του Gnome και του KDE, media players, όμορφα παιχνίδια, κατάλληλα εικονίδια και χρώματα, και φυσικά διαφορετικά λογότυπα, κλπ….
(more…)

Filed under:
Education, Open Source by dimitris

I was having a kind of …insomnia attack last Friday night, so I decided to search the openSUSE repositories for interesting applications. I was using openSUSE (11.1) at the moment, with lots of additional repos [1] from the excellent Build Service, so there were a lot of things there to explore. One thing led to another, and soon I ended up downloading Processing. What is this? The package description looked interesting:

Processing is an open source programming language and
environment for people who want to program images, animation,
and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers,
researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production.
It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming
within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook
and professional production tool. Processing is an alternative
to proprietary software tools in the same domain

I thought “ok, this is promising, let’s have a closer look at it”, and waited a couple minutes for all 85MB of packages to be downloaded and installed from the Education repository (no Ubuntu packages yet, but you can just download a tarball with linux binaries). Then I started the application with the command: (more…)

Filed under:
Education, Open Source by dimitris