Asterisk have announced an updated version of the Asterisk PBX, an open source, VoIP solution. I've written about Asterisk many times, and I've never failed to be impressed by the quality or the feature set.

If you are still unfamiliar with the technology, there's a detailed exposition of the software and it's abilities in Throw away your PBX: Why Asterisk may be the VoIP future of your network and Asterisk 1.4 unveiled.

Asterisk have announced an updated version of the Asterisk PBX, an open source, VoIP solution. I've written about Asterisk many times, and I've never failed to be impressed by the quality or the feature set.

If you are still unfamiliar with the technology, there's a detailed exposition of the software and it's abilities in Throw away your PBX: Why Asterisk may be the VoIP future of your network and Asterisk 1.4 unveiled.

There's an interesting piece on the 10 Programming Languages You Should Learn Right Now.

The article compares the number of available jobs against the different programming languages. There's an interesting mix here, and four of those quoted are directly open source, including the big three (Perl, PHP and Python) and of course Ruby.

My only criticism of the article is that it quotes AJAX as a language (it isn't, it's a technology, and you can do AJAX with Javascript and just about any backend language you like); and Ruby on Rails is a web environment for Ruby, and probably shouldn't be considered as a different entity (they both get the same ranking).

There's an interesting piece on the 10 Programming Languages You Should Learn Right Now.

The article compares the number of available jobs against the different programming languages. There's an interesting mix here, and four of those quoted are directly open source, including the big three (Perl, PHP and Python) and of course Ruby.

My only criticism of the article is that it quotes AJAX as a language (it isn't, it's a technology, and you can do AJAX with Javascript and just about any backend language you like); and Ruby on Rails is a web environment for Ruby, and probably shouldn't be considered as a different entity (they both get the same ranking).

I've been criticized on my post yesterday (HP head does the decent thing) for not calling what has happened at HP 'incompetence'.

James Earl, who commented this fact, has some other strong opinions on what should have happened, and I don't in any way disagree with him.

Incompetence is not the right word though; Incompetence implies that HP don't have the skills to do the job properly.

What the chairwoman did here was not incompetent, it was malicious, AFAIK illegal, and well executed, if , as we'll all agree, very badly thought out. What the board did when they found out was not incompetent either, it was instead the comparatively typical response for a group of people who's responsibility is to the shareholders and the company. As I mentioned yesterday, those shareholders hold a significant amount of sway in any company.

I've been criticized on my post yesterday (HP head does the decent thing) for not calling what has happened at HP 'incompetence'.

James Earl, who commented this fact, has some other strong opinions on what should have happened, and I don't in any way disagree with him.

Incompetence is not the right word though; Incompetence implies that HP don't have the skills to do the job properly.

What the chairwoman did here was not incompetent, it was malicious, AFAIK illegal, and well executed, if , as we'll all agree, very badly thought out. What the board did when they found out was not incompetent either, it was instead the comparatively typical response for a group of people who's responsibility is to the shareholders and the company. As I mentioned yesterday, those shareholders hold a significant amount of sway in any company.

After my post on the Sun T1000 and the subsequent podcast interview, I noticed this comment on the T1000 post from David Halko:

Please run some tests and take the T1 to the breaking point... total number of requests, total number of failures, latency... and compare it to something else.

This is, of course, exactly what I'm doing!

I've developed a simple quite of functionality that I'll be testing. I have a comparison against Sun's own X2100 (based on the AMD) using a combination of static and dynamic elements. From that, I'll be able to extract all of the above and show the detail, as well as some graphs, on that output.