Open Source on Caktus Group

Automating PyPI releases with Github Actions

Thu, 11 Feb 2021 14:37:42 +0000

At Caktus, we maintain some open source packages, which are usually pieces of code that we’ve found useful when building an application, and we figure they might be useful to others. From time to time, those open source projects need a little maintenance: Maybe a bug fix has been provided from a community member, or we need to update to support a new version of Python or Django. I always hesitate to do this because I know there are multiple steps involved to ensure that any updates are properly tested, documented, versioned, and released. One of my silly blockers is that I always seem to forget how to upload a release to PyPI, which is the Python Package Index, a repository of software for Python. I call it silly because it shouldn’t really be a blocker, seeing how simple it actually is, but I still forget it each time and have to walk through the documentation step by step to make sure I do it properly. I recently found a tool that helps with this process.

What to do About Email: How to Extract Data from Microsoft PST Files

Thu, 19 Mar 2020 12:27:52 +0000

In my previous line of work as an archivist, the question of what to do about email archives was an ongoing and deeply-considered topic. Email is everywhere. Yes, even Gen Z and millennials use it, despite thousands of think pieces that would have you believe that the old ways are giving way to business meetings conducted on fixed-gear bicycles, over avocado toast and Instagram.

All Things Open 2019 Recap

Wed, 06 Nov 2019 19:02:08 +0000

I recently attended All Things Open in Raleigh. Bringing together more than 4,000 attendees, it is the largest open tech event on the East Coast, and is focused on “exploring open source, open tech, and the open web.” This year, ATO included more than 240 sessions across 22 tracks, ranging from front-end development to internet-of-things to studies of open data in government. The event was much larger than the last time that I attended in 2017.

Caktus Adopts New Web Framework

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 11:00:00 +0000

Caktus Changing from Django to New COBOL-based Framework

Beginning immediately, Caktus will build new projects using our new COBOL-based framework, ADD COBOL TO WEB.

Django Depends on You: A Takeaway from DjangoCon

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 13:00:00 +0000

Photo by Bartek Pawlik.

DjangoCon 2018 attracted attendees from around the world, including myself and several other Cakti (check out our DjangoCon recap post). Having attended a number of DjangoCons in the past, I looked forward to reconnecting with old colleagues and friends within the community, learning new things about our favorite framework, and exploring San Diego.

ShipIt Day Recap Q3 2017

Mon, 14 Aug 2017 13:30:00 +0000

Caktus recently held the Q3 2017 ShipIt Day. Each quarter, employees take a step back from business as usual and take advantage of time to work on personal projects or otherwise develop skills. This quarter, we enjoyed fresh crêpes while working on a variety of projects, from coloring books to Alexa skills.

Presidential debate questions influenced by open source platform

Tue, 25 Oct 2016 18:40:02 +0000

During the past two presidential debates, moderators from ABC and Fox asked candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump voter-submitted questions from PresidentialOpenQuestions.com. The site, created by the bipartisan Open Debate Coalition (ODC) with the support of Caktus Group, is built on top of the open source Django web framework.

ShipIt Day Recap Q3 2016

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 15:50:02 +0000

This ShipIt day marks four years of ShipIt days at Caktus! We had a wide range of projects that people came together to build. Most importantly, we all had fun and learned through actively working on the projects. People explored new technologies and tools, and had a chance to dig a bit deeper into items that piqued their interest in their regular work.

Caktus Group @ PyData Carolinas 2016

Wed, 14 Sep 2016 17:23:47 +0000

Tomorrow marks the official beginning of PyData Carolinas 2016 (though technically, the tutorials started today). This is the first time PyData has hosted a conference in our area. We’re especially proud of the way local leaders and members of meetups like TriPython, TechGirlz, Girl Develop It RDU, and PyLadies have worked in tandem to put this event together for the Python community.

Trainspotting: Real-Time Detection (PyCon 2016 Must-See Talk: 4/6)

Thu, 04 Aug 2016 13:41:43 +0000

Part four of six in our annual PyCon Must-See Series, a weekly highlight of talks our staff especially loved at PyCon. With so many fantastic talks, it’s hard to know where to start, so here’s our short list.

