Matt Croydon::Postneo

Day: May 5, 2004

  • Howard County Library Moves to Linux

    Newsforge:

    Over the past year, the Howard County (Md.) Public Library has migrated more than 200 public PCs from Windows 98 and Windows NT to Linux. These PCs are used both to surf the Internet and to access the library’s catalogues. NewsForge recently spoke with Brian Auger, associate director of the library, and the IT team responsible for the migration. We wanted to learn more about why and how it was accomplished, and how pleased they are with the results.

    Wow, that’s surreal.  I’m in Howard County right now.  They chose an interesting route: Linux from Scratch + Gnome, Mozilla, and OpenOffice.org.  A cron script is run twice a day to see if there are any updates to be downloaded from a master server.

    More information, including some screenshots can be found at LuMiXtech.

    Way to go, Howard County!  Stories like this and the library behind White Box Enterprise Linux give my warm fuzzy penguin feelings.

  • WS-WTF? (Devices Profile for Web Services)

    Infoworld notes that Microsoft and Intel have released a Devices Profile for Web services.  It builds on WS-Discovery and will allow enterprise level peripheral connectivity.

    Tying devices together today is too complicated

    Ahh yes, adding another layer of complexity on top is going to help.  Really!

    Furthermore, UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) 1.x used today is not enterprise ready, according to Allchin.

    My dream enterprise class peripheral connectivity platform would be built on top of Rendezvous/Zeroconf, would involve XML over HTTP (or something like that), and might even involve a little RDF.  It sure would not involve WS-anything and under no circumstances would UPnP be allowed to play.

    I’m sure that Microsoft and Intel want to make our lives easier, but WS-this on top of WS-that is getting on my WS-nerves.

  • Geronimo!

    Via Matthew, OETrends takes a look at the current state of Apache Geronimo, as well as what to expect in the future.  It looks like things are progressing quickly.  Congrats to the Geronimo team!

  • Wikis Help in a Pinch

    EWeek:

    For about six hours yesterday, the staff of eWEEK.com was treated to a lesson in emergency improvisation. But thanks to 123 lines of Python code, running on a $7-a-month personal Web site on an Apache Web server somewhere in California, you probably didn’t notice.

    This is an excellent story of improvisation at its finest.