AntOS 1.0.0-alpha

Github: https://github.com/lxsang/antos branch antos-1.0.0a

Demo: https://app.iohub.dev/antos/ using user name and password: demo/demo

If one wants to run AntOS VDE locally in their system, a docker image is available at:
https://github.com/lxsang/antosaio

API Documentation: https://doc.iohub.dev/antos

It has been a long time since version 0.x.x and now AntOS hits a major changes in its API. From version 1.0.0, AntOS no longer depends on Riot.js in its core UI API. This version introduces a brand new AntOS UI API called AFX API which is rewritten from bottom up. The entire AntOS core API is rewritten in Typescript (from Coffeescript) for better debugging, code maintenance and documenting.

Browser support: tested on Chrome, Firefox and partly Safari. Any browser that supports custom elements API should work. May have problem with Microsoft Edge.

Rust tip: (Unix) drop the current user privileges

Brief

Rust is a modern programing language which is claimed to be blazingly fast and memory-efficient. It syntactically similar to C++, but is designed to provide better memory safety while maintaining high performance and productivity:

• Zero cost abstraction: allow a perfect balance between performance and productivity
• Memory efficient with no runtime or garbage collector
• Memory safe: Rust does not permit null pointers, dangling pointers, or data races in safe code.
• Memory management using an ownership model guarantee memory-safety and thread-safety .
• Great documentation, easy to use compiler and integrated packages/libraries management
• Easy to interface with other language.
• A bit of learning curve for the variable ownership and variable lifetime features.

WVNC: web based protocol and API for accessing VNC server from browser via websocket

This post is deprecated, WVNC now is a part of AntOS eco-system. The easiest way to setup a Web base VNC client is to used the AntOS docker image that is presented in this post.

As with AntOS and its applications, one can remotely access and edit server resources from browser in a desktop-like manner. However, sometime these web based applications are not enough for some specific tasks. For a long time, I've thinking of a web based API for controlling remote desktop right from the browser ( or AntOS application). The VNC protocol is a good starting point. After playing around with libvncserver/libvncclient, i came up with wvnc a web based protocol and API for accessing VNC servers using websocket.

Controlling a Turtlebot using PhaROS: Goals planning and Automatic docking

This is a demonstration of my current work on controlling robot using ROS and PhaROS. For that task, I've developed a dedicated PhaROS package that defines:

1. A base framework for ROS based visualization such as map, robot model, robot trajectory, etc.
2. An Event-driven API for robot controlling

Evaluation of grid maps produced by a SLAM algorithm

When evaluating the performance of a SLAM algorithm, quantifying the produced map quality is one of the most important criteria. Often, the produced map is compared with (1) a ground-truth map (which can be easily obtained in simulation) or (2) with another existing map that is considered accurate (in case of real world experiment where the ground-truth is not always available ).

Basically, grid maps are images, so image similarity measurement metrics can be used in this case. In this post, we consider three different metrics: Mean Square Error (MSE), K-nearest based normalized error (NE) and Structure Similarity Index (SSIM)

AntOSDK tutorial: Developing a simple text editor

AntOS API in a nutshell

AntOS provides an abstract API for application development. The core API contains three main elements: the UI API, the VFS API and the VDB API, as shown in the following graph:

The UI API defines the basic UI elements such as Window, List, Tree, Dialogs, etc, and provides a generic interface for application and dialog UI development. UI design consists two steps: (1) the first step is to layout UI elements using antOS' scheme syntax (in XML format); (2) the second step is to handle user interaction using the coffeescript/ Javascript API.

Linux Tips and Tricks

This post contains some tips and tricks that helps resolve problems that i've encountered when working with Linux, mostly Ubuntu.

Ubuntu: Install 32 bits libraries on 64 bits system

Some of my applications are 32 bits only which sometime depend on several 32 bits libraries. By default, ubuntu installed only the 64 bits version of these libraries. To installed the 32 bit ones, we need enable the i386 architecture using dpkg, these following commands should be executed as root:

Simple (naive) document clustering using tf-idf and k-mean

When i developed this blog (using my own client-server platform such as web server, back-end, front-end, etc., built from ash/scratch :) ), i simply designed it as a simple "note book" where i put my ideas or some stuffs that i have done. So, initially, there are no category no advance feature like post suggestion based on current post, etc. It is just a bunch of posts sorting by date. The thing is, i usually work on many different domains (robotic, IoT, backend, frontend platform design, etc.), so my posts are mixed up between different categories. It is fine for me, but is a real inconvenience for readers who want to follow up their interesting category on the blog. Of course, i could redesign the blog and add the missing features by messing around with the relational database design (i'm using SQLite btw), manually classifying the posts in the back-end, etc. But, i'm a kind of lazy people, so i've been thinking of a more automatic solution. How about an automatic document clustering feature based on a data mining approach ? Here we go!

AntOS v 0.2.3-alpha release: AntOSDK - a development kit for AntOS application

A new release of AntOS, it is now in the beta state, but i'll keep the alpha branch on the release for a few further releases.

Change logs

• Fix bugs and improve stability
• DotEditor app is renamed to GraphEditor and use mermaid to generate graphs instead of dot
• AntOS in now under GPLv3 licence, if you want to use it for comercial purpose, please contact me
• Blogger is no longer default application, it is moved to MarketPlace
• Add svg support to Preview
• MarketPlace now can detect if an application update is available
• Add AntoSDK, a development kit that allows to develop, build, and package your own application right in the browser, it is available on MarketPlace
• New UI elements: afx-slider, tooltip

AntOS 0.2.0a "Localization" release

AntOS 0.2.0-alpha is out now. The big change in this release is the support of localization. The UI now support multi-languages rendering based on the current system locale setting.

Github: https://github.com/lxsang/antos
Demo: https://app.iohub.dev/antos/

Change logs

• The API now automatically translate text base on the current system locale setting
• Current locales supported:
  • English: en_GB
  • French: fr_FR
  • Vietnamese: vi_VN
  • More to come...
• Update all packages to support the new localization mechanism
• Some minor changes:
  • Font-awesome is used as default icon font for the entire system
  • Add Setting package for system configuration
  • Wallpaper, language, VFS and startup applications/services now can be configured via Setting
  • Bug fix on some packages: File, Market Place
  • Stability improvement