ShipIt Day Recap - July 2016

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 12:00:00 +0000

We finished up last week with another successful ShipIt Day. ShipIt Days are quarterly events where we put down client work for a little bit and focus on learning, stretching ourselves, and sharing. Everyone chooses to work together or individually on an itch or a project that has been on the back of their mind for the last few months. This time, we stretched ourselves by trying out new frameworks, languages, and pluggable apps. Here are some of the projects we worked on during ShipIt Day:

Code for Durham: National Day of Civic Hacking Recap

Fri, 10 Jun 2016 12:00:00 +0000

Code for Durham recently participated in Code for America’s National Day of Civic Hacking. Hosted in the Caktus Group Tech Space, the event was attended by more than 50 local participants.

Caktus CTO Colin Copeland Invited to the White House Open Police Data Initiative

Thu, 12 May 2016 18:46:57 +0000

We at Caktus were incredibly proud when the White House Police Data Initiative invited CTO Colin Copeland to celebrate their first year accomplishments. While at the White House, Colin also joined private breakout sessions to share ideas with law enforcement officials, city staff, and other civic technologists from across the country. Colin is the co-founder of Code for Durham and served as lead developer for OpenDataPolicingNC.com. OpenDataPolicingNC.com, a site built for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, displays North Carolina police stop data.

What We’re Clicking - April Link Roundup

Thu, 05 May 2016 14:04:27 +0000

It’s time for this month’s roundup of articles and posts shared by Cakti that drew the most attention on Twitter. The list highlights new work in civic tech and international development as well as reasons for the increasing popularity of Python and open source development.

ShipIt Day Recap: Q2 2016

Thu, 21 Apr 2016 12:00:00 +0000

Last Friday, the Cakti set aside regular client projects for our quarterly ShipIt Day, a chance for personal development and independent projects. People work individually or in groups to flex their creativity, tackle interesting problems, or expand their personal knowledge. This quarter’s ShipIt Day was all about open source contributions, frontend fixes, and learning new (or revisiting old) programming languages. Read about the various ShipIt Day projects for Q2 of 2016 below.

What We're Clicking - March Link Roundup

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 12:00:00 +0000

We’re starting a new, monthly series on the Caktus blog highlighting the articles and posts shared by Cakti that drew the most attention on Twitter. These roundups will include everything from Django how-tos to explorations of the tech industry, to innovations for social good.

New white paper: "Shipping faster: Django team improvements"

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 13:26:38 +0000

For the past couple months, we’ve been working on a new white paper, “Shipping Faster: Django Team Improvements”. We examined our existing processes, looked at best practices, and considered what has or hasn’t worked across our dozens of simultaneous projects.

What We Open Sourced in 2015: A New Year's Retrospective

Thu, 31 Dec 2015 13:00:00 +0000

This year we had the pleasure of building a number of unique solutions for several organizations. In addition, we had the support of these clients to open source the tools we built. By open sourcing our work, we enable others to use, replicate, and even improve upon the tools we’ve created.

Reflecting on My Time as Caktus' Open Source Fellow

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 13:00:00 +0000

My name is Ben Phillips and I am Caktus’ Open Source Fellow. As my fellowship comes to a close, I wanted to reflect on my time at Caktus and to share my experience and some of what I’ve learned here. First, however, I should probably share how I ended up here in the first place.

Caktus CTO Colin Copeland Helps Launch Open Data Policing Website

Thu, 17 Dec 2015 13:50:11 +0000

Today, at Caktus headquarters, CTO and co-founder of Caktus Colin Copeland will stand at a press conference along with activists, police representatives, and elected officials to announce the launch of OpenDataPolicingNC.com. The first site of its kind, OpenDataPolicingNC.com draws on public records to publish up-to-date stop, search, and use-of-force data—broken down by race and ethnicity—for every police department and officer in the state of North Carolina. The volunteer effort, led by The Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ) and technical leadership by Colin, includes approximately 20 million anonymized data points from 15 years of NC traffic stop data.

Identifying Racial Bias in Policing with a Data-driven App

Fri, 16 Oct 2015 21:16:16 +0000

Recently, Caktus co-founder Colin Copeland spoke about the creation of a web app that analyzes North Carolina traffic stop data to identify racial bias during the Code for America 2015 Summit. The website allows both police departments and community members to visualize a dataset of more than 18 million stops statewide. Colin spoke with Ian Mance, the originator of the app idea and staff attorney with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. Together with fellow community members, Andy Shapiro and Dylan Young, they used Django, an open source web framework, to make policing data more accessible.

