Open Source Pixels

A review of several different backup options for ubuntu/linux, and the pros and cons of the different options.

According to research that’s supposed to be published later this year, growing demand for Internet use will soon outstrip the stamina of the infrastructure supporting it, and the Internet will cease to be reliable by 2012. Complete anarchy will ensue, and the world will essentially end along with the Internet we created for it. Perhaps this is what the Mayan prophecies meant?

International Business Machines Corp., the world’s biggest computer-services provider, increased its dividend by 10 percent to expand shareholder returns after scrapping a bid to buy Sun Microsystems Inc. The quarterly payout will rise 5 cents to 55 cents, IBM said today in a statement before its annual shareholder meeting in Miami Beach, Florida. The company also boosted its stock repurchase plan by $3 billion.

Full announcement here: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Nationally Recognized Psychiatric Hospital Selects Medsphere’s Open Source Electronic Health Record to Transform Clinical Care

Silver Hill Hospital Chooses OpenVista to Improve Efficiency and Patient Care

CARLSBAD, California – April 29, 2009 – Medsphere Systems Corporation, the leading provider of open source healthcare IT solutions, today announced a five-year contract with Connecticut’s Silver Hill Hospital for implementation, training and support of the company’s OpenVista electronic health record (EHR) solution.

Flash has an undeserved bad wrap in the Search Engine Optimization world. Some SEO experts even warn not to use Flash, because many search engines have trouble indexing Flash content. While Flash content is searchable by Google, it’s critical to use Flash wisely if you want your applications to be searchable by all search engines.

New technology doesn’t wait for a 5 year release cycle. It just happens. Operating systems have to be ready for it, and, more importantly, flexible.

While we generally don’t really report on Apple rumours (for obvious reasons) I thought the one currently making its rounds across the countless copying/pasting Apple websites is pretty interesting discussion material. According to the ominpresent and omnipotent “people familiar with the matter”, as told by AppleInsider, Apple is preparing to compete on… Price.

There has been some discussion in recent days in the Rails community about appropriate conference presentations, whether women feel welcome in the Rails community, and related issues….But unfortunately for me, in parallel to the public discussion there have been private ones. I can’t reveal details without breaking confidences, but suffice it to say that a significant number of Rails core contributors – with leadership (if that’s the right word) from DHH – apparently feel that being unwelcoming and “edgy” is not just acceptable, but laudable. The difference between their opinions and mine is so severe that I cannot in good conscience remain a public spokesman for Rails. So, effective immediately, I’m resigning my position with the Rails Activists.

[I commend you for why you are doing it Mike, speaks to your character fortitude. - Scott]

Sun is rolling out the latest update to Solaris 10 with enhancements to Solaris Containers, tighter integration with IPSec and upgrades to its Logical Domains technology. The updated Solaris also includes the work Sun and Intel have done over the past two years to optimize the operating system to take advantage of the power, management and monitoring capabilities in Intel’s new Xeon 5500 series processors, code-named Nehalem. The seventh update to Solaris 10 comes a year before the planned release of the next-generation Sun OS.

This guide explains how you can do a live migration of an LVM-based virtual machine (domU) from one Xen host to the other. I will use iSCSI to provide shared storage for the virtual machines in this tutorial. Both Xen hosts and the iSCSI target are running on Debian Lenny in this article.