soledad penadés

Broadcom open source their wireless drivers. YES!

The driver, while still a work in progress, is released as full source and uses the native mac80211 stack. It supports multiple current chips (BCM4313, BCM43224, BCM43225) as well as providing a framework for supporting additional chips in the future, including mac80211-aware embedded chips.

Having working, native drivers without nasty work-arounds is an excellent news for me --now I can recommend Linux even more strongly to people who complain about Windows XP. They won't get blocked by a non-working wi-fi driver right after wubi does its marvellous job.

Also, it makes the experience of getting new hardware in the future a tad more relaxed. Less problems to worry about :-)

One note of warning before you all jump into the closest LiveCD: it seems the drivers are only for relatively new hardware; older chips will still require the nasty b43-fwcutter technique in order to get a semiworking driver:

This is limited to newer chips. Can you at least authorize redistribution of firmware blobs for older chips so that b43-fwcutter won't be needed anymore? I have such a laptop myself with one of the older chips, and I remember the pains of having to download it after booting from a LiveCD. #

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UK Government are asking the public their opinion on the most suitable open source license for government-funded projects. Some commenters suggest MIT/BSD, upon the basis that anything GPL will prevent private/closed initiatives from taking part due to their companies' policies against anything 'GPL viral', but I think that's silly. Anything government funded belongs to us (the people and the companies); if you use something public, the least you can do is return something to the public. GPL all the way in my opinion.

I wonder when will we see something similar in Spain. There have been several government-sponsored Linux distributions but it looked more like branding and theming and less about developing actual software. Hmm...

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mySociety's cached Ordenance Survey open data (from public sources). Includes postcode information, amongst others.

mySociety are cool.

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Has anyone noticed that Number 10's petitions website has been suspended until further notice?

Existing e-petitions, submitted to the previous administration, will not be carried forward to the new administration as part of this process. E-petitions that were live at the time of the election announcement on 6 April, when the e-petitions system was suspended, will therefore not be reopened for signatures. We are issuing responses to petitions that had exceeded the 500 signatures threshold as of 6 April 2010 and these can be viewed on the HMG e-petitions responses page. We will welcome resubmission on issues of concern to the improved e-petitions system when it is launched later in 2010.

Later in 2010? Like... now?

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Android platform versions chart. Quite interesting. I thought there would be a majority of devices running 1.6 or older versions of the system, but it seems that 2.x devices are dominant. Which is good if you want to do things like live wallpapers (although it seems that some 2.1 capable devices such as HTC Legend can not run live wallpapers, which is odd!)

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Underscore, a functional programming library for JavaScript, without extending any of the built-in JavaScript objects. Example from their docs:

var lyrics = [
  {line : 1, words : "I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay"},
  {line : 2, words : "I sleep all night and I work all day"},
  {line : 3, words : "He's a lumberjack and he's okay"},
  {line : 4, words : "He sleeps all night and he works all day"}
];

_(lyrics).chain()
  .map(function(line) { return line.words.split(' '); })
  .flatten()
  .reduce(function(counts, word) {
    counts[word] = (counts[word] || 0) + 1;
    return counts;
}, {}).value();

Might be useful.