Merry Christmas to all our readers, from everybody at OPENXTRA. Many thanks to Tarus Balog over at OpenNMS for the lovely t-shirt.
OPENXTRA is going to be closed over the Christmas holidays, though we will fulfil online and fax orders. We’ll all be back at the Chambers officially on the 2nd January.
The Tech Teapot will be [...]

Popularity: 21% [?]

There are very few people who really influence the world. I think one of those people is Alan Kay. If you’re a programmer I would suggest that you familiarise yourself with his work. He’s got some very interesting things to say about IT and programming in particular.
“To find the most interesting things about our field [...]

Popularity: 23% [?]

Following the 2006 review I thought it’d be nice to see the highlights for 2007.
Senturion
Towards the end of 2007 Sensatronics released the Senturion rack environment monitor. This is something of a landmark release for Sensatronics, as the first rack-mounted device they’ve ever released. We expect the Senturion platform to generate plenty of interest in 2008 [...]

Popularity: 21% [?]

The most interesting thing about technology change are the odd juxtapositions it throws up. If you’d asked me a few years ago who would be the leader in cloud computing, I wouldn’t have predicted that it would be Amazon.
Sure Amazon know how to run very large websites. How did they go from e-commerce pioneer to [...]

Popularity: 32% [?]

Interesting what Amazon is up to…first with cloud storage then cloud computing and now cloud databases. Is the art of data centre management going to be concentrated into a few massive data centres?
We currently rent a single Sun box, running Linux oddly enough, in a data centre to run all of our websites and email. [...]

Popularity: 33% [?]

Just because it’s Christmas doesn’t mean we’ve been slacking in the Chambers this week.
If you’re lucky enough to be using Microsoft Vista we now have a sidebar gadget for displaying the current readings from your Sensatronics temperature monitor. You can have multiple gadgets in your sidebar in case you’ve got more than one [...]

Popularity: 43% [?]

Spammers have automated tools to spam blog comments. Blog owners have a number of automated tools to stop them. Spammers set up dummy blogs with the anti-spam tools of the day so they can refine their spamming tools. Blog owners deploy new or updated anti-spam tools to stop the newly refined spamming tools…
All so that [...]

Popularity: 26% [?]

One of my pet hates is coming into the office only to be presented with a nice problem on the website. This morning I tried to log into this blog and saw the screenshot above.
All sorts of things went through my mind. Have we been hacked? Fortunately not.
The explanation was much simpler. The [...]

Popularity: 28% [?]

I’ve been hanging around with the 8-bit crowd lately! Yes, it does still exist, though is now largely restricted to the embedded market. What has surprised me is the level of functionality you can implement with very modest hardware. You can create fully functional web server, email servers and pretty well everything else all with [...]

Popularity: 28% [?]