After a bit of downtime, Mark and I got back together to catch up on life in the open source world.  Both of us have been immersed in some cool projects and now are finally catching our breath.

Mark has been configuring and hacking away on some IP tables and routing, all based on the flexiblity of Linux.  We talked briefly about the key points that Mark found interesting and are planning to dedicate a future podcast to the topic.

Over the past weeks this topic has been blogged, posted, twittered, etc by many different parties.  Previously I had thought myself pretty middle of the road when it came to waving the feminist flag.  Having been the lone female on the team for most of my IT career, I have come to accept that this is still a non-traditional path for most women. 

This past week, I read an interesting blog post regarding Linux's future on the desktop. http://bit.ly/yoUqn  A keynote speaker at LinuxCon, openSUSE Community Manager Joe Brockmeier, used a musical analogy to portray his vision regarding mass adoption of the Linux desktop. 

In our last episode of OTE, we had the pleasure of speaking with Fred Yeboah from the Kofi Annan Institute in Ghana.  Mark had met Fred at a 2 week OSS " train the trainer" seminar, which was focused on increasing in-country capacity around FLOSS & ICT.  Fred gave us good insight regarding how his department is leveraging open source, by offering courses in server administration, and programming.

Just a quick blog post to announce the release of episode 6 of OTE. Show notes can be found here

After my brief glimpse of VMworld, I flew into Chicago to be part of the Redhat Summit.  The open source based company, where I am currently the International Partner Development Manager, had an exhibit.  As well, I gave a presentation about our software.

On Monday, I spent the day checking out the exhibits at VMworld in San Fransisco USA.  While the key focus was on VMware and many of the companies present focused their product support on the MS platform, it was encouraging to see a strong representation by enterprise level companies such as Canonical, Redhat and Novell.  While it is common knowledge that probaly 75% of the servers around the world run on a Unix platform, there are still Microsoft holdouts.

In this episode of open tech exchange Darlene and I talk to Teddy from the Open Source Zambia Initiative. Teddy is pushing the adoption of open source by organising the open source community in Zambia and by encouraging the adoption of open source in government.

Download the podcast here

The South African government has adopted a policy to foster the use of Free and Open Source software within government and in South Africa in general. As part of this effort we worked with Floss.pro founder Karl Fischer to deliver a presentation on the Drupal Content Management System to IT support and web developers at the Department of Science and Technology.

Episode 4 of OTE is out

First, the latest episode, number 4, of OTE is out. In this episode Darlene and I ramble on about browsers and cell phones.

The Future of Web Applications

From about 2004 we entered a new phase in the evolution of  web application development.  After a number of, relatively uneventful years, with Microsoft's Internet Explorer being the dominant player,  we began to see a lot  of frenetic activity, and innovation in the web application space.