As I wrote quite a while ago, I set up a RAID5 with three IDE disks at home, which I'm using as backup (yes, I know that RAID != backup) and storage space. A few days ago, the RAID was put to a real-life test for the first time, as one of the disks died. Here's what that looks like in dmesg: raid5: ...

Say it with me slowly, forty million big ones ! That's how much government agencies have saved by deploying open source software in favour of proprietary, and costly licensed technology in government ministries, departments and agencies. A massive big up is due to the folks at MAMPU and the Open Sou...

Linux in 2009: Recession vs. GNU - "The general agreement among experts is that not only is FOSS well-equipped to face the recession of 2009, but that those who adopt it will be better off when the hard times are over." SBC-DSL + router = dropped connections - dslreports.com - Post around ...

Reposting from Neary Consulting: This is an article accompanying the presentation I gave at MAPOS 08 in London on December 9th 2008. Moving the Mobile industry from purchasing to co-development in free software communities Recently, Matt Aslett wrote an article about the way that attitudes to free s...

I’m going to have a busy busy month of December. La Fête des Lumières I’ve written about the Festival of Light in Lyon before, and it’s coming around again. I’m going to bring the boys into Lyon with over 1 million other people to walk around cold streets looking at light s...

Friday afternoon I went along to Handicap International’s Centre icom’ here in Lyon, to see what they do first hand, to talk to the people there, and to figure out if there was any way that GNOME could be working better with people like them. Handicap International, like all of the other...

Tim (Assorted Stuff) nails it when he writes... So these not-so-flush times are an excellent time to take a break, reflect and take a good, hard look at how all that stuff is being used...The anarchist in me wonders if this wouldn’t be a great time to try something different, to seriously experime...

One of the slides in my presentation at TechForum SW 2008 was added in the middle of Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach's keynote. As she shared the words in quotes above, the question that popped into my head was, how could free, open source software help schools be a better node for our students, teachers, and...

Harvard's world-renowned Berkman Center for Internet & Society is celebrating its tenth anniversary with a conference called Berkman@10. I'll report here on today's sessions, which were organized as a fairly conventional symposium (although as loosely as one could run it with 450 attendees). Tom...

I’ve been annoyed by some of the Sun-bashing that has been going on over the past few months and years. I’ve written in the past about my belief that Sun are trying to do the right thing, and my appreciation for the investment that they’ve put into projects I care about. And yet no...