Bob Sutor

Daily links for 03/12/2010

Bob Sutor — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:30:31 +0000

OpenSim security 101 – Hypergrid Business

“Enterprises rolling out new opensim grids are often concerned about security issues of running OpenSim, and justifiably so. OpenSim is alpha software and still poses some security challenges. However, the security level of a particular OpenSim deployment depends quite a bit on how it is configured.”

tags: opensim, security, virtual-world
Federal Virtual World Challenge Reviews and Evaluations

“Below are the candidates for the Federal Virtual World Challenge.
You are welcome to read about and review each entry.”

tags: virtual-world, government
30 game scripts you can write in PHP, Part 1: Creating 10 fundamental scripts

“PHP is an easy-to-use, easy-to-learn, widely accessible programming language. It’s well suited for developing simple scripts you can use to help you in all kinds of games. Whether you play simple pen-and-paper games by yourself, complex tabletop role-playing games with a group of people, or online games of any kind, this series will have something for you. Each article in this “30 game scripts you can write in PHP” series will cover 10 scripts in 300 words or less (3d10 stands for “roll three 10-sided dice”) simple enough for even a beginning developer, but useful enough for a seasoned game player. The goal is to give you something you can modify to suit your needs, so you can impress your friends and players by busting out your laptop at your next gaming session.”

tags: game, scripts, php

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, unless otherwise specified.
Posted under: Blog and Website.
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2010 photos of late winter / early spring flora

Bob Sutor — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:00:43 +0000

Every year I find it hard to resist slipping out of the house on warm sunny days in late winter and photographing the first flowers that break through the ground and snow. Here’s this year’s batch:

Here’s what things looked like in March, 2005.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, unless otherwise specified.
Posted under: Home, Photos.
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Webcast: “Cloud Computing Made Easy with IBM and Linux”

Bob Sutor — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:29:47 +0000

Judith Hurwitz, Adam Jollans, and I are hosting a webcast on Wednesday, March 17, at 12 noon ET called “Cloud Computing Made Easy with IBM and Linux.”

From the description:

If you are implementing cloud computing, or considering clouds but still have questions, don’t miss this webcast. You will learn about cloud computing in simple, straightforward terms, from industry analyst, Judith Hurwitz, author of the new white paper on Linux and Cloud Computing, and co-author of “Cloud Computing for Dummies.” Find out why Linux is so well suited for cloud applications and how IBM’s cloud offerings and Linux make cloud computing easy from Dr. Robert Sutor, IBM Vice President, Open Source and Linux. Hear Judith’s top predictions for clouds in 2010 and get some practical guidance on implementing cloud computing in your organization in this webcast.

Please join us! Attendees will receive the complimentary white paper “Linux and Commercial Software: Combining to Support the Cloud Environment” by Judith Hurwitz.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, unless otherwise specified.
Posted under: Cloud, Linux.
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Daily links for 03/11/2010

Bob Sutor — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:30:32 +0000

Microsoft offers a Sophie’s Choice | Open Source | ZDNet.com

“You get one choice. You buy Microsoft and you’re locked into Microsoft. You can’t go back.

In Microsoft’s world its formats and open source are the two children, and you get to make one choice. Then you have to move on.”

tags: microsoft, open-source
Meet Ubuntu Linux’s new CEO (Q&A) | Deep Tech – CNET News

“Being in the red now doesn’t mean that the company–funded in part by Shuttleworth’s proceeds from selling his earlier company, Thawte Consulting, to VeriSign for $575 million in 2000–doesn’t plan to be in the black. Canonical has three main businesses: selling server management services to companies using Ubuntu Linux; working with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) such as Hewlett-Packard or processor companies that need help with Linux; and most recently, an Internet-based tool for buying and synchronizing music files and other personal data.”

tags: linux, ubuntu
Prototype $200 Tablet Runs Android, Chromium OS, Linux – PCWorld

“What Freescale announced, and demoed in the video below, is the i.MX51. It is a 7-inch tablet that comes in multiple colors, and can run three different operating systems: Android, Chromium OS, or Linux. The demo tablet is used with a keyboard and mouse, but touch features exists as well – The Chrome Source reports that there was another demo tablet running a capacitive touch version of Linux.”

