July 2007 Archives
I was in an Irish pub in downtown Portland, contemplating ordering my third beer of the evening, when a force of energy dressed in black and carrying a very large skateboard shouted my name and threw himself into my field of admittedly narrowing vision.
The man in black was William (whurley) Hurley, who's work in the open source community is highly regarded. The fact that he's a pretty good socializer and could conceivably kill you with his pinkie, well, that doesn't hurt, either. Currently, whurley is the Chief Architect of Open Source Strategy at BMC Software, Inc., otherwise known as the BMC open source guru.
With a headline like that, I get the most buzzword-conscious award for the day. But I can't help myself; I'm currently sitting in the O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing, listening to publisher Tim O'Reilly give the opening remarks to the small audience of about 150.
If you're here at OSCON, this all-day event is the one that you had to shell out another grand for to attend. The format of the presentation is O'Reilly sitting on a comfy chair and interviewing his guests sitting on a comfy couch.
Think Oprah meets TechTV.
Matt Zimmerman, CTO of Canonical, gave the Ubuntu Live attendees here a look ahead on the Ubuntu Technical Roadmap, letting us see what's coming in Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop and Server.
Users with high-end monitor needs will be happy to hear that the Ubuntu release known as Gutsy Gibbon should have 3-D desktop functionality working right out of the box. Multiple monitor configuration will also be provided in the release. If you have a laptop, power profiling features are planned for the desktop version.
I got the word yesterday that Zenoss, which has a nifty network and server management tool (cleverly named Zenoss Core), was planning to announce the launch of its new Zenoss Enterprise product today. I would have written about it last night, but we had a tornado warning announced, so I shut down the computers and hunkered down to watch the radar on TV. No damage here at the headquarters of LT, though the city airport got shutdown by lightning.
Anyway, Zenoss: if you haven't played with this app, I suggest you give it a spin. There are a lot of monitoring tools out there, but this is one that I think rises to the top.
The small-town bar was filled with the light of the afternoon sun pouring in from the front windows. There were the usual furnishings: the bar itself, various high tables with similarly heightened chairs, a jukebox... and on one wall, a flat monitor screen, encased in metal and displaying advertisements for local arts and music events.
Across from me is the man who invented that monitor and the content delivery system that runs it, Eric Kanagy, CEO of RedPost, Inc. I have traveled all of 40 minutes to Goshen, Indiana to meet Eric and find out what's the big deal about an electronic bulletin board that runs Linux.
There's this debate right now going on about a security hole in Firefox.
I haven't linked to any of the coverage on Linux Today, because it seems to be a Windows-only issue. Interestingly, this exploit seems to also depend on Internet Explorer, and right now security analysts can't seem to decide which browser is more at fault.