Open Source

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.