Greg Nawrocki was talking about grids and virtualization a few days, something I covered.

Now he has an interesting piece of the use of open source software for virtualization, such as Xen (making its way into Linux distributions, from Computerworld). As usual, Greg is right to point out that open source models could help accelerate the use of virtual technology for grids, something only previously thought about in terms of VMware up to now.

Linux is coming to the desktop, and if the Linux Standard Base (LSB) and Free Standards Group (FSB) have anything to do with it, then it will based on some standards that the different Linux distributions can adhere to and that make using Linux as a desktop operating system much easier.

First off we start with the launch of the Linux Standard Base Desktop Project. The basics of the project are also described in this piece at eWeek.

At EclipseWorld this year I presented tools for developing Python and Perl applications within the Eclipse IDE. These were extensions built and released by enthusiastic programmers who needed the tools, developed them, and decided to let other interested people (like me) use them.

Now it seems Zend are going to be formally joining the Eclipse project, as detailed in this Computerworld piece.

This is great news. PHP is a wonderfully rich web development platform, and Eclipse could give us the ability to develop and deploy PHP apps in a straightforward and intelligent manner. We can already develop HTML in Eclipse, so the merging of the two makes sense.

I'm a big fan of Asterisk, the VoIP exchange system, even if I'm not yet in a position to make use of it at the moment.

Asterisk is difficult to configure and is such a rich and capable application that getting to know how to configure everything can be a problem, so a good book is always useful.

O'Reilly's Asterisk book was released under a creative commons license, and it is now available to download for free, as noted here.

Grids are very cool technology, but it's amazing to see how different computing ideas are beginning to merge together.

The latest technology to get drawn into the grid space is virtualization. I've written about grids and virtualization technology before, but not necessarily in a deployment situation. Now it seems others are beginning to see the power of grids and virtual tech together, as demonstrated by this piece.

There's a good analysis of the main points by Greg Nawrocki.

Intel has produced a new technology - mature enough that we could see it in laptops soon - called Robson that dramatically speeds up boot times, application start-up times and helps save battery power in the process. In essence it is simply another form of cache, as explained in this Computerworld piece. The big difference seems to be the way it's used, the size (they can supply up to 4GB) and how it can be employed both by the system as a whole and by the OS to speed up general application access.

There are problems facing the computing community as companies try to to determine how to approach the open source world and model.

For companies already on the open source side of the fence - BSD, Linux - there are no issues, they've already made their decision.

But for companies in the commercial/proprietary world, some are beginning to realize that closing themselves off to open source may lead to problems down the line. Some companies have already worked it out - hence Sun released OpenSolaris.

Where it will really begin to hurt is in the smaller companies, those that don't have multi-billion dollar budgets to keep their programmers and developers happy, but who still want to compete. There are lots who potentially fall into this category. Some of them, like BeOS, have already fallen before choosing to go the open source route.

It was only a few weeks ago when I reported on the difficulty I had trying to find something in a past blog due to a number of 'spam blogs' - blogs specially designed to return results and get people to click on links. I postulated at the time that is was probably due to people trying to increase page rank and get clicks to earn referrals.

Apparently these are compararitvely new, and obviously designed to cash in on the explosion of people reading feeds.

The term for these? Splogs.

The problem is that the content on these splogs interferes with all the real content on the Internet and if I can find it on simple searches like 'linux terminal server schools' others are going to find splogs on other seemingly innocuous search terms.

There were a rash of OpenSolaris articles and pieces over the weekend, all of which are worth a read.

First up, a piece I've mentioned before, the OpenSolaris Lessons Learned by OpenSolaris Community Manager Jim Grisanzio. Jim has also done an interesting Story of OpenSolaris, from the perspective of someone at the front line of the process.

There's also been an excellent comparison, at the kernel internals level, of the FreeBSD, Solaris and Linux kernels. This is a technical piece and the quality and level fo the material is excellent. Certainly worth a read if you want to understand the acute differences between the ways the kernels work.

Considering everything we have to think about as IT administrators, nothing is more fraught with potential problems than backups. A lot of this is simply because we hope we never have to use it. One of the more annoying aspects of backups is that as hard disk space has increased, backup media hasn't, and that means we have to use multiple tapes, tape libraries and autochangers. More tapes also means more storage space and that means bigger fireproof safes, or higher costs with offsite media storage companies. This is complicated by the fact that the higher density tapes and drives are expensive.