tags: tablet, linux
IBM hopes to make mobile devices more accessible | Cutting Edge – CNET News

“IBM is embarking on a research project to design mobile gadgets that are easier to use for people who have disabilities or aren’t fully literate.”

tags: ibm, mobile, accessibility
Selecting an Open Source Operating System

“There’s a large selection of free and open source (FOSS) operating systems available these days, and choosing the right one for any given circumstance can be quite a challenge. This article is intended to help you pick the best operating system for your needs and experience level. Although this article is geared primarily toward those who have little to no experience with FOSS operating systems, we’ve included some pointers for more savvy open source users – say, those who use a FOSS operating system at home and would like to deploy one on the job.”

tags: open-source

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, unless otherwise specified.
Posted under: Linux, News, Software, Standards.
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Daily links for 03/10/2010

Bob Sutor — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:30:17 +0000

Rackspace hires to align with MySQL offshoot – BusinessWeek

“A number of former Sun Microsystems employees who worked on Drizzle, an offshoot of the MySQL open-source database, have ended up at cloud infrastructure provider Rackspace, where they will continue their efforts, developer Jay Pipes wrote in a blog post Monday.”

tags: sun, mysql, rackspace
Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal « What I Couldn’t Say… (Jonathan Schwartz)

“As in life, bluster and threat are commonplace in business – especially the technology business. So that interaction was good preparation for a later meeting with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.”

tags: sun, apple, oracle, microsoft
Sunday Morning SEO: Using Google’s Spam Report to Fight a Cloaking Scraper « BloggingPro

“In my situation though, the scraper was also cloaking. Cloaking is a black hat tactic that Google frowns upon because it tricks the user into thinking they are visiting a page but instead they are redirected to an unrelated page.”

tags: spam, seo
Webmaster Tools – Spam report – Google

“We think that’s a bad thing, and so we request that, if your Google search returns a result that you suspect is spam, you please let us know by using this form. We thoroughly investigate every report of deceptive practices and take appropriate action when we uncover genuine abuse. In especially egregious cases, we will remove spammers from our index immediately, so they don’t show up in search results at all. At a minimum, we’ll use the data from each spam report to improve our site ranking and filtering algorithms, which, over time, should increase the quality of our results.”

tags: spam, google

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily links for 03/09/2010

Bob Sutor — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:30:20 +0000

Second Life’s virtual money can become real-life cash – washingtonpost.com

“Last year, as the physical economy withered, Second Life’s economy blossomed, with user-to-user transactions topping $567 million in actual U.S. currency, a 65 percent jump over 2008. About 770,000 unique users made repeat visits to Second Life in December, and the users, known as residents, cashed out $55 million of their Second Life earnings last year, transferring that money to PayPal accounts.”

tags: second-life, virtual-world
What to expect from HTML 5 | Developer World – InfoWorld

“HTML 5 aims to change all that. When it is finalized, the new standard will include tags and APIs for improved interactivity, multimedia, and localization. As experimental support for HTML 5 features has crept into the current crop of Web browsers, some developers have even begun voicing hope that this new, modernized HTML will free them from reliance on proprietary plug-ins such as Flash, QuickTime, and Silverlight.”

tags: HTML
Major League Baseball to Stream ESPN Events – NYTimes.com

“ESPN had previously used the services of Move Networks, based in American Fork, Utah. But Move’s system required that customers download a special video player that uses Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, said John Kosner, senior vice president of ESPN Digital Media. The network wanted to make its site easier to use by moving to a supplier that used Adobe’s popular Flash software, which operates within the Web browser.”

tags: baseball, espn, silverlight, microsoft

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily links for 03/09/2010

Bob Sutor — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:30:36 +0000

W3C pulls former Novell CTO for CEO spot

“Filling a position left open since 2008, former Novell CTO Jeffrey Jaffe has taken on the role of chief executive officer for the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).”

tags: novell, w3c
Second Life’s virtual money can become real-life cash – washingtonpost.com

