Don Watkins

I just upgraded my site to Wordpress 2.6.2. It went off without a hitch.

I’ve been down with a chest cold the last few days and it’s given me some time to learn more about Drupal. My son who is in advertising is looking for a way to drive traffic to a website that in turn generates advertising clicks for clients. I’ve built and rebuilt a couple of Drupal sites in the past few days trying to help him. I don’t know how many people out there that read this blog know how to really use Drupal for such purposes. I’d like to learn more. I’ve got one book about building online communities with Drupal, Wordpress and phpBB and while it’s been some help, I really need some Drupal gurus to give me some assistance. Drupal is a very powerful application and in this work for Devin I’ve learned enough to improve some Drupal sites I already have built for other customers. Here are a couple of relative simple Drupal sites I’ve built and added to recently, Town of Franklinville, New York and the Western New York Maple Festival.

This is a nice write up on a great open source project and product. I’ve been using Virtual Box on Ubuntu for almost a year and I regularly go back and forth between Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Ubuntu 7.10. It’s a slick implementation and a great way to get the most from your desktop. If you are person like me who loves Linux and Ubuntu in particular yet still needs to run applications that simply don’t run on Linux then Virtual Box is definitely for you.

Read more here.

I’ve long been a fan of inclusive virtual reality. This is a great project. Each pair of projectors is powered by a high-end, quad-core PC running on Linux, with dual graphics processing units and dual network cards to achieve gigabit Ethernet or 10GigE networking.

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According to an article appearing in Computer World, Microsoft’s “I’m a Mac-I’m a PC” advertisements were actually created on a Macintosh. That’s very funny in my opinion, but it’s an indication of how ridiculous the advertisements were in the first place. I came across this news while reading Bob Sutor’s blog. More importantly in the same post is news that Google’s brand name value has jumped from 20th to 10th. Apple’s Macintosh, Google and the open source community in general have been a thorn in the side of Microsoft for sometime now. The instability on Wall Street and elsewhere in the nation is causing organizations to look again at the bottom line and although a Macintosh is almost double what a typical PC costs these days it doesn’t carry all the liabilities that the same PC carries.

In May of this year I purchased an Apple MacBook for my daughter. She loves it. My brother who is a member of senior management at a Fortune 500 firm recently told me that he too is a Macintosh user. I’m too frugal to go for a Macintosh and I’m too familiar with Ubuntu and things Linux to switch, but for the average consumer why wouldn’t you buy a Macintosh. It make more sense. No spyware, no viruses, no rebuilds for the same. I’d like to know how much money gets spent each year cleaning up for the debacles that befall Windows PCs just because they are running Windows.

If I was ignorant of the joys of Ubuntu and open source software in general and it was a choice between Windows and Macintosh OS X, you’d have to be crazy not to buy a Macintosh.

I’ve been busier than usual with the beginning of the school year and so I haven’t been keeping up as much with blogging and I’ve been feeling a bit guilty about it all. I did come across a really well written piece on cloud computing with Linux at IBM. I think the future and even the present is more about clouds than we’d like to think. There are a lot of purists who want to create their own clouds and many will do that at considerable expense. There is however wisdom in relying on virtual servers and virtual storage in much the same way that we rely on the grid for our electricity and other utilities.

One of the most important ideas behind cloud computing is scalability, and the key technology that makes that possible is virtualization. Virtualization allows better use of a server by aggregating multiple operating systems and applications on a single shared computer. Virtualization also permits online migration so that if a server becomes overloaded, an instance of an operating system (and its applications) can be migrated to a new, less cluttered server.

Read more here.

You probably know that you can run Windows XP on your Linux machine through virtualization. But let’s face it, you don’t really want Windows you want the App under Windows. So why not eliminate Windows out of the equation and run it seamlessly on Ubuntu?

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Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth says that his company, Canonical, will hire interaction experts and designers to improve the usability of the Linux desktop. Canonical will also fund improvements to Xorg and other lower-level components of the desktop stack.

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The long rumored, long awaited “Eee PC Killer” from Dell, now called the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, is now shipping! The Windows XP version, available now, costs $399. The Ubuntu Linux version, available in “a few weeks,” will cost just $349! These prices are actually much lower than ASUS’s for comparable systems.

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Sure, Windows is expected to run on 1 billion devices by 2010. But a loud minority is making its voice heard by moving to Ubuntu Linux. In fact, Canonical
’s marketing materials state that Ubuntu now has more than 8 million users.

read more | digg story