Somewhere out there!

Zonbu: an intersection of open source, Web 2.0 and energy efficiency is a brief review of a clever convergence device.

reloaded with an office suite, email, IM, web browser, multimedia player, games and Skype, Zonbu is aimed at being a general computing appliance. You can’t install anything else on it, but then again, that way you can’t break it easily either. It sounds the sort of thing I’d be happy leaving with non-technical family and friends.

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The Zonbu has 4GB of compact flash storage on board, which it uses as a cache for Amazon’s S3 storage network. All your files get encrypted and sent to S3, and are retrieved when you need them. One really neat consequence of this is that you can get at your data via the web any time you want.

I was playing around a little with ThinkFree Online over the weekend. It handle quite well the matrix math methods I use to generate many of my business analysis spreadsheets. Methods that I’ve tried in Google Docs but haven’t been able to get work. Equations like {sum((A1:A10<=10)*(A1:A10>0)*B1:B10)} and LOOKUPs. I don’t use pivot tables so I didn’t try those.

Worth a look if you need something online, they even have a self-hosted server version that runs on tomcat.

Some useful info and comments on the Solaris scheduler.

A great line.

My Views on OSS ESM (Part 1) | John M Willis – ESM BLOG:

I had to present to Jeff Schulman at Gartner, at the time, the infamous ops automation guru at Gartner. Jeff is another guy I used to argue with a lot back in the early days of ESM automation. Although I can find no record of this on the Internet, I am pretty sure Jeff Schulman coined the phrase marketecture. During my presentation Jeff didn’t listen to a word I had to say. All he kept asking was when he was going to get to meet Aubery Chernick, the founder of Candle. It was then I learned my first lesson about analyst groups. It had nothing to do with the technology and all about the smooze.

Most of my mobile devices have management tools for difference auto-config at locations. Devicescape seems to be a more generic free option, that would make it easier setup new device and manage the config information generically over several devices. I’m not sure I understand their business model yet though.

From jkontherun.

Quite a useful list of Office 2.0 applications that are being used at the Office 2.0 Conference.

Sun have released their latest Xen update and it looks like it will be one of the key strategic platforms:

And that’s exactly the theory behind the newly bundled virtualization features in Solaris 10 – from Xen to ZFS, Crossbow to Java (fancy names for the same idea – reducing complexity to increase productivity). Solaris 10’s virtualization enables customers to consolidate the sprawling Linux, Solaris and Windows boxes laying around their datacenters, without having to pay exorbitant software licenses for add-on products. We built virtualization in to Solaris 10 not to encourage fewer computer or storage purchases, but instead, more – systems that are twice as utilized are twice as affordable. (When you double the mileage of a car, more people can afford it.)

AskoziaPBX is Monowall derived embedded version of Asterisk. It weighs in at about 10Mb. It could also be useful for larger systems where something like AsteriskNow is overkill and only the extra hardware power is need to drive more phones.