Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘App Packaging‘ files: Novell’s openSUSE Build Service is among the useful online tools for Linux developers. It lets you build packages for multiple targets including other Linux distributions (Fedora, Debian, Mandriva and Ubuntu), as well as being the platform that SUSE developers use to build SUSE Linux. The openSUSE Build Service is now […]

Oracle took control of the MySQL database effort through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, but it’s hardly the only game in town. SkySQL is the latest initiative to offer open source support for MySQL, potentially rivaling Oracle’s own tools. But the leaders of SkySQL, which include many former MySQL executives, insist that they are not […]

From the ‘Sky Isn’t Falling‘ files: The Number Resource Organization (NRO) announced today the less than 5 percent of the IPv4 address space now remains. So what? We’ve been hearing about IPv4 address space depletion for years and various organizations have kept trying to predict the year we’d ‘run out’ of address spaces. The reality […]

Fog may have started as a hobby, but for creator Wesley Beary, who now works as an engineer with commercial sponsor Engine Yard, the project is evolving rapidly. But that’s all changed now. Engine Yard has announced formal support for the Fog project, aiming to spur Ruby and Ruby on Rails deployments in the cloud […]

From the ‘Do As We Say, Not As We Do‘ files: Facebook is THE site now for social collaboration with 500 million plus users. From a technical collaboration perspective though, is Facebook ‘socializing’ as it should? Last week I wrote a story about Apache Shindig 2.0, an implementation of the OpenSocial standards. OpenSocial is a […]

Many enterprises, maybe most, have been priced out of 40 Gigabit Ethernet technology in their data centers. It just costs too much, according to Blade Network Technologies, a spinoff of the now-bankrupt Nortel Networks. Blade, now in the process of being acquired by IBM, is looking to change all that. With its new RackSwitch G8264, […]

To virtualize or not to virtualize. If that’s the question, furniture retailer Slumberland has an answer. But to arrive at that point of certainty, CIO Jamie Page and his team went through scrupulous cost-benefit analyses, evaluated competing hypervisor offerings from Microsoft and VMware, and ultimate settled on a deployment that runs Microsoft’s Hyper-V over Cisco’s […]

From the “Who Is That?‘ files: Browser vendor Mozilla has a new CEO with the appointment of Gary Kovacs. Kovacs will takeover from outgoing CEO John Lilly in November. Before today, I personally had never heard of Kovacs. Apparently he has work experience at Macromedia / Adobe, SAP and Sybase — companies that aren’t known […]

From the ‘Years After Everyone Else‘ files: The ability to extend a browser, called extensions or add-ons depending on the vendor, is now finally set to debut in the upcoming Opera 11 browser. According to Opera, their extensions will be based on the W3C Widget spec and they’ll be trying to enable developers to be […]

Ever wanted to use Twitter to make a phone call? The clever folks over at click-to-call VoIP provider Zyngaya have, and now they’re making it a reality. The firm is offering a new service for the popular microblogging site called zin.to, which will enable users to initiate a VoIP call by tweeting a message with […]

Oracle’s security update pattern is shifting a little since it absorbed Sun Microsystems and its product portfolio. The database giant is now responsible for issuing patches for both product lines, and this week it’s out with a big release. As the calendar worked out, Oracle’s quarterly Critical Patch Update (CPU) and its CPU for Java […]

Aruba is out with a new software-driven upgrade to its networking technology, promising a spate of improvements in the areas of spectrum analysis and security. The new ArubaOS 6.0, a Linux-based operating system, promises to improve signal-to-noise issues thanks to features such as real-time spectrograms and channel quality assurances. Meanwhile, the new TotalWatch technology aims […]