Here’s an excellent 10-minute tutorial video on how to use JMeter, the open source tool for stress testing your server and your website, by Stuart Marsh. (via testingtv.com)

Have you heard of Adhearsion? It bills itself as a new, open source way for you to create voice enabled applications. It’s a fully featured framework, done in Ruby with a comprehensive regression test suite, that aims to help web developers with no previous experience in telephony combine Web 2.0 with voice. Adhearsion uses the open source telephony-engine Asterisk for to handle low-level telephony details, but founder Jay Phillips points to Adhearsion’s ease of use and greater functionality as reasons for its superiority over Asterisk. Check out the screencast showing Phillips managing the Adhearsion source base with git and Github, showing the ease with which developers can contribute to Adhearsion.

Dygraphs is an open source JavaScript library that you can use to create interactive, zoomable charts of time series, capable of displaying huge data sets and enabling users to explore and analyse them. Check out the examples at the link, along with sample code to get you started. Looks dead simple to use. Dygraphs sends no data to any servers – it is client-side JavaScript, processed entirely in the client’s browser.

Interesting article at Cnet by Matt Asay on the difficulty in bringing Linux to the non-technical masses– the ongoing dilemma is that adoption of a mainstream Linux by people without technical backgrounds would likely be unacceptable for Linux purists.

Asay’s opinion is that eliminating some degree of choice in favor of increased ease of use, coupled with corporate involvement, might be the way forward, concluding:

So, the Linux “desktop” can work. But to do so, I think we need companies involved, companies that are trying to scratch a very different itch than the one developers may be inclined to scratch themselves. That itch is usability for average end users. It’s an experience that is high on ease of use and trades away choice. This is not a bad thing.

A further problem that I see with Linux adoption by the technically less-inclined is that to the extent that they now regard their computers as internet appliances, non-geeks might be desensitized to choices regarding operating systems, and less willing to learn.

Gaining an understanding of complicated subjects is easier with multiple approaches/teachers/media, and figuring there was a Git tutorial out there for everyone, I gathered 16 tutorials on the powerful, versatile revision control tool. Regardless of your degree of familiarity and comfort with Git, there should be an appropriate tutorial here for you. This list adds a lot more to another post that Digital Media Minute did, regarding a good ruby centric Git site.

The Git Users’ Manual from kernel.org may be the place to start, then again some say that it’s not the best tool for gaining a working understanding of Git. You be the judge.

Also from kernel.org is part 1 of a 2-part Git no-nonsense tutorial explaining how to import a new project, make changes to it and share those changes.

Part 2 attempts to explain two fundamental pieces of git’s architecture–the object database and the index file, and to provide enough of a foundation to understand the rest of the Git documentation.

Don’t have a lot of time? The Git-SVN Crash Course over at git-scm.com gives you a very clear, concise overview. An excellent place to start.

Scott Chacon has the excellent Git PDF on PeepCode, which if you haven’t visited, is a very well-done site with a great marketing hook: Peepcode screencasts! It’s US$9 but provides an excellent job of the fundamental workings of Git. True to the site name there is a US$9 Git screencast also. There is a ‘Git with rails’ screencast here, also by Scott Chacon; not sure if it’s the same one offered at PeepCode.

Want to get Git concepts? Charles Duan tries to give an ‘under the hood’ understanding of Git beyond just memorizing commands.

Ben Lynn’s philosophy with this tutorial was that rather than getting too bogged down in Git abstractions (a la the Git user manual), one could follow rough instructions for specific effects, then get a deeper understanding by practicing the techniques.

Along the same lines as Gitmagic, the supremely easy-to-navigate Gitready, by Nick Quaranto, bundles tips into beginner/intermediate/advanced, and appears to be updated regularly.

Perl uber-guru Randal Schwartz gives an hour-long overview on ‘what git is and isn’t', why it’s better than other repository managers, and a conceptual overview.

Version Control for Designers starts by defining the ‘version control’, then goes into a very lengthy and detailed Git tutorial. People with experience with other version control tools might find its approach almost too elementary or lengthy, but it’s an excellence reference if you need one that assumes no prior knowledge of SCM.

If Paolo Bonzini can help us ‘use Git without feeling stupid’ it’s an added bonus. Seriously, if the comments on part 1 and part 2 are any indication of the clarity of his explanation, he gets high marks.

The rather short Git for the lazy takes a functional approach, aiming to provide help that can be accessed in any point in the tutorial, especially if you suspect you’ve already made a mistake.

Appropriate for those unafraid of terms like like Directed Acyclic Graph ie computer science, as it states in the intro, Git for Computer Scientists, by Tommi Virtanen (Tv) is geared toward advanced users.

If this list still leaves you scratching your head over Git, one more reference you might consult is the GitHub Guides from GitHub.

Good luck!

Seems as though all the cool kids lately are using Git – a new Source Control Management system.  If you’re interested in finding out more check out these Git tutorials, articles and links.

If your a user of the cross-platform (Windows, OSX, Linux) virtualization software Virtual Box, you’ll be happy to find the VirtualBox VDI Index.  While you’re there you’ll find hundreds of preconfigured virtual appliances available for free download.

Open Source Living is a great place to find some of the web’s best open source software.  There is a lot of really high quality open source (aka free) software on the web these days.  If there is a software package you’ve been thinking of purchasing, I’m sure you will find a great free replacement at this site.

If you’ve ever had to install PHP from source on Mac OSX, two of the dependencies you’ve likely come across are libpng and libjpg.  Ethan Tira-Thompson has created a universal binary installer for both of these libraries to make them easier to install.  You could also grab these from Darwin Ports or Fink, but the installer is easier!

It looks like the Aptana: project is now offering their Aptana IDE with Adobe AIR support.  It provides an integrated development environment for creating Adobe AIR (nee Apollo) applications.   Flex developers should not get too excited as it looks like this project is targeted towards HTML, JavaScript, Ajax, and CSS developers, enabling them to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIA’s) to the desktop.  From what I can see this is not a replacement for Flex Builder – rather a way to make it easier to deploy classic web applications to the desktop.