I greatly enjoyed Zak Greant's keynote talk at OpenWeb 2008 on The Age of Literate Machines in which he reminded us of the many attempts by rulers and government over the ages to curtail freedoms such as the ones defining "Free" sof...read more

The press release is out, the company newsletter is proclaiming the news: Raincity Studios has acquired Bryght....read more

I found this interesting article about the Linux kernel developer community and the changes that are afoot there with a community that is growing in size and complexity. Read beyond the sensational headline for some thought-provoking interviews with some of the top Linux kernel developers.

According to the article, the most active 30 developers authored only 30% of the changes, while two years ago the top 20 developers did 80% of the changes. One result of this is that new code makes it into the kernel much more quickly than a few years ago - in a six months time frame, rather than 2 to 3 years.

This trend seems to be similar to what is happening in the Drupal community. ...read more

I've been long overdue for some sysadmin house cleaning - cleaning up my backup drives, and organizing the hundreds of Gigs of data that I've managed to convince myself are important...read more

So, the MacBook is back from repairs, the USB system has mysteriously fixed itself, and I've replaced the stock 80GB 5400 RPM Toshiba drive with a Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM, 160GB drive. I was worried that this drive might draw more power than the one it was replacing but it turns out to draw only 620 mA, compared to the 1A that the original drive draws. Sweet! Bigger capacity, better performance, and better battery life. ...read more