Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘Fork This‘ files: Back in 2008, I was at the OSCON conference when Brian Aker announced Drizzle to the world. Nearly three years later, Drizzle is now Generally Available (GA), as a new open source database that takes a different path than its MySQL roots. Drizzle originally had the backing of Sun, but […]

From the ‘Let’s Try This Again‘ files: Debian is the ‘mother’ distro to many ‘children’ derivative distros, including Ubuntu. Sometimes those derivatives give back to the upstream, but it’s not always easy. A new effort called DEX is aiming to improve how derivative bits are merged upstream. “DEX is all about action: merging patches, fixing […]

The MySQL database is often associated with PHP, though that’s not the only open source language it can be used with. This week, database vendor Xeround debuts their ‘MySQL in the cloud’ technology for the Heroku Ruby platform. The idea behind the integration is to make it easier for Ruby developer on Heroku to provision […]

There is a zero day Adobe Flash Player vulnerability out in the wild that Adobe won’t be patching until next week. Google however is getting the jump and is already shipping a new version of Chrome, including an updated Flash Player. “This vulnerability (CVE-2011-0609) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take […]

The new Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition 3.8 release is now out, aiming to enable users with new functionality for guided business intelligence analysis and building reports. New capabilities in Pentaho BI 3.8 enable the setup of guided analysis across content. The Pentaho dashboard has also been improved with content linking as well. So as […]

How do you forecast datacenter demands? New technology called Datacenter Insight from Zenoss announced this week, builds on the company’s Enterprise monitoring solution. The goal of Datacenter Insight is to take all of the monitoring information from a datacenter and provide tools by which that data can be analyzed. Datacenter Insight can be leveraged to […]

From the ‘Time to Update‘ files: Apache may no longer be a part of the Java Community Process, but that’s not slowing down development on the Apache Tomcat Java Server. Tomcat 7.0.11 was recently released as a security update for 7.0.10. The Tomcat 7.0.10 update itself was mostly a bugfix and security update for Tomcat […]

The open source Apache CouchDB database is among the most popular NoSQL technologies in use today. This week, newly formed vendor Couchbase unveiled its debut product, Couchbase Server providing users with an easier to use and manage version of CouchDB. The new Couchbase Server is the first product release resulting from the merger of Membase […]

Lots of people bring their own devices to work. Shouldn’t those devices, whether they’re Apple iPads or other tablets get network security and policies applied to them? Aruba is aiming to make it easier for enterprise admins to control and manage mobile devices on a network, including new Apple iPad tablets. The new products are […]

Oracle is expanding its mobile developer efforts with the release of the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) Mobile Client. In the past Oracle has also had a mobile browser, which enabled Java applications in a limited fashion. Now Oracle is moving to the next step of mobile application enablement. “ADF Mobile Client steps onto the […]

The second major Linux kernel release of 2011 is now available, offering open source users enhanced performance over its predecessors. The Linux 2.6.38 kernel goes a step beyond what Linux developers provided in the 2.6.37 kernel released earlier this year, by eliminating the last main global lock, which further unlocks Linux performance. “There are many […]