Next week I am headed to London, England for a conference called "Cloudexpoeurope" run by my old friend Maggie Meer, publisher of LinuxUser Magazine. Maggie is one of those people who is as tough as nails, but with a heart of gold. This will be my first conference dedicated solely to "cloud...

I was working for Digital Equipment Corporation when I first met Linus and facilitated the port of Linux onto the Alpha processor. During the port, a member of the community contacted me and asked if Digital would contribute their math library to the Linux project, since Digital's math library...

I have been busy over the past several weeks doing various videos, all done with Free Software, in specific the programs Inkscape, Kino, GIMP and Audacity. These videos can be found on my YouTube channel "maddoghall" I have had many comments about them. A couple of people have critiqued the...

March 25th is Document Freedom Day. Like Software Freedom Day this is a grass-roots effort to educate people about the importance of open document formats and information freedom. My friends at 4Linux, in Sao Paulo Brazil mentioned to me that they were having a "BotecoNet" to answer questions...

Dear President Obama, Congratulations on passing the stimulus package! I hope that the stimulus package will help the economy get back on track. One thing that could help is to eliminate some of the approximately five billion dollars a day that we waste as a world economy with closed source,...

I first met Jim Bound when I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation in their Unix operating system group. Jim was "in the field" as a pre-and-post sales technical support person. When a salesman needed some good technical help in selling a customer a technical solution, or when a customer...

"At 11:31:30pm UTC on Feb 13, 2009, Unix time will reach 1,234,567,890. Where will you be at this momentous second?" - from Bell Labs This will be Friday, February 13th at 1831 and 30 seconds EST. If you want to find out what time it will be in your local time, try this Perl script courtesy...

How does a young innovator get advice about how to bring their product or services to market? How do they get the attention of knowledgable people who act as a Venture Capitalist or can make those connections for them? Here at Campus Party, one segement is called "CP Labs", and so far they have...

It is -10 degrees Celcius at my home in New Hampshire, but I am in Sao Paulo Brazil with a balmy temperature of +25 degrees Celcius. Hmmm...35 degrees Celcius difference....enough to cause me to shatter if I were to transport here.... But fortunately I am at the first day of Campus Party, and...

Campus Party is going to be held January 19th to 25th in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I have been asked to create a "challenge" for the attendees. I have long had a fascination with automated musical instruments (player pianos, player reed organs), and while I sometimes struggled with higher mathematics...

I was riding Southwest Airlines, coming back from visiting my relatives in Pennsylvania. I picked up a copy of the airline's Spirit Magazine from the seat back pocket, and started reading about various little-known holidays. Then I noticed that "Penguin Awareness Day" is January 20th. While...

This time of year a lot of people exchange gifts in celebration of various holidays. Chanukah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa to name a few. Making things a little harder for me, both my brother and my father celebrate their birthdays in December. If you are like me and coming up with the extra money...

I was attending Latinoware, an event in Brazil held on the grounds of the Itaipu Hydro-electric plant, currently the world's largest in capacity. Each event in Brazil has its own personality, and the Latinoware event reaches out not only to the Portuguese-speaking Free Software community, but...

As part of your campaign, you were an advocate for small and medium business (SMB). I agree with this philosophy, since such a large number of people in the United States are employed by SMBs, and since such a large portion of our economy is based on SMBs. In the computer industry there is...

Last week I was at a conference in San Francisco entitled "Open Mobile Summit". For their first attempt the organizers did what I thought was a very good job organizing this conference, getting people from many branches of the mobile telephone industry (handset manufacturers, carriers, service...