Heather Johnson is guest blogging at WhatIs.com this week. Heather is a freelance writer, as well as a monthly contributor for OEDb, a site that helps students select among accredited online schools. She invites comments and freelancing job inquiries at heatherjohnson2323@gmail.com.

There has been a lot of talk about open source hardware lately and its potential effects on research and education. ETech 2008 showcased many examples of open hardware and offered an insightful presentation [PDF] to those who are new to the emerging technology. Likewise, popular sites like Slashdot and bloggers like Scobleizer have been discussing the growing movement.

The increasing popularity of open source software has already had a tremendous influence on education and the world as a whole. Not only are many schools now making the switch to open source programs, leading universities like UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon are involved with developing large open source software projects.

However, we have yet to see open hardware really take off. Ryan Singel of Wired feels that 2008 could be the year and I second that opinion. Leading the pack seems to be open source robotics, which has been embraced by several major universities.

Just last month, Willow Garage’s Steve Cousins gave a keynote speech at ETech 2008 about open source personal robots, which has brought more attention to the subject. Willow Garage is a privately funded lab that experiments with various robotics platforms.

This open source robotics movement can be felt on many college campuses as well. Carnegie Mellon, which I previously stated is involved with open source software, is also building OS personal robots. The university has recently formed a joint project called the Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE).

The IPRE is a joint project between Georgia Tech and Bryn Mawr College, with sponsorship provided by Microsoft Research. Its purpose is to help advance robotics research and computer science education. The IPRE is currently selling open source robot kits, which are geared toward educators and can be integrated with computer education curricula.

Instructions can be found RobotEducation.org if you are interested in building your own educational robot.

[Image credit: RobotEducation.org]

This video captured Dave Burke, an engineering manager within Google’s mobile team, at the Future of Mobile conference in London talking about Android and the Open Handset Alliance (OHA).

This lecture from the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley describes how the manufacture design of integrated circuits (ICs) has evolved and improved over the years.

As IC’s routinely include more than a billion transistors, the interactions between the design and the manufacturing communities now must handle atomic-level variability, dozens of new materials, and patterning techniques operating at their theoretical limit.

In this talk, we will present several facets of this problem and discuss emerging innovations at the IC design-manufacturing interface.

Two weeks and less than 10,000 lines of code result in this demonstration of a starfighter action game on an iPhone that takes advantage of the device’s accelerometer, touch screen and high contrast display. This is a great use of the interface and should inspire some creative thinking the software development community.

My immediate thought upon seeing Steve Forstall’s demo is that there could be a lot of flying iPhones, similar to the stories we’ve heard about the Wiimote. Remember those videos of plasma screens when the Wii debuted?

Now just imagine it’s a device that costs more than $500 direct from Apple in the U.S. and often much more than that in Europe.

That being said, I’m excited to see how software designers take advantage of that new Apple iPhone SDK.

That and Spore. Given more than two weeks to work on this game, I think this could be a killer gaming app for the device.

In this Google TechTalk, Ted Nelson discusses implementing the original hypertext concept and how transclusion should be used now to fulfill its original potential.

While Nelson is credited with coining the term “hypertext, Vannevar Bush is responsible for inventing the concept, which he described as “instant cross referencing.”

As usual, we tread in the path of giants.

Are you thinking ahead to making gifts for the holidays? I certainly am; once the Thanksgiving holiday is on the immediate horizon, my internal clock starts ringing madly. Less than a month until the gift exchanges begin?!

{angst}

Fortunately, a friendly colleague forwarded me a rather useful tool: Vector Magic. If you, like me, love to make your own gifts, including digital imagery, this tool will excite you as well.

Here’s a quick and clean summary. Vector Magic converts bit map images to vector graphics.

Why is this cool? Because a bit map uses a fixed or raster graphics method of specifying an image, the image cannot be immediately rescaled by a user without losing definition. A vector graphics graphic image, however, is designed to be quickly rescaled.

Instead of using commercial software, you can just upload your image to Vector Magic (essentially, a stanford.edu server) and they’ll vectorize it for you.

Here’s their example of the difference:

In other words, you can scale an image without making it blurry or pixelated. Savvy? Happy gift making!

Here’s a video that demonstrates how you how Vector Magic works:

Check out this FAQ for more info. Vector Magic supports the JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF image formats as inputs and outputs them as EPS, SVG or PNGs.

Say what you will about link bait — this list of freeware and open source Web development applications from Andrew Sellick is a great resource if you’re in the business (or even hobby) of building Web sites and don’t have the budget for Adobe’s creative suite. While some resources are likely to be familiar to many, like Eclipse or the IE Toolbar, if you work in the creation or maintenance of online content, it’s a sure bet you’ll discover something new and worthwhile in Andrew’s list.

Thanks to Andrew for all of his hard work researching and pulling them together — and to the delicious community, as always, for highlighting the achievement by collectively bookmarking it to the top.

Try the XEL-1. Engadget has a great photo gallery for your viewing pleasure.

Today, Sony unveiled the world’s first OLED television. That’s organic light-emitting diode, for you acronym-o-phobes.

The TV is only 3mm thick, has a resolution of 960 x 540 (though it’s described as 1080p) and comes with a TV tuner. More impressive, however, is the contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1 on the 11″ screen. The screen manages to be thinner than an LCD or PDP (plasma display panel) set because no backlight is required — ah, the wonders of OLED lighting!

You can attach your next-gen optical disc player (Blu-Ray or HD-DVD) to the HDMI port, along with USB and Ethernet inputs for other devices.

