Sean Michael Kerner

Open source memcached efforts continue to draw interest from investors, who see the potential market growing for distributed caching technology. The latest example is NorthScale, a memcached startup that has secured an additional $10 million in its latest round of venture funding, and snagged a new CEO, Bob Wiederhold. Developer.com has the story on NorthScale […]

From the ‘Bad GRUB‘ files: No, Fedora 13 Linux is not coming out today (and if you read my blog last week you’d know that!). The release was pushed back by a week to fix a number of blocker bugs, among them is an interesting one that many users might simply consider to be just […]

Juniper Networks is rolling out new routing, switching and software technology in an effort to help simplify enterprise network management. The firm has announced a new datacenter switch, the EX4500, which will compete directly with Cisco’s Nexus 5000 model. Additionally, Juniper is out with a new line card and router, as well as the new […]

Why would a new filesystem in the latest Linux kernel be named after a class of mollusks that includes things like octopuses and squid? Because Ceph, as the new distributed filesystem included in the latest Linux kernel is known, can manage petabytes of storage by tapping into multiple storage nodes, conjuring, perhaps, the image of […]

From the ‘Funding Mature Companies‘ files: Zend, one of the lead commercial PHP vendors, today announced that they have received another $9 million in venture capital funding, led by Greylock Partners. While that certainly sounds like good news on the surface – an open source vendor getting money etc – Zend isn’t exactly a startup […]

Eclipse is branching out. The organization is now inviting small open source projects into its Labs effort, offering a home and promotion among the community without requiring them to adhere to all the rules of the Eclipse Foundation. Instead, Eclipse is offering a specific set of guidelines for the Labs environment, and also expects participating […]

Efforts to develop an XML pipeline standard have been underway for years, but the World Wide Web Consortium finally got it done. The W3C has announced the XProc XML Pipeline Language, a method for automating, managing and sharing operations performed on XML documents. DevX has the story. XML has been in use for over a […]

For the longest time, it has been standard practice that apps written for the desktop are written in C/C++ and Web apps are written in Java or an interpreted language like PHP. Well, Google aims to change that with its Native Client SDK. This developer kit will allow developers to create Web apps in C […]

Cisco reported another record quarter, citing steep sales jumps in a number of its key businesses, and signaling growing IT interest in several new product lines. That’s good news for the leading enterprise networking vendor, which has been executing strongly throughout the downturn and against a number of new rivals — thanks to Cisco’s entrance […]

Running out-of-date browser plugins can put users at risk on the Web. Mozilla, which already offers a plugin checker for its own open source Firefox browser, is now extending the service to rival products. Mozilla’s plugin checker now works on select add-ons on certain versions of Opera, Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. […]

From the ‘Smiles That Crash‘ files: The open source pidgin instant messaging client has a new update today with version 2.7.0. Pidgin is an important open source project in that it is included in multiple Linux distributions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is also available for Windows users as well. While Pidgin is often […]

The search for a new chief executive is on at Mozilla. John Lilly, a five-year veteran of the open source outfit who has held the top spot for two years, has informed employees that he is stepping down and taking a partner position at Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm. Lilly leaves at an important […]