Archive

ZoneBSD Announced

I've started a project in anticipation of the upcoming release of OpenSolaris called ZoneBSD. The goal of the project will be to factor as much code from OpenSolaris as necessary into FreeBSD in order to support running FreeBSD from within a Solaris Zone, allowing virtualized FreeBSD instances to be run atop a host instance of Solaris.

An analysis of HP’s future strategy, post Carly Fiorina

Carly Fiorina's undoing was her inability to capitalise on the 2002 HP-Compaq merger, seen as her bet-the-company move. HP is on shaky ground at the moment because its product portfolio has become too large and diversified to manage, and lacks organisation-wide synergy. The printing and imaging business account for a disproportionate share of the profits, while its enterprise divisions lag. The options that stand before HP's board range from organisational restructuring, to a complete split of the company. Which of the many strategies is eventually adopted depends on the identity that HP decides to create for itself.

Enterprise Database Development on OSX

This article explains how I’m able to use an aging but still capable Mac for database development in a company that develops commercial decision support software for hospitals. I wrote this article because I think the results of the search I made for software that allows me to work productively on this machine may be of use to others.

Days of Lean I remember

Amazing is the recent interest in full, live, operating systems that can fit on a 50 MB CD-ROM. It's totally astounding that they can cram so much onto such a tiny disk. But wait.. let's run back to the days of old.. back to say 1988.

Ubuntu: could do with a bit more work

I'd better start by admitting that I'm a fan of KDE. It's not because it works like Windows, but for the quality of the tools available. However, a GUI is just a way of doing something and I think I've been a bit dismissive of the Gnome desktop up to now. I read a few reviews of Ubuntu, looked at their web site and decided to have a look. I wanted a general purpose (desktop) distribution and an opportunity to get to know the Gnome utilities.

New Enlightenment; Rasterman’s Opinions on xdevconf

Rasterman talks about other's opinions. As he says, E17 has several of the tecnoologies gnome and others are searching. He adds two videos as a proof with animate backgrounds and other things.Perhaps it's time for the linux desktop world to stop reinventing the wheel and collaborate one with each other. Gnome has things like accesibility and lots of apps, enlightenment has a very powerful rendering engine. It'd be a shame to see people reinventing the wheel.

Apple community revolt over lawsuits

There's an article up with a quote from Steve Wozniak, where he publicly chastises Apple for their lawsuits against the canadian student being sued by Apple Computer for leaking a build of 10.4, and will be donating money to the student's defense. It doesn't just stop there. Some of the biggest names in the Mac world are also listed with quotes, and the general consensus is "He made a mistake, but Apple is going too far".

Some thoughts on “Database Filesystems”

With the recent (or not so recent, I am a very slow writer) interest in database file systems, I've been thinking about what a typical user really wants from such a system. What would they use it for? What would we need to do to help them get the most from it? Are there any precedents that show how useful a database file system could be? If not, could we invent one? This lead me to some "gedanken solutions" (like gedanken experiments, just with software) that I thought I'd distract you with.

KDE 3.4-b2 Preview

KDE 3.4 is currently in the beta2 stage, and preparations are being made for the final release. I thought it would be nice to give people some advance information on new features in KDE 3.4, so I have written this beta2 preview.

The vfat file system and Linux

Recently I stumbled across a very nice article, written by Torsten Scheck, published on pro-linux.de, a German Linux site. This article proved to be so helpful to me that I decided it would be worthwhile to translate it into English and republish it. Comments of the translator will be added in italics. I hope a lot of people will find this little gem as useful as I did...

Achieving higher consistency between OSS graphics applications

Jozef Mak recently made a noteworthy proposal for achieving better integration of Open Source graphic applications, which has been positively received by the three communities he targeted: GIMP (for photo and image editing), Scribus (for desktop publishing), and Inkscape (for vector graphics editing). This has sparked a bit of discussion in our communities and brought up several ideas for improvement.