Some time ago, I wrote here about the Habitat project, an effort to relaunch the first massively multiplayer online game. This is an effort led by my non-profit, the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, an all-volunteer videogame museum reopening in Oakland on Feb. 5. Last week, that project made a major stride forward as … continue reading
Software-defined networking (SDN) is still quite a new technology, but Project Calico is hoping to push forward a generational evolution. Today, the open-source project added support for Google’s Kubernetes container-management platform. Calico is the brainchild of Christopher Liljenstolpe. He is the director of solutions architecture at Metaswitch, and he said the goal is to build … continue reading
The JBoss team at Red Hat is hoping you’re ready for a new Java platform. The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform version 7 entered beta yesterday, making it available to users for free. This new version includes Java-focused updates while adding the WildFly Application Server 10 to the bundle for the first time. WildFly has been … continue reading
While this may not be the droid you’re looking for, it’s certainly worth taking a gander at. An IBM employee has used the company’s Node-RED and Bluemix Internet of Things tools to add mental controls to a Sphero BB-8 robotic toy. Joshua Carr, lead developer at IBM working on Internet of Things projects, decided a … continue reading
Back in October, Red Hat acquired AnsibleWorks, making it the first major software company to buy out one of the four burgeoning players in the provisioning market. Today, Ansible released the first fruits of that acquisition in Ansible 2.0. Chief among the changes in 2.0, said James Cammarata, head of the Ansible open-source project, was … continue reading
The PostgreSQL community has a new version of its database to play with. Version 9.5 arrived today, and with it came a number of updated features, the most prominent of which promises to bridge the final gap between MySQL and PostgreSQL. In version 9.5, PostgreSQL gets an UPSERT feature for the first time. This was … continue reading
Apache Spark 1.6, which shipped yesterday, offers performance enhancements that range from faster processing of the Parquet data format to better overall performance for streaming state management. As a large-scale data processing platform, Apache Spark has untethered itself from the Hadoop platform. As a result, Spark can be used against key-value stores and other types … continue reading
While I don’t like to call myself a manager, I have spent a great deal of time managing people over the years. This has almost always been in a non-profit capacity, though it’s not always simply been about managing volunteers. Whilst working at a computer recycling center, we hired ex-cons and ex-meth addicts, typically with … continue reading
The smartphone reached eight years old in 2015, and looking at the app stores on iOS and Android, it’s becoming clear that these devices are replacing desktops. From Microsoft Office reaching both platforms, to Apple’s introduction of the professional-grade iPad, smart devices became first-class work citizens. And that’s not surprising, considering the trajectory of these … continue reading
Ian Murdock, 42, has died, according to Docker. He will be remembered as the founder of Debian and the creator of apt-get, and his death this week has touched the entire software community. In the past, Murdock also worked at Sun Microsystems, where he created a packaging system for the Solaris operating system. He also … continue reading
Madhukar Kumar is vice president of product management and marketing at Liaison Technologies, and he’s convinced he’s seen the future of data. In the past 10 years, Kumar has served as director of professional services at Autonomy, manager and architect of Interwoven, and finally, a vice president at HP. Today, however, he’s strictly concerned with … continue reading
Perl 6’s 15-year history is actually more than just the history of a programming language. The process has paralleled the development of the Rakudo virtual machine, an all-purpose engine for running interpreted languages, known as the Moar virtual machine. Over the Christmas break, the Rakudo Perl 6 was released. While Rakudo Perl 6 is not … continue reading
