by Mark Stone on June 01, 2009
The 1.0 release of WinBioinfTools might seem like a modest event; as of this writing, the project has 44 downloads. High Performance Computing (HPC) is a small community, granted, and the number of HPC applications for bioinformatics is a small subset of that. Let's not confuse popularity with importance, however. We use the phrase "mission critical" very frequently and somewhat casually within software... more
- Monday, June 01, 2009
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by Mark Stone on April 10, 2009
Discussions of the PC market usually break down into "desktop" vs. "server", as if these are the only platform categories. However, the developer's dev box -- call it a "workstation" to distinguish it from desktop -- is really a separate platform. Remember, when Linus Torvalds created Linux it wasn't because he needed a better desktop operating system, or a better server operating system. What he wanted... more
- Friday, April 10, 2009
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by Mark Stone on March 30, 2009
We should never forget that a key motivator for open source developers is fun. For student developers -- where open source really starts -- this is especially true. We’ve been looking at several potential student projects in Croatia, and for the past several months have been lending some support to the PlugBlog project. In many ways this is a classic open source story. Croatia is not a large country... more
- Monday, March 30, 2009
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by Mark Stone on March 25, 2009
On Monday Microsoft and SD Forum held the 3rd annual Open Source ISV Forum. In a day of interesting talks, I was particularly struck by Larry Augustin's talk. As an emphasizing example of the growth of open source projects partnered with a commercial endeavor, Larry mentioned DotNetNuke . DotNetNuke is, of course, freely available for download and licensed under an open source license. But there is... more
- Wednesday, March 25, 2009
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by Mark Stone on March 18, 2009
Several years ago I was helping a musician friend of mine set up a web site to use as a promotional site for his live performances. I opted for a simple, PHP-based Content Management System (CMS) that wouldn’t require any special knowledge for him to post new information, and would be – famous last words – easy for me to set up and maintain. Not having done professional web development for some time... more
- Wednