Red Hat, the $1 billion Linux company

In August 1998 Microsoft employees Vinod Valloppillil and Josh Cohen wrote a famous internal confidental document entitled "Linux OS Competitive Analysis", which was subsequently leaked to Eric Raymond and became known as "Halloween Document 2".

Whilst the whole set is fascinating reading it is worth noting what the document said about Red Hat at the time...

Could Your Business Gain From A Switch To Open Source?

I'll start off with a caveat, I am an open-source advocate, a long standing committee member and current president of Linux Users of Victoria (http://luv.asn.au). My overall approach is that computer programs are scientific problems, and therefore there is an inherent tendency towards a better solution when the source code can be freely analysed, distributed and developed; release early, release often and with many eyes all bugs are shallow (to paraphrase Eric Raymond's famous essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar').

Parallel WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting) with Intel compilers on a 64-bit Linux System

The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model is a next-generation mesoscale numerical weather prediction system designed to serve both operational forecasting and atmospheric research needs. It features multiple dynamical cores, a 3-dimensional variational (3DVAR) data assimilation system, and a software architecture allowing for computational parallelism and system extensibility. WRF is suitable for a broad spectrum of applications across scales ranging from meters to thousands of kilometers.

JQuery and Views for Slideshows with Drupal 6.x

The JQuery cycle is an extremely useful tool for building various slideshow effects. The following discusses its use on Drupal 6.x websites which, like all good websites, are running a *NIX operating system. All instructions on this page assume that you're operating as root/sudo on a Linux system and logged in as administrator on Drupal.

Installing Demon with Intel and OpenMPI

DeMon (Density of Montréal) "is a software package for density functional theory (DFT) calculations. It uses the linear combination of Gaussian-type orbital (LCGTO) approach for the self-consistent solution of the Kohn-Sham (KS) DFT equations. The calculation of the four-center electron repulsion integrals is avoided by introducing an auxiliary function basis for the variational fitting of the Coulomb potential."

The Future is GPGPU

Since the early 1990s the x86 line of CPUs has dominated the computer world. Although it has hardly entered popular consciousness that is all changing. A revolution is afoot, as significant as the change from mainframes to clustered or networked systems some twenty years ago. It is time to welcome our new GPU overlords who, in the November 2010 list of the world's supercomputers, have taken 1st, 3rd and 4th position.

Ignorant, Dangerous and Organised

Recently a PEW study surprised many by its announcement that most atheists know more about religion that those of strong belief, despite the fact that a majority consider religion to be "very important" to their lives. In other surprise figures, a sizeable minority of Protestants cannot name the gospels and a similar figure of Catholics are unaware of the sacrament of transubstantiation.

Upgrading Drupal Core and Modules

The following is a "sufficiently paranoid" approach to upgrading Drupal core and modules. As always, when one is going down this path the first thing to do is put the site in offline mode from admin/settings/site-maintenance.

Then make a back-up of your site, existing modules and themes, and database.


cp -r drupal-site drupalsite-bak
mysqldump drupal6-site > drupal6-site.sql

Download the core modules, based on the suggested updates from admin/reports/updates. You might even want to turn this into a script;

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