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I just read the story of Helmer, a Fedora 8 linux cluster in an IKEA Helmer cabinet. The story begins 3D computer rendering are very CPU intensive and the best way so speed up slow render problems, are usually to distribute them on to more computers. Render farms are usually very large, expensive and run…

Business Week has written a series [1], [2], [3] of articles on the One Laptop Per Child project this week, and none are too favorable. I myself have blogged my disappointment with the apparent direction of the project. Yesterday they released Build 703, and before I say anything else negative, I have to see how…

Apparently somebody somewhere sometime recently called Walter Bender, late of the OLPC, an open source fundamentalist. Walter expressed confusion about what that meant. I wish I could clear it up for him, but I don’t know what it means either. We never talk about Open Source in terms of religion or philosophy, morality or ethics.…

I first met Dr. Phatak at the Red Hat Summit in New Orleans in 2005. Dr. Phatak exemplifies what Amartya Sen lovingly calls The Argumentative Indian. Dr. Phatak is passionate, well educated, articulate, and most of all, sincerely committed to raising the standards in India to the highest levels. After spending time with him in…

This report is a summary of Zak Greant‘s Open Source Initiative activities from April 13th to May 17th, 2008. These Weeks Dropped the ball on my OSI volunteer work due to client emergency. Found great sysadmin to manage our infrastructure for us (I now just need to get budget approved.) Lightweight community service (chasing after…

Sometimes I want to declare victory and go home. Of course, that’s usually an admission of defeat, but I really think that with news like Verizon Embraces Linux, that the penetration of Open Source into every sector of computer-using society (which would be … everything) is inevitable. We’ve started the snowball down the hill, and…

Last month I was honored to be a keynote speaker at the Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T) annual meeting. Open Source has become a major topic on campuses, not just the enterprise, and I was delighted to meet with some of the leaders in setting the agenda for software engineering education. When…

I recently got myself a Flickr Pro account, and have been using Flickr for more of my photos. I find myself more and more annoyed at the rough edges in the Flickr user interface. For example, when you want to delete a tag from something, you click on the [x] to the right of the…

For the past several years I’ve printed various documents at home by sending them to my wife Amy with a request “Please print…”. And after several years we both know that Adobe Acrobat version 5 for Mac works far, far better than any subsequent release from Apple or Adobe, at least for the pdf documents…

Many, many programs written in C or C++ use a file called “config.h” which contains #define statement that control the compilation of the program. These programs are also nearly always built using ‘make’. I claim that these two attributes are in conflict with each other. Or, in layman’s terms, “config.h sucks”. The problem is that…