Colin Copeland to Speak on Police Data and Racial Bias at Code for America Summit

Tue, 29 Sep 2015 17:33:09 +0000

This Thursday, Colin Copeland, CTO and Caktus Group Co-founder, will be co-presenting “Case Study from North Carolina: Identifying Racial Bias in Policing Practices” during the prestigious 2015 Code for America Summit in Oakland, CA. This invite-only event joins technologists, activists, and officials ranging from mayors to White House officials to discuss technology’s role in civic participation.

Introduction to Monte Carlo Tree Search

Thu, 24 Sep 2015 13:47:08 +0000

For DjangoCon 2015, Jeff Bradberry created an A.I. for our booth game, Ultimate Tic Tac Toe. Reprinted here from jeffbradberry.com is his explanation of the Monte Carlo Tree Search used to build the A.I.

Announcing the Caktus Open Source Fellowship

Thu, 06 Aug 2015 12:00:00 +0000

We are excited to announce the creation and funding of a pilot program for open source contributions here at Caktus Group. This program is inspired by the Django Software Foundation’s fellowship as well as the Two Day Manifesto. For this program, Caktus seeks to hire a part-time developer for twelve weeks this fall for the sole purpose of contributing back to open source projects. Caktus builds web applications based on open source tools and the continued growth of these projects is important to us. Open source projects such as Python and Django have given so much to this company and this is one of many ways we are trying to give back.

Stanford Social Innovation Review Highlights Caktus' Work in Libya

Fri, 12 Jun 2015 18:43:50 +0000

The Stanford Social Innovation Review recently featured Caktus in “Text the Vote” in Suzie Boss’ “What’s Next: New Approaches to Social Change” column. It describes how our team of developers built the world’s first SMS voter registration system in Libya using RapidSMS.

Robots Robots Ra Ra Ra!!! (PyCon 2015 Must-See Talk: 6/6)

Wed, 10 Jun 2015 12:00:00 +0000

Part six of six in our PyCon 2015 Must-See Series, a weekly highlight of talks our staff enjoyed at PyCon.

I’ve had an interest in robotics since high school, but always thought it would be expensive and time consuming to actually do. Over the past few years, though, I’ve observed the rise of open hardware such as the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi, and modules and kits built on top of them, that make this type of project more affordable and accessible to the casual hobbyist. I was excited by Katherine’s talk because Robot Operating System (ROS) seems to do for the software side what Arduino and such do for the hardware side.

Creating and Using Open Source: A Guide for ICT4D Managers

Fri, 29 May 2015 18:25:00 +0000

Choosing an open source product or platform upon which to build an ICT4D service is hard. Creating a sustainable, volunteer-driven open source project is even harder. There is a proliferation of open source tools in the world, but the messaging used to describe a given project does not always line up with the underlying technology. For example, the project may make claims about modularity or pluggability that, upon further investigation, prove to be exaggerations at best. Similarly, managers of ICT4D projects may be attracted to Open Source because of the promise of a “free” product, but as we’ve learned through trial and error at Caktus, it’s not always less costly to adapt an existing open source project than it would be to engineer a quality system from the ground up.

Q2 2015 ShipIt Day ReCap

Thu, 14 May 2015 12:00:00 +0000

Last Friday everyone at Caktus set aside their regular client projects for our quarterly ShipIt Day, a chance for Caktus employees to take some time for personal development and independent projects. People work individually or in groups to flex their creativity, tackle interesting problems, or expand their personal knowledge. This quarter’s ShipIt Day saw everything from game development to Bokeh data visualization, Lego robots to superhero animation. Read more about the various projects from our Q2 2015 ShipIt Day.

Marketplace Radio Highlights How Service Info App Helps 1.5 Million Syrian Refugees

Tue, 28 Apr 2015 18:51:07 +0000

Image Courtesy of UK Department for International Development [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Recently, one of our projects, Service Info, received national attention thanks to a Marketplace interview. American Public Media’s Kai Ryssdal spoke with International Rescue Committee CEO David Miliband about how Service Info is helping 1.5 million refugees of the Syrian conflict in Lebanon. The Syrian conflict is one of the worst ongoing humanitarian crises, accounting for the majority of the world’s refugees.

Why RapidSMS for SMS Application Development

Mon, 16 Mar 2015 12:00:00 +0000

Caktus has been involved in quite a few projects (Libyan voter registration, UNICEF Project Mwana, and several others) that include text messaging (a.k.a. Short Message Service, or SMS), and we always use RapidSMS as one of our tools. We’ve also invested our own resources in supporting and extending RapidSMS.