“Last year, as the physical economy withered, Second Life’s economy blossomed, with user-to-user transactions topping $567 million in actual U.S. currency, a 65 percent jump over 2008. About 770,000 unique users made repeat visits to Second Life in December, and the users, known as residents, cashed out $55 million of their Second Life earnings last year, transferring that money to PayPal accounts.”

tags: second-life, virtual-world
What to expect from HTML 5 | Developer World – InfoWorld

“HTML 5 aims to change all that. When it is finalized, the new standard will include tags and APIs for improved interactivity, multimedia, and localization. As experimental support for HTML 5 features has crept into the current crop of Web browsers, some developers have even begun voicing hope that this new, modernized HTML will free them from reliance on proprietary plug-ins such as Flash, QuickTime, and Silverlight.”

tags: HTML
Major League Baseball to Stream ESPN Events – NYTimes.com

“ESPN had previously used the services of Move Networks, based in American Fork, Utah. But Move’s system required that customers download a special video player that uses Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, said John Kosner, senior vice president of ESPN Digital Media. The network wanted to make its site easier to use by moving to a supplier that used Adobe’s popular Flash software, which operates within the Web browser.”

tags: baseball, espn, silverlight, microsoft

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, unless otherwise specified.
Posted under: News, Open Source, Standards, Virtual Worlds.
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Really setting the default browser on a Mac

Bob Sutor — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:09:18 +0000

I was having a problem last week with my Mac: even though I set my default system browser to Google Chrome, one application just refused to believe it wasn’t Firefox any longer. (And no, that application wasn’t Firefox itself!)

Though I tried several times within Chrome and Firefox to toggle the system browser to end up being Chrome, that one application was being recalcitrant.

Today I got an email from my friend and IBM colleague Kelvin Lawrence with the workaround to the problem: go into Safari and under Safari > Preference > General toggle the browser to something non-Chrome and then back to Chrome. This seems to do something a little extra and it did the trick. That one application now opens web pages in Chrome.

Thanks for the fix, Kelvin!

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, unless otherwise specified.
Posted under: Macintosh, Open Source, Software.
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Daily links for 03/08/2010

Bob Sutor — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:30:21 +0000

W3C pulls former Novell CTO for CEO spot

“Filling a position left open since 2008, former Novell CTO Jeffrey Jaffe has taken on the role of chief executive officer for the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).”

tags: novell, w3c

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, unless otherwise specified.
Posted under: News, Standards.
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A winter walk on the Erie Canal

Bob Sutor — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:48:00 +0000

This afternoon the temperature made it up almost to 50 F here in northwest New York State. This is certainly above normal, which only starts to make up for the very cold but relatively snowless winter this year. I had several hours to kill this afternoon so I took a walk along the Erie Canal. Specifically, I took a visit to Lock 32 near Pittsford, New York.

There are hundreds of miles of trails along New York State’s canals. At the point where this photo of a sign was taken three generations of canals forked. The first two turned north near here and went through Rochester, while the current Barge Canal stayed more south and went below the city on its trip westward toward Buffalo.

While quite wide in places, the canal is not neatly framed with concrete along its length, though there are certainly some areas where it is contained that way. Here, looking west, the canal spreads out and bends in the distance.

The northern side of the canal has these iron tie-ups every hundred feet or so. The water level in the canal is dropped in winter starting in November, and it is raised before the canal reopens in May for boat traffic.

Here’s the western side of Lock 32. The lock gates are open slightly on both ends and some water can flow through it during the winter, though most goes through the sluiceway on the southern side.

On the eastern side you get a better idea of the crushed rock along the banks used to prevent erosion and maintain the shape of the canal. The building in the distance is a boathouse. I was one of the few people walking along the canal who did not have at least one dog with me.

This gives you a better idea of how much lower the water level is now than it will be come summer. It wasn’t difficult to get down to this point, though it got quite muddy below the crushed rock.

This sign gives more of the local history of the canal and the boat building history of Pittsford.

Someday I hope to rent a boat and lazily travel the length of the canal, though only my son among my immediate family members shows any interest of joining me. I’ve been trying to convince them for years, so I may need to extend my invitee list!

