Help NASA Code Its Way Through Space
If you’d like to work on software projects that might one day send your code to Mars or on a deep space mission, NASA has some code for you to hack on. The Space Agency recently unveiled a new website, code.nasa.gov, to provide a home for NASA’s various open source software projects.
The new website isn’t the first open source effort from NASA, in fact the increasingly popular OpenStack cloud software stack grew out of a NASA project. If you go further back into history the Beowulf cluster — forerunner of most of today’s Linux clusters — was also a NASA project.
Unfortunately for outside developers NASA’s past open source efforts have not been very well organized, nor has there been an easy way to contribute code to the various projects. The new code website is designed to change that. According to its homepage the site’s mission is to “surface existing projects, provide a forum for discussing projects and processes, and guide internal and external groups in open development, release, and contribution.”
For the initial release the focus seems to be primarily on the first item in the list, while the forums and discussion aspects are still listed as “coming soon.”
While the community aspects may still be in the works, NASA has already made it considerably easier for developers to contribute by hosting its code at GitHub. So far there are five projects on GitHub (licensed under NASA’s Open Source Agreement).
Not all of the projects involve space, but if you’d like to try your hand at some code that tweaks images from Mars rovers or creates 3D interactive worlds, head on over to Github and grab a copy of NASA’s code.
Open Source Upstart Nginx Surpasses Microsoft Server
For the first time since it sprang onto the web in 2004, Nginx (pronounced “engine-ex”), the lightweight open source web server that could, has overtaken Microsoft IIS to become the second most used server on the web.
Nginx currently powers some 12.18 percent of the web’s active sites — including big names like Facebook and WordPress — which means Nginx has just barely squeaked ahead of Microsoft IIS which currently powers 12.14 percent of websites. While Apache is still far ahead of both with over 57 percent of the market, of the top three, only Nginx continues to grow in market share.
These market share numbers come from NetCraft, which has been tracking data like server type and server operating system since 1995. It’s worth noting that Nginx is only ahead in the “active sites” survey which throws out results like parked domains and registrar placeholder pages (full details of NetCraft’s methodology can be had here).
Unlike Apache, which, while robust and powerful also uses considerably more resources, Nginx was designed to be fast and lightweight. The server can handle a very large number of simultaneous connections without suffering a performance hit or requiring additional hardware.
The combination of lightweight and fast has made Nginx the darling of the web in recent years with everyone from Facebook to Dropbox relying on it in one form or another. Indeed, another part of Nginx’s success lies in its versatility. The server can be used for everything from a traditional high performance web server to a load balancer, a caching engine, a mail proxy or an HTTP streaming server.
Having recently moved several primarily static websites to Nginx I can also vouch for another of Nginx’s strengths — outstanding documentation.
If you’d like to give Nginx a try head on over to the official site and download a copy today.
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