Triangle Open Data Day and Code Across

Tue, 17 Feb 2015 14:56:22 +0000

International Open Data Day is this weekend, February 21st and 22nd. As part of the festivities, Code for America is hosting its 4th annual CodeAcross. The event aims to unite developers across the country for a day of civic coding, creating tools that make government services simple, effective, easy to use. Put simply, “the goal of CodeAcross is to activate the Code for America network and inspire residents everywhere to get actively involved in their community.”

PyCon Blog Features Caktus Group

Tue, 27 Jan 2015 21:07:10 +0000

Brian Curtis, the director of the Python Software Foundation, recently interviewed and featured Caktus on the PyCon website. PyCon is the premiere event for those of us within the Python and Django open source communities. Brian writes about our work designing the PyCon 2015 website, our efforts in Libya, and what’s on the horizon in 2015. We’re excited about this recognition!

Why I Love Technical Blogging

Fri, 23 Jan 2015 16:06:51 +0000

I love writing blog posts, and today I’m setting out to do something I’ve never tried before: write a blog post about writing blog posts. A big part of our mission at Caktus is to foster and help grow the Python and Django development communities, both locally and nationally. Part of how we’ve tried to accomplish this in the past is through hosting development sprints, sponsoring and attending conferences such as PyCon and DjangoCon, and building a knowledge base of common problems in Python and Django development in our blog. Many in the Django community first get to know Caktus through our blog, and it’s both gratifying and humbling when I meet someone at a conference and the person thanks me for a post Caktus wrote that helped him or her solve a technical problem at some point in the past.

Q4 ShipIt Day: Dedicated to Creativity

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 13:00:00 +0000

This October, nearly everyone at Caktus took a break from their usual projects to take part in Caktus’s 8th ShipIt Day. Apart from a few diligent individuals who couldn’t afford to spare any time from urgent responsibilities, nearly everyone took a break to work and collaborate on creative and experimental projects, with the aim of trying something new and ideally seeing a project through from start to finish in the space of a day and a half.

Improving Infant and Maternal Health in Rwanda and Zambia with RapidSMS

Fri, 19 Sep 2014 21:19:06 +0000

Image courtesy of UNICEF, the funders of this project.

I have had the good fortune of working internationally on mobile health applications due to Caktus’ focus on public health. Our public health work often uses RapidSMS, a free and open-source Django powered framework for dynamic data collection, logistics coordination and communication, leveraging basic short message service (SMS) mobile phone technology. I was able to work on two separate projects tracking data related to the 1000 days between a woman’s pregnancy and the child’s second birthday. Monitoring mothers and children during this time frame is critical as there are many factors that, when monitored properly, can decrease the mortality rates for both mother and child. Both of these projects presented interesting challenges and resulted in a number of takeaways worth further discussion.

OSCON 2014 & REST API Client Best Practices

Mon, 04 Aug 2014 11:36:53 +0000

Mark Lavin, Caktus Technical Director and author of the forthcoming LightWeight Django was recently at OSCON 2014 in Portland where he gave a talk on improving the relationship between server and client for REST APIs. OSCON, with over 3000 attendees, is one of the largest open source conferences around. I sat down with him to ask him about his time there.

A Culture of Code Reviews

Mon, 28 Jul 2014 11:00:00 +0000

Code reviews are one of those things that everyone agrees are worthwhile, but sometimes don’t get done. A good way to keep getting the benefits of code reviews is to establish, and even nurture, a culture of code reviews.

July 2014 ShipIt Day Recap

Mon, 14 Jul 2014 21:28:13 +0000

This past Friday we celebrated another ShipIt day at Caktus. There was a lot of open source contribution, exploring, and learning happening in the office. The projects ranged from native mobile Firefox OS apps, to development on our automated server provisioning templates via Salt, to front-end apps aimed at using web technology to create interfaces where composing new music or performing Frozen’s Let It Go is so easy anyone can do it.

Reflecting on Challenges Faced by Female Developers

Wed, 18 Jun 2014 11:36:28 +0000

Karen Tracey, a Django core committer and Caktus Lead Developer and Technical Manager, recently participated in TriLUG’s panel on Women in Free and/or Open Source Software. Karen was one of five female developers who discussed challenges women face in joining the open source community. We recently caught up with Karen to discuss her own experience.