You’ll have to wait until December for this beauty, sadly — and travel to all the way to Japan!

As amazing as this may be to gadgethounds, I’m still holding my breath for FOLEDs– a flexible OLED screens — on, say, a t-shirt, jacket sleeve or smartnewspaper. The technology is still a few years out, even if this video shows a tantalizing preview of what’s to come.

snap2objects.com knows. In fact, Mauricio Duque’s list of the 45 best freeware design programs is just the thing to help you or any (cheap) relatives with image editing, desktop publishing or Web design.

The Colombian graphic designer affectionately known as “Mao” took a break from working towards his master’s in information systems design to go through thousands and thousands of applications and bring us his list of the best of the best. As he says, none of them will replace Photoshop, Flash, InDesign, Quark or other professional applications, but the price is right!

I’ve loved GIMP for a while, but, I have to admit, most of these were new to me. Thanks, Mao!

One of our colleagues, SearchNetworking.com’s Tessa Parmenter, wrote a provocative message to her audience this past week. In it, she commented on a new tool, Netcosm, described by Andrew Hickey in his recent article, “Network Monitoring gets a video game touch.” Here’s what Andrew had to say:

What if monitoring tools got a 3D kick and incorporated slick, video game-like graphics and sound effects to alert IT of problems on the network?

Sounds a bit goofy, but it just might work.

NetQoS, maker of tools like SuperAgent and ReporterAnalyzer, recently announced its latest creation: Netcosm, a 3D graphical representation of the network and the traffic that traverses it. It uses video game-style graphics, resembling something out of the futuristic 1980s movie Tron or early incarnations of popular games like Doom or Quake.

Netcosm, to put it simply, represents the network and the traffic that traverses it with 3-D graphics that look distinctly like those of a video game. While the tool is not yet released, Netcosm can be viewed as an online demo.

Tessa asked some provocative questions in a recent newsletter, which, with her permission, we’ve excerpted below. Please feel free to respond to with your thoughts in letters to the editor or in the comments section of this post. Do you think this is the future of networking and tech support?

Netcosm targets the younger generation of networking pros, those used to the graphics and sound effects of video games — the IT pro gamer.

What does this say to the non-gamer, networking professional? Maybe it won’t matter because the graphics are doing them a service, presenting lots of metrics all at once with quickly comprehensible images. But could this be ostracizing, or even belittling to the more informed and practiced IT pro?

My guess is no, since much of work these days feels, well, much more like work. Laughter seems to have been squeezed out of our daily work lives — no play allowed, no laughter, no games — so why not add a little joie de vivre to our work day? Isn’t this like getting paid to play video games? And isn’t that a gamer’s dream come true?

In a sense…but then what is this saying about our culture? Maybe the boundaries of work and play should not combine. If you go into this program with the mindset that you’re playing a video game, then you might want to rethink things. There are no pauses, no cheat codes, and certainly no extra lives. Once a failsafe has gone down and the bad guys have taken over your network, you’ve compromised corporate data, not just your self-esteem. And the excitement of the graphics might be tempting. Even the best network admin might want to see what happens, just this one time, when something combusts. Though unrealistic, it’s still a thought to consider. The worse things get, the cooler things look.

All in all, though, we can take this for what it is: a great way to illustrate what is going on with your network. Rather than deciphering vague alert messages, this gets the point across immediately. And, because the majority of us are image-oriented, it makes sense to represent these pertinent metrics graphically.

Do you feel differently about this? Is there something you want to add or comment on? Share your thoughts with us at SearchNetworking.com and send your message to: editor@searchnetworking.com.

Buzzfeed helps you “find movies, music, fashion, ideas, and technology that are on the rise and worth your time,” combining buzz detection with short, pithy posts about whatever the idea happens to be.

Jason Kottke, one of our favorite technology bloggers, was involved in the creation of Buzzfeed — so you can bet the design is worth a look.

Buzzfeed detects new memes by crawling 50,000 different Web sites, crunching that raw data to uncover new ideas as they start to enter the online conversation, not just the blogosphere. Pretty nifty!

What’s more than a blog and less than a Web site? A Squarespace, apparently. According to Caroline McCarthy at Webware.com, Squarespaces are what result when users of a content management system (CMS) developed by a Manhattan startup located in the heart of Silicon Alley use it as a platform for online publishing.

The Wall Street Journal Online thinks that “This is the kind of software the internet has been crying out for.”

What do users get for their money that isn’t available for free elsewhere? A robust CMS, an elegant user interface, beautiful template design and AJAX-enhanced click-and-drag functionality, in both case significant improvements to what Blogger (and certainly MySpace) currently offer, though Wordpress and Movable Type are worth considering for this sort of thing as well.

Potential users of Squarespace include small businesses, entrepeneurs, political campaign, educators and anyone else willing to pay $7 to $17 per month, as you’ll see in this gallery of featured users.

You can learn more at Squarespace.com and see a great example of the software in action at the Modern Girls Kitchen.

Tired of clicking from one metafilter to the next? Thomas Marban’s PopURLs.com displays the most popular links on social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl, Fark, Slashdot, Wired, NewsVine, Metafilter and many others, all on one page, with direct links to the stories. Federated Media calls it a “dashboard for the hive mind,” a statement we’re inclined to agree with entirely. Constantly updated headlines are displayed on a minimalist black background. You can simply rollover a story to get a summary to pop up, which makes browsing that much easier. There are also feeds for the most tagged photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube, iFilm and MetaCafe.