A longer version of this story is published at www.opensources.com

Last week, Barnes & Noble announced they would cut the price on their wireless Nook eReader, from $259 to $199 ($149 for a new WiFi-only edition.)  Many thought this was a good opportunity for the third place contender to gain market share.  But within a few hours Amazon beat Barnes & Noble's price by $10, marking down the Kindle …

1. Membase -- an open-source (Apache 2.0 license) distributed, key-value database management system optimized for storing data behind interactive web applications. These applications must service many concurrent users; creating, storing, retrieving, aggregating, manipulating and presenting data in real-time. Supporting these requirements, membase processes data operations with quasi-deterministic low latency and high sustained throughput. (via Hacker News)
2. Sergey's Search (Wired) -- Sergey Brin, one of the Google founders, learned he had a gene allele that gave him much higher odds of getting Parkinson's. His response has been to help medical research, both with money and through 23andme. …

OpenSQLCamp is less than 4 months away, and I have finally gotten around to updating the site. Special thanks go to Bradley Kuzsmaul and the folks at Tokutek for getting the ball rolling and making the reservation at MIT. Using MIT means that we will have *free* reliable wireless guest access and projects.

OpenSQL Camp is a free unconference for people interested in open source databases (MySQL, SQLite, Postgres, Drizzle), including non-relational databases, database alternatives like NoSQL stores, and database tools such as Gearman. We are not focusing on any one project, and hope to see representatives from a variety of open source database projects attend. As usual I am one of the main organizers of Open SQL Camp (in previous years, Baron Schwartz, Selena Deckelmann and Eric Day have been main organizers too; this year Bradley Kuzsmaul is the other main organizer). The target audience …

Julie Bort of Networkworld.com has an interview with Mårten Mickos of Eucalyptus, formerly of MySQL. In MySQL times it seemed (to me at least) that most users never realized Mårten and his management team were taking MySQL increasingly into a closed source direction. (Maybe I'm just stupid myself, but at least personally I had not noticed this until after I started working for the company.) In this interview Mårten at least comes squarely out of the closet and is defending the model.

Julie makes a good journalistic effort of reporting on the topic from a neutral point of view. Alas, sometimes that approach just makes things fuzzier. So let me try to make one thing clear: Open core may be a good business model, but open core is not open …

What happens when you mention Open Office and Firewall in once sentence, in public ?

People start actually building it (French Article)

Then add to that list that there's also people out there that think that running MySQL over NFS is providing them High Availability, or that using DNS Round Robin will provide them a scalable setup,

So yes .. apparently there is indeed a parallel universe out there.

And no .. I don't want to see Webmin in any Appliance .. that is a joke..., or rather a rant ..

Technorati Tags: firewall …

For the last few years I have had an interest in configuration management of IT infrastructure. While by no means an expert I have a considerable amount of experience with the problems associated with mass server configuration and have come to believe it also one of the most under-served disciplines in systems management.

In a previous life I had an operations role maintaining primarily Linux servers and other open source infrastructure. In 2006 I worked on launching the open source NetDirector project, a graphical tool for configuring open source infrastructure like Apache, Samba, LDAP and NFS servers. During that time the challenges of …

1. Law of Success 2.0 -- a blog of interviews with famous and/or interesting people, from Brad Feld to Uri Geller.
2. Pioneer One -- crowdsourced funding for TV show, perhaps a hint of the future. Pilot shot for $6,000 which was raised through KickStarter. Distributed via BitTorrent.
3. DrasticTools -- PHP/MySQL visualisation tools, including TreeMap, tag cloud, hierarchical bar chart, and animated list. (via TomC on Delicious)
4. GoogleCL -- command-line interface to Google services. At the moment the services are Picasa, …

I may or may not be interviewed on the Swedish language Radio Vega. The background to this confusing statement is that the Finnish government today publishes a report on the use of open source in Finnish companies and associated risks related to that. I was a contributor to the report since Monty Program is a Finnish open source company. I guess since I speak Swedish, the reporter had scheduled a telephone interview with me after the press conference.

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