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A few days ago I said that we wouldn't be holding a CTO breakfast in August. I was wrong. In fact, we'll be holding the breakfast on August 28 in conjunction with the Utah Open Source Conference at Salt Lake Community College. Please mark your calendars.
If you're a regular breakfast attendee, I have discount codes for UTOSC that I can give you. Just send me a note.
Tags: utah events open+source cto breakfast
Doc Searls must have spent some of his convalescence deep in thought. His recent essay Saving the Net III: Understanding its Frames is a great piece on how we understand and don't understand the Net. This is a long essay. You'll actually have to do some reading if you want to get the meat of Doc's argument. But it's worth the time.
David Eaves posted a piece overlaying the Firefox 3 Pledge Map and Thomas Barnett's map that divides the world into the "the functioning core" and the "non-integrated gap."
As you might expect, there's a high correlation. People in the gap aren't connected, so they have less access to computers, use the 'Net less, and participate in open source projects less. There are some exceptions--like Scandinavia on one side and Columbia and Turkey on the other.
David makes this comment:
Non-Integrated Gap countries with the most pledges are Iran, Turkey, Venezuela, Peru, and Indonesia -- interesting list. Seems to suggest that many of the countries the US tries to isolate are actually the most connected.
I too find this ironic. I think that the Bush administration has made a huge mistake in not pushing these countries to integrate more fully. Forget their governments, their citizens want to be connected and once they are, the policies of their governments will follow them into the functioning core. They have to.
As Tom points out, terrorism is "what's left" after the cold war and I see it as a reaction to connectivity. Terrorists, while exploiting the connectivity of the 'Net, would deny that connectivity to people because it leads them away from the fundamentalist societies that the terrorists promote.
David's analysis is just one more data point in the argument that some of the world's seemingly most dangerous countries have citizens who are ready to connect. The world (i.e. functioning core) needs to take advantage of that.
As an aside, I just pre-ordered Tom's new book 'Great Powers: America and the World After Bush' from Amazon. I'll schedule another IT Conversations interview with him after the book comes out. I had a great conversation with him a few years back.
The Utah Open Source Conference is calling for presentations. If you've got something you've always wanted to tell the world about open source, this may be your chance! Sign up on the Web site and submit your presentation idea now. The deadline is June 1st.
Tags: utah events open+source
I'm looking for a management console for Xen (besides the command line). I'd looked into this months and months ago and concluded that when the time came, I'd try Enomalism, but after some initial experiments I'm no longer sure. Any advice? Let me know what you use for managing the Xen hypervisor and why.
Tags: xen virtualization open+source kynetx
I'm looking for a management console for Xen (besides the command line). I'd looked into this months and months ago and concluded that when the time came, I'd try Enomalism, but after some initial experiments I'm no longer sure. Any advice? Let me know what you use for managing the Xen hypervisor and why.
Tags: xen virtualization open+source kynetx
Clint Savage was the speaker at tonight's PLUG meeting. Clint is the founder of the Utah Open Source Foundation. UTOSF was the power behind the recent Utah Open Source Conference.
Clint ran down a long list of activities that UTOSF is sponsoring to promote open source in Utah. Some of the most promising, IMO, were promoting open source at local colleges and universities and open source family day. BYU's UUG sponsors Linux install fests, but I'm generally disappointed by the lack of interest in open source among CS students.
They mentioned the Home Runs in IT Conference that will be held at the Open Source Technology Center at Novell on Dec 6th. I'm flying home from San Jose the morning of the 6th from IIW to speak at noon. Sounds like it will be a good event.
Tags: utah events plug open+source linux
The Provo Linux User's Group meeting for November will be on the 14th at 7:30pm. Omniture is hosting, so head on over to Canyon Park Technology Center. I'm going to try to make it. Here's the announcement:
This is an exciting month for PLUG. We have a new meeting location: Omniture. Never before has the local FOSS community been stronger. The reach of groups like PLUG is growing beyond just a few computer hobbyists. Linux is now becoming the premiere solution for countless business tasks, rather than just an alternative one. If there was any doubt, it was dispelled with the recent runaway success of the first ever Utah Open Source Conference.
In line with the new growth trends in FOSS we have invited Clint Savage, president of the Utah Open Source Foundation to offer the first "State of Utah FOSS" presentation. This exciting new foundation is helping all of the Utah FOSS groups (like PLUG) take their groups to new heights. Come participate, grab a drink, shoot some pool, and meet the new players in the Utah open source industry!
Tags: utah events open+source linux
Lamont Peterson, co-founder of NeverBlock is talking about XEN and virtualization.
The talk is an intro to virtualization technology and a discussion of why use virtualization. Here are some pros:
Of course, there are some cons:
It's a good idea to keep some headroom on each machine so that VMs can be migrated when a physical box dies. This gets easier (and less costly) as the number of physical boxes you're using grows. Here's my analysis: The headroom you need is somewhat greater (20%) than 1/N where N is the number of servers. So with 2 boxes, you can use about 40% of each machine and still be able to migrate everything from one machine to the other in the case of problems. With 10 boxes, you can load boxes up to 80% (as much as I'd do in any event) and still have room to migrate a single bad server's VMs. XEN supports live migration if you get the storage architecture right.
Tags: virtualization open+source utosc uosc07
I'm in Brad Nicholes' session on configuring Apache 2.2.
First up he starts talking about MPM (multi-processor modules). MPMs control the multi-processing that happens on in Apache (servers and threads). If you install Apache, the default is the pre-fork MPM that doesn't include threads. You have to install the Worker MPM to get threads. the pre-fork MPM is more stable, but slower. The Worker MPM won't play well with mod_perl and other modules that aren't thread friendly.
Brad recommends using include files to modularize configuration. I've never done this (habit) preferring to have everything in one place so I don't have to go out and look in multiple files. Still I can see the wisdom in this. Sometimes the configuration file can get pretty hairy.
Huh, I didn't know you could use ServerAlias (with or without wildcards) to create aliases for a host. That will save me a few lines in my configuration file!
LDAP authentication looks relatively easy to set up. This would be good to use on my server at BYU since we have an LDAP server anyway for the lab. I've never bothered to figure it out. Brad makes it look easy enough to try.
Tags: open+source apache utosc uosc07