CTO Copeland Featured on WNCN for Open Government App

Tue, 10 Jun 2014 19:17:18 +0000

Colin Copeland, our Chief Technology Officer, recently spoke to WNCN about a new web application, NCFoodInspector.com, that lets Durham County visitors know the cleanliness of nearby restaurants. Colin helped build the application in his spare time as captain of Code for Durham Brigade, an all-volunteer group dedicated to using technology to improve access to publicly available sanitation scores. The group leverages open source technology to build applications.

FastCompany: 10 Most Innovative Companies in Local

Fri, 14 Feb 2014 21:59:21 +0000

FastCompany named Caktus client, UNICEF, as one of the Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Local. UNICEF received this honor for their launch of RapidSMS, an open source platform for quickly building SMS applications.

Caktus Completes RapidSMS Community Coordinator Development for UNICEF

Wed, 05 Feb 2014 14:12:35 +0000

Colin Copeland, Managing Member at Caktus, has wrapped up work, supported by UNICEF, as the Community Coordinator for the open source RapidSMS project. RapidSMS is a text messaging application development library built on top of the Django web framework. It creates a SMS provider agnostic way of sending and receiving text messages. RapidSMS has been used widely in the mobile health field, in particular in areas where internet access cannot be taken for granted and cell phones are the best communication tool available. This has included projects initiated by UNICEF country offices in Ethiopia, Madagascar, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Raspberry IO Open Sourced

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 14:40:39 +0000

Back in March, at PyCon 2013, the PSF provided each attendee with a Raspberry Pi, a tiny credit-card sized computer meant to be paired with the Python programming language. The power and portability of the Raspberry Pi has stimulated an explosion of interest among hobbyists and educators. Their uses seem to be limited only by our collective imagination.

Mark & Julia Speaking at OSCON. “Developers + Designers: Collaborating on your Open Source project”

Tue, 23 Jul 2013 14:20:01 +0000

On Wednesday, Mark and Julia are teaming up to deliver their talk "Developers + Designers: Collaborating on your Open Source project " at OSCON 2013. We’re thrilled that their talk got accepted and know that they have a lot to contribute to the Open Source conversation which too often lacks the voice of designers. Julia and Mark will be discussing how it is important to start collaborating early on your ideas before writing code. We’re happy to have such adept developers and designers here at Caktus pushing each other to work outside of their strict job titles and collaborate to build projects that couldn’t be built anywhere else. If you are at OSCON this week, stop by and hear Mark and Julia’s talk. Or, if you miss their talk, they will be around all week and are excited about meeting new people.

AngularJS to PyGame: Caktus’ 2nd ShipIt Day

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:00:00 +0000

We had our 2nd ShipIt Day at Caktus last week. ShipIt (coined by Atlassian), in case you don’t know, is an exercise that allows your team to work on alternative projects in a 24-hour hackathon. We brainstorm ideas related to Caktus, break into small groups and try to build a project by the end of the day on Friday. It’s a lot of fun and provides an opportunity to work on internal tools, try something new and collaborate together. \

Managing Django Translations with Transifex

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:51:27 +0000

We manage a number of open source Django apps here at Caktus. While many of us here are proficient in a number of programming languages, the same can’t be said for our ability to read or write in languages other than English. The Django community is global and we want our apps to support other languages. For that we’ve turned to Transifex which it the same tool Django itself uses for translations.

django-scribbler, a lightweight front-end interface for Django template editing

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 13:36:44 +0000

django-scribbler is a new open-source project published by the team at Caktus. Its goal is to create a seamless way for authorized end users to make edits to specific blocks of content in their Django template.

Planning Our First ShipIt Day at Caktus

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 16:10:33 +0000

I'm delighted to write that last Friday, we announced we'll be trying our first "ShipIt Day" at Caktus in October. ShipIt Days, also known as FedEx Days, provide a time for the team to set aside what occupies us most days—building fantastic web applications using Python and Django for our wonderful clients—and pick up something new or scratch an itch that's been bugging us for awhile. We got the idea from the book Drive by Daniel Pink, and it was also suggested independently by a number of team members.

Djangocon 2012 First Day

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 15:24:10 +0000

The Caktus team arrived in DC for Djangocon on Monday evening, 9/3 and I've been keeping notes about what the presenters have been discussing and generally what the mood and experience have been like. I am taking a few minutes out of my Tuesday schedule to share with everyone how Djangocon 2012 is shaping up! I stayed in Track 1 throughout the day, so I can only report on talks given there.

