Regardless of the OS I’m using, I spend the majority of my time ssh’d to some linux server somewhere around the globe. Recently I’ve switched from using Ubuntu as my client-side OS and am now using a MacBook Pro. I have small Mac keyboard and a magic mouse.

This Oracle TechCast which comes to us from an “undisclosed location” in Silcon Valley, offers us assurance that Oracle is committed to maintaining the free, open source, GPL’d community edition of MySQL. They have recently released version 5.5 and state that they are hiring within Oracle and will surpass Sun’s investment into the MySQL project. [...]

During my twenty-five or so years of technology consulting, I’ve witnessed many in-house software development projects. Large or small, too often companies tend to believe their needs are too special for any sort of off-the-shelf solution. The true stumbling block tends to fall into the category of “we’ve always done it this way”. Outdated processes and an unwillingness to change force overworked IT staff to build an in-house solution where feature creep is rampant and the project never meets expectations. At the same time, development costs skyrocket far beyond the cost of even the most expensive off-the-shelf alternative. If a close open source alternative exists, those same developers could work within the community to enhance the project and submit code back to the project for inclusion and benefit both the company and the community.

He and Amitt also talked about the ability of tying each experience to a point of monetization—at user account creation, users status page and status viewing; but also that the best way is to bring the promotion into the game. He talked specifically about a promotion they ran with FTD where in the game you could buy a virtual boquet; and integrating product placement into the story line yielded he said 3-5x conversion rates. He also was big on two tier currencies; which I understood as a base currency that users mostly earn through time and effort in the game; and a second more mega currency that maps to premium monetization of user actions; and links with more “subscriber” class buyers.

I haven’t seen the Google Nexus One yet, but I’ve listened to and read reviews.  From what I’ve heard, if I were to give up my iPhone, this would be the phone I would choose.  Jeff Jarvis on a recent This Week in Google, however, pointed out that the Google app for the iPhone provides [...]

Those of you who regularly work with virtualization technologies know the many frustrations and concerns surrounding providing a proper storage infrastructure for virtualization. In particular, we often spend top dollar for high-end storage arrays from companies such as EMC in order to gain the support and high availability that these arrays offer. However, much of what makes these arrays high-end winds up being wasted in the implementation of these arrays for virtualization.

Who wouldn’t want to launch the next Twitter, Facebook or Google? Everyone in the tech business is asking the question, “What is the next big thing?” Clearly the most recent “big thing” has been the social networking boom. But what’s next?

This presentation by Kevin Rose of Digg.com provides us with fantastic and timely information for how to grow a site and cultivate the community of followers you gain. I have outlined the highlights of his presentation here for easy reference. For further discussion, visit the Tech Cast Talk Discussion Forum Post for this topic.