Also See:

New York Times: “Life in the Slow Lane: Navigating the Erie Canal”
Book: River-Horse: The Logbook of a Boat Across America by William Least Heat-Moon
Book: Erie Canal (Great Destinations) by Deborah Williams
Book: Cruising America’s Waterways: The Erie Canal by Debbie Daino Stack
Book: Cycling Along The Canals of New York State, 2nd Edition: Scenic Rides On The Historic Waterways Of The Empire State by Louis Rossi

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, unless otherwise specified.
Posted under: Photos, Travel.
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Daily links for 03/07/2010

Bob Sutor — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 17:30:20 +0000

The web designer’s guide to WordPress | News | TechRadar UK

“So what can WordPress do for designers? A lot, my friends! First and foremost, WordPress is a CMS.”

tags: wordpress, cms, open-source
How to run almost any OS on your Mac | News | TechRadar UK

“In fact, as a Mac user, you’re uniquely positioned because an Intel Mac is the only computer in the world that can legally run all three major operating systems, Mac OS, Windows and Linux. Indeed, you can, if you like, load all three on the same computer and pick which one you want to load when you switch your Mac on.”

tags: mac, osx, linux, virtualization

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Two photos on the inevitability of Spring

Bob Sutor — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:14:12 +0000

Though official Spring is still two weeks away, and “meteorological Spring” is several weeks ater than that here in northwest New York State, it’s possible to find some signs that Winter really is coming to an end.

Here are a couple of photos from yesterday: a bunny being sold at the local farm supply store (“just in time for Easter”) and a shoot from a bulb coming up in a warm part of the front garden.

Daily links for 03/06/2010

Bob Sutor — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:30:36 +0000

IT PRO | Q&A: Mark Kingdon on Second Life for business

“At the CeBIT conference in Hanover this week, Kingdon told IT PRO that more business functions would move to worlds like Second Life, for meetings, simulations and more – especially after the launch of more user-friendly systems, like the beta of its new viewer, which allows document sharing.”

tags: second-life, virtual-world
Gamasutra – News – BigWorld Debuts New Indie, Academic Engine Licenses

“Hoping to offer its tools to a new userbase, engine developer BigWorld is launching three new licenses geared for indie, student and small commercial MMO developers.

BigWorld Technology suite intends to offer a “complete technical architecture” for online game and virtual world developers, and includes BigWorld Server Software, Content Creation Pipeline, 3D Client Engine Package, and Live Management Tools & Instrumentation.”

tags: bigworld, virtual-world
Hands-on: a close look at Ubuntu’s new non-brown theme

“Canonical is updating Ubuntu’s look and feel with a new style that departs from the popular Linux distribution’s traditional brown theming. The new theme, which was announced yesterday as part of an initiative to overhaul Ubuntu’s branding and visual identity, will be used in the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 release, codenamed Lucid Lynx.”

tags: ubuntu, linux, theme

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, unless otherwise specified.
Posted under: Linux, News, Open Source, Virtual Worlds.
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Oh, the indignity!

Bob Sutor — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:29:01 +0000

I had to make a quick run to the grocery store yesterday and while I’m used to seeing statues, religious and otherwise, in gardens, this seemed to me to be a strange and awkward location for one.

Daily links for 03/05/2010

Bob Sutor — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:30:25 +0000

Apple iPad coming April 3: Will anyone wait for Wi-Fi and 3G version? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

“Apple’s iPad will be available April 3 in the U.S. for the Wi-Fi model with Wi-Fi and 3G versions coming later in the month. The timing sets up a nice buying decision: Is it worth waiting for the 3G version?”

tags: apple, ipad
Technology News: Distros: The Linux Desktop Will Have Its Day: Q&A With Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth

“People think of Ubuntu as Linux, or Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) as Linux, or they think of Debian as Linux. But actually the real work gets done in many upstream communities. The distributions get a lot of credit. And our focus has been to really try to serve those upstream communities well by delivering their code to users on a very predictable schedule with the highest levels of quality and integration.”

tags: linux, ubuntu

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, unless otherwise specified.
Posted under: Linux, News.
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