My Vista 64 laptop has suddenly decided to not use anonymous logins for shared folders and remote printers. I assume its an improvement from windows update, or maybe my anti-virus products. I have commented, on my Vista and Networking and hope to find an answer. If you have any ideas, let me know at my friendfeed. …
Neverwinter Nights
Last weekend, I played some Neverwinternights (V1) and finished my first run through Witch’s Wake as a Cleric of Tempus and my second run through SoU, in which I played as fighter/thief travelling with Misha Waymeet. I wish I hadn’t played Witch’s Wake which I have reviewed on this bliki, but I am on to Shadohaunt (sic) with my adventurer from Udrentide. …
Europe’s largest supercomputer
The Forshung Julich phase two super computer, now Europe’s largest, had its formal opening session last week and Mark Hamiltion, Sun VP who leads our HPC team went to visit them, and recorded it on his blog, in a couple of articles dated as at the end of May, because it runs on Sun. He wrote three articles, several of them with lots of pictures. …
Ubuntu, Java and Snipsnap
Struggling to bring up a snipsnap instance on an Ubuntu Virtual Box VM. I have returned to the Synaptic Package Manager and am installing the Java JDK, Groovy and Velocity, not that I need velocity but its fun. I have also included the javadb for good effect as well.
ooOOOoo
Originally published on blog version 3, the snipsnap bliki. …
Are liberal licenses a better future proofing
A couple of days after the Kable Open Source conference, I looked up Gianugo Rabellino’s blog and read his then most recent blog article, “Of Oracle, Sun and Open Development” about the impact of M&A on open source investment protection.
The conclusion I draw from his article is that open source adopters need to make investment protection a selection criteria. Its well understood that the vibrancy of the product community is crucial, so its just obvious that taking a view on the future is as important. Gianugo also argues that liberal licenses enhance the ability of a community to survive M&A activity. I think he’s probably right, and this means that license terms might become important even to end user sites who have no intention of distributing software. It may also be worth measuring how diverse an open source development community is before adopting the software. …
Open Source in the Public Sector

I attended Kable’s “Open Source in the Public Sector” 2009 conference and captured and published my notes at my original Sun now Oracle blog, the hyperlinks are listed below. I have reproduced and edited the articles here. This is backdated to the date of occurrence. The main changes are to repair some lost hyperlinks i.e. those that disappeared when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. Interestingly Liam Maxwell, who became the Deputy CIO for the UK Government spoke on Government and procurement but I didn’t consider his points worth recording. Shame on me. DFL 25 Jan 2014 …
Any ideas for hosting?
I have spent the afternoon trying to work out if 1and1 can host the services currently running on the Qube. I suspect that ssh andcron are enough for the planet and dyndns, but I might need a full virtual server with root authority for snipsnap, although .htaccess might be sufficient for the port redirect. Unfortunately they want to charge me £15 p.m. for this package, a 100% increase. Basically this is a vanity site, and while I am pretty vain I find this a bit steep, does anyone know of any other web hosting services that might do what I want for less? …
About the Fishworks appliance
On my original sun/oracle blog, I wrote a piece about installing Sun’s Storage Server image on a VMware host, in this case, my Laptop. The links and technology are now no longer relevant so I have rescued a copy of the console screenshot and the link above (and below) takes you to the original post. …
Open Source, the price is right

I shall be speaking tomorrow on “Open Source, Free the right price!” and shall be posting my slides here. I have been busy reading up my undergraduate economics to remind me of what I learned then and check that it hasn’t changed. I borrowed Beggs, Fischer and Dornbusch’s “Economics”, since I got rid of my text books years ago and this seems to be the modern equivalent. The presentation covers some theory of the firm, poses community vs. a supply chain, IP Law and its impact on the software supply chain and finishes with some conclusions about free. …
Squaring the circle, from disruption to trust
Mike Shapiro is an expert in disruptive technology; he was working on Solaris in the early 2000s. He spoke to a number of us at Sun’s Guillemont Park Campus about Amber Road, Sun’s new disruptive file server technology. Sun and our customers have the opportunity to take advantage of the next big thing in network storage. …