Open Recall: NSH, nginx 1.2.7, Coreboot for the "Butterfly"

Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth covering. In this edition: two competitions for open code and data, a new nginx version, Coreboot for the HP Pavilion Chromebook, a new version of the WordPress iOS app, the Dalvik VM on Xubuntu, and the NSH command line.

• €15,000 for humanities research – The Open Knowledge Foundation has announced the first Open Humanities Awards. The Foundation is offering a €15,000 (approximately £13,000) prize for three to five projects in the areas of open content, open data or open source tools that further humanities research and teaching. The awards are open to EU citizens and the application deadline is 12 March.
  

• $2,000 for open government data visualisation – Another competition being run by the Open Knowledge Foundation in conjunction with The Guardian's Data Blog and Google is looking for the best visualisation of open government data, whether with existing tools or software written especially for the contest. The competition is open for citizens of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US and the winner will receive $2,000 (approximately £1,200) as prize money.
  

• Nginx 1.2.7 – The latest release of the open source web server nginx now supports IPv6 in its geolocation module, supports variables in the auth_basic directive, and has a number of other improvements. A number of bugs have also been fixed, including several segmentation fault problems. A list of all changes is available from the project's change log.
  

• Coreboot support for the "Butterfly" – Chromium developer Stefan Reinauer has pushed a patch to Coreboot that enables support for the ENE KB3940Q controller in the HP Pavilion Chromebook, nicknamed "Butterfly". This patch should enable the Chromebook to boot using the free software BIOS and UEFI alternative.
  

• WordPress iOS app adds notifications – Version 3.4 of the WordPress application for iOS adds notifications for comments, followers and likes on posts. The new release of the application is now available in the Apple App Store.
  

• Dalvik VM on Xubuntu – Krzysztof Klinikowski has posted a screenshot on Google+ showing a Dalvik VM running under Xubuntu. The installation of Xubuntu itself is running in VirtualBox. Klinikowski says his next goal is to get Android's SurfaceFlinger component to work correctly.

• The NSH command line – The NSH command line for OpenBSD-based network appliances replaces ifconfig, sysctl and route with its own tools, consolidating the configuration for these programs and several daemons in one place. This replaces /etc/netstart and /etc/rc with a solution that is more optimised for appliance use. NSH is licensed under a BSD-style licence. More information is available in the tool's README file.

(fab)