Jul 12, 2010 GMT
Last month I briefly blogged about my love affair with old automated musical instruments such as the player piano, player reed organ, nickelodeon, wind-up phonographs and my long association with the Automatic Musical Instrument Collector's Association (AMICA). June, 2008 was the first time that I was able to physically attend a local chapter of the AMICA, and I enjoyed meeting other people who collected and played these ancient instruments. One of the downsides of collecting the older paper-driven instruments is that in a lot of cases the paper, sometimes made with an acid-based wash, is deteriorating and some of the members are trying desperately to preserve this old music by...Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog
Jul 01, 2010 GMT
July has two conferences where I will be presenting, but first I will remind people that the Ohio Linux Fest has extended their call for papers another week to July 7th. Since I have already submitted the abstracts for my Ohio Linux talks, on July 6th I will be leaving for the FOSSED conference in Bethel, Maine on July 7th to 9th. My good friend David Trask has been putting on this conference for eight years now, and has helped hundreds of school teachers learn the benefits of FOSS for teaching. Lately some of these same teachers have come back and are sharing what they know. Very practical courses in networking, use of Moodle, LTSP systems and more. I will be teaching two...Jun 30, 2010 GMT
Sometimes you run across something so discouraging you want to just hang your head. That happened today as I received a letter from the folks at Creative Commons stating that The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), one of the groups that supposedly represents artists by licensing their music and paying the artists royalties, had sent out letters to their 380,000 members asking for donations to fight against the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Public Knowledge and Creative Commons (CC). These groups were portrayed as being “against the interests of music creators”.This letter, signed by their President and Chairman of the Board, Paul Williams, asked...Jun 29, 2010 GMT
This past weekend I visited my family who now lives in Pennsylvania. My mother and father are long retired and living in a retirement community. This weekend was their 68th wedding anniversary. My brother retired from the telephone company a long time ago, having been an electronic technician and lives with his wife. Once a year my brother and sister-in-law attend a big family reunion that mostly centers on her family, since my side of the family is very small (and destined to get a lot smaller). I participated in this reunion and mostly stayed with my aged parents while my brother and sister-in-law orchestrated the reunion that drew about 60 people from around the...Jun 27, 2010 GMT
Last week I spent two days that the Red Hat Summit in Boston. Unlike a lot of conferences I attend, I actually spent much of my time in technical talks listening to some of the things that Red Hat was going to be putting into RHEL 6.0 which is due out in a short time1.I enjoy listening to technical talks, particularly ones talking about kernel issues since I used to teach operating system design. I taught other types of programming (database, compiler design, networking, graphics) but in my opinion most application-level programming (including libraries) is a “calm sea” versus the “Hurricane Katrina” of kernel programming.One of the areas of interest to me was the various file...Jun 25, 2010 GMT
There are a growing number of local and regional FOSS conferences happening around the world, and one of the oldest of them, the Ohio Linux Fest, asked me to comment on why people should consider submitting and giving a talk a conference such as theirs. The first reason, is the concept of “sharing”. You have developed an idea, a project or a piece of code on which you have expended time and effort, and talking about it at one of these events gives that work visibility so that others may benefit from it. From this visibility you may get additional volunteers to help you with the project, or even just additional users of your project. The second reason is “feedback”....Jun 21, 2010 GMT
There will be a lot of Linux activity in Boston this summer, all before the middle of August. The Red Hat Summit and JBOSS World leads the parade with four days of training and talks, June 22nd to June 24th. I have a great deal of respect for Red Hat and their engineering staff, having worked with many of them when they were at Digital Equipment Corporation, and I know that I will enjoy seeing some of the talks on filesystems, virtualization, cloud computing, security and a lot of other topics that are of interest to me in general as a Linux enthusiast. Unfortunately due to a prior commitment, I will only be at the Summit Wednesday and Thursday. The Advanced Computing...Tag Cloud
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Google and NASA Partner in Quantum Computing Project
Vendor D-Wave scores big with a sale to NASA's Quantum Intelligence Lab.
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Mageia Project Announces Mageia 3 Linux
Many package updates and Steam integration highlight the latest from the Mandriva-based community Linux.
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FSF Outs the World Wide Web Consortium over DRM Proposal
Richard Stallman calls for the W3C to remain independent of vendor interests.
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Debian 7.0 Debuts
The new release supports nine architectures, 73 human languages, and zero non-Free components.
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Alpha Version of Fedora 19 Released
Fedora developers release the first alpha version of Fedora 19, known as Schrödinger’s Cat, for general testing. The final release is expected in July 2013.
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ack 2.0 Released
ack is a grep-like, command-line tool that has been optimized for programmers to search large trees of source code.
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SUSE Studio 1.3 Released
New features in SUSE Studio 1.3 include enhanced cloud integration, VM platform support, and lifecycle management.
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Xen To Become Linux Foundation Collaborative Project
The Linux Foundation recently announced that the Xen Project is becoming a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.
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RunRev Releases Open Source Version of LiveCode
Open source version of LiveCode is now available for developing apps, games, and utilities for all major platforms.
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OpenDaylight Project Formed
OpenDaylight is an open source software-defined networking project committed to furthering adoption of SDN and accelerating innovation in a vendor-neutral and open environment.

