- Thoughts on Web Application Deployment (OmniTI) — if your web site is your business, this stuff is critical and it’s under-taught. Everyone learns it on the job, and there’s not a lot of standardization between gigs.
- Github Enterprise — GitHub Enterprise is delivered in the industry-standard OVF format, which means you’ll be able to run it on virtualization layers like VMware, VirtualBox, and Oracle VM. An increasingly common way to sell web apps, but it’ll trigger GPL-style distribution terms in software licenses.
- SparkleShare — open source sharing tool that markets itself as “like Dropbox”. Uses git as a backend, so you can share via github.
- Whatever Happened to Programming? — When I was fourteen, I wrote space-invader games in BASIC on a VIC-20. If you were interested in computers back in 1982, I bet you did the same. When I was 18, I wrote multi-user dungeons in C on serial terminals attached to a Sun 3. [...] Today, I mostly paste libraries together. So do you, most likely, if you work in software. Doesn’t that seem anticlimactic? Any time you are in the “someone else’s code is almost right, make the changes to improve it” situation, you’re doing unsatisfying programming. It’s factory assembly of software, not craftsmanship. Welcome to the future: you have been replaced by a machine, and the machine is you.
ENTRIES TAGGED "virtualization"
LISA mixes the ancient and modern: report from USENIX system administration conference
System administrators try to maintain reliability and other virtues while adopting cost-cutting innovations
I came to LISA, the classic USENIX conference, to find out this year who was using such advanced techniques as cloud computing, continuous integration, non-relational databases, and IPv6. I found lots of evidence of those technologies in action, but also had the bracing experience of getting stuck in a talk with dozens of Solaris fans.
Such is…
Four short links: 2 November 2011
Deployment, Image Distribution, Open Source Sharing, and Soulless Programming
Four short links: 23 September 2011
Visualizing Populations, Hardware Futures, Radio Different, and Kooky Javascript
- How Many Really? — project by BERG and BBC to help make sense of large numbers of people, in the context of your social network. Clever! (via BERG London)
- Why the Best Days of Open Hardware Are Yet To Come (Bunnie Huang) — as Moore’s law decelerates, there is a potential for greater standardization of platforms. A provocative picture of life in a world where Moore’s Law is breaking up. A must-read.
- Ira Glass on RadioLab — fascinating analysis of a product that’s the result of skilled creators with high standards and a desire to do things differently. Lessons for all who would be different. (via Courtney Johnston)
- Scripting Photoshop with Javascript — Javascript is the new BASIC. (via Brett Taylor)
Four short links: 20 September 2011
Android Plan 9, Virtualization OS, Rogue Games, and Wikipedia Semantics
- Plan 9 on Android — replacing the Java stack on Android fans with Inferno. Inferno is the Plan 9 operating system originally from Bell Labs.
- SmartOS — Joyent-created open source operating system built for virtualization. (via Nelson Minar)
- libtcod — open source library for creating Rogue-like games. (via Nelson Minar)
- Wikipedia Miner — toolkit for working with semantics in Wikipedia pages, e.g. find the connective topics that link two chosen topics. (via Alyona Medelyan)
Four short links: 5 August 2011
Flexible Display, Free Icons, Virtualization, and Virtualization Management
- NanoLumens — flexible display technology, 2.6lbs/sq ft (that’s 17 kilofrancs/kelvin in metric, I think). (via Fiona Romeo)
- The Noun Project — a vast collection of free-to-use icons. (via Russell Beattie)
- VirtualBox —
SunOracle’s open source virtualization product, trivial to run multiple VMs on your local box. VirtualBoxes has pre-built VMs for common OSes. - Vagrant — tool for managing VirtualBox VMs with provisioning and teardown, NFS folder sharing, host-only networking, etc.
Four short links: 23 May 2011
PC in JS, Musical Visualization, S3 Parallel, and Tech-led Ed
- PC Emulator in Javascript — days later and it’s mindboggling.
- US Home Prices as Opera (Flowing Data) — reminded me of Douglas Adams’s “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” which has software that turns your company’s performance numbers into music. The yearly accounts of most British companies emerged sounding like the Dead March from “Saul”, but in Japan they went for it like a pack of rats. It produced lots of cheery company anthems that started well, but if you were going to criticise you’d probably say that they tended to get a bit loud and squeaky at the end.
- s3cmd Parallel — command-line tool with parallel uploads to s3. (via Nelson Minar)
- Eight of China’s Top Nine Government Officials are Scientists (Singularity Hub) — the article’s idiotic reduction to performance on standardised tests misses America’s primary strength against China, namely creative and flexible workforce. China will get there, but it’s not there yet.
Feeding the community fuels advances at Red Hat and JBoss
Red Hat’s usual modus operandi is the precise inverse of most companies based on open source. This drives what I heard at Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, solid progress along the lines laid out by Red Hat and JBoss in previous years.
What VMware's Cloud Foundry announcement is about
Cloud Foundry is aggressively open middleware, offering a flexible way to administer applications.
By now, the popular APIs for IaaS have been satisfactorily emulated so that you can move your application fairly easily from one vendor to another. But until now, the PaaS situation was much more closed.
Reaching the pinnacle: truly open web services and clouds
Part 5 of the series, "What are the chances for a free software cloud?"
The merger of free software with cloud and web services is a win-win. The transition will take a buy-in from cloud and SaaS providers, a change in the software development process, a stronger link between computational and data clouds, and new conventions to be learned by clients of the services. (Part 5 of a 5-part series.)
Why web services should be released as free software
Part 4 of the series, "What are the chances for a free software cloud?"
Let’s put together a pitch for cloud and web service providers. We have two hurdles to leap: one persuading them how they’ll benefit by releasing the source code to their software, and one addressing their fear of releasing the source code.
Radar 
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Radar on 
Radar on 