Caktus Team Members Presenting at DjangoCon 2012

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 14:00:13 +0000

Caktus is proud to announce that four of our developers will be presenting at this year’s DjangoCon. We are also happy to announce that we will be sponsors of DjangoCon, taking place in Washington D.C. on September 4th through the 7th. In addition to the four Caktus team members who will be presenting this year, our entire development staff will be in attendance enjoying the conference and city.

Caktus Consulting Group Sponsors PyCon 2011

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 03:00:00 +0000

PyCon 2011 Atlanta is just around the corner, and I'm proud to announce that Caktus is a gold sponsor at the conference this year! We sponsored DjangoCon in both 2009 and 2010, and this year agreed to extend that support to the Python community in general.

Caktus Consulting Group Sponsors DjangoCon 2010

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 17:50:45 +0000

DjangoCon 2010 is just around the corner, and I'm proud to announce that Caktus is sponsoring the conference again this year!

Caktus Consulting Group hosts 2nd Django sprint in NC Triangle area

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:36:31 +0000

Django is a tool we use every day to build fantastic web apps here at Caktus, and a development sprint is a concerted, focused period of time in which developers meet in the same space to get things done on a project.

Decoupled Django Apps and the Beauty of Generic Relations

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:18:02 +0000

Like just about everyone else, we've written our own suite of tools to help with building complex content management systems in Django here at Caktus. We reviewed a number of the existing CMSes out there, but in almost every case the navigation and page structure were so tightly coupled the system broke down when it came time to add additional, non-CMS pages.

Caktus Sends Team of Five to PyCon 2010 in Atlanta

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:08:30 +0000

Python and Django are tools we use on a daily basis to build fantastic web apps here at Caktus. I'm pleased to announce that Caktus is sending five developers--Colin, Alex, Mike, Mark, and myself--to PyCon 2010! PyCon is an annual gathering for users and developers of the open source Python programming language. This year the US conference is being held in Atlanta, GA. We'll be driving down tomorrow (Thursday) from Chapel Hill, NC and staying for the conference weekend plus one day of the sprints.

Caktus Consulting Group hosts Django sprint in Triangle, NC area

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:37:17 +0000

Django is a tool we use every day to build rock-solid web apps here at Caktus, and a development sprint is a concerted, focused period of time in which developers meet in the same space to get things done on a project.

Open Source Django Projects from Caktus Consulting Group

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 23:48:44 +0000

At Caktus we're big fans of reusing code. We leverage many open source projects--especially Django apps--to accomplish a variety of tasks. In addition, we've written quite a few pluggable apps over the paste two years that we reuse over and over again for different projects. As a way of giving back to the community, we've polished and released a portion of that code as open source ourselves. While some of the projects have been available on Google Code for awhile now, we just put together a consolidated list of open source Django projects on our web site to serve as a jumping off point for all the projects we like, we contributed to, and we created. Enjoy!

Why Caktus Uses Django

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:45:31 +0000

Here at Caktus, we use the popular Django web framework for a lot of our custom web application development. We don't use Django simply because it's popular, easy to learn, or happened to be the first thing we found. We've written web apps in PHP, Java, and Ruby on Rails--all before we discovered Django--but were never quite satisfied. Following are just a few of the reasons that we both enjoy working with Django and believe it gives you (the client) the best end-product.

Free and Open Source security scanning software

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 17:45:23 +0000

I was pretty disappointed when I discovered today that Nessus, the security scanner I've used for many years now, had discontinued its free plugin feed. The plugin feed is used to disseminate updated security alerts in an automated fashion to the security scanner, as they become available. The price tag on Nessus' new "Professional Feed": $1200.

Is Asterisk More Silent Than You'd Like?

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 19:06:01 +0000

At Caktus, we use the Asterisk open source telephony platform. While setting up Asterisk, we tested a number of different system environments and configurations to help determine what would best fit our telephone needs. This involved running Asterisk on both real and virtual machines and testing several configuration front ends, including FreePBX and DeStar. This article discusses a fairly technical problem we confronted while installing a basic Asterisk setup on the Debian GNU/Linux operating system (on real hardware); namely, when the ztdummy Linux kernel module was loaded, Asterisk was unable to play back any recordings (even its own). When we unloaded the ztdummy module, however, recordings would play back fine. The catch, of course, was that we needed ztdummy loaded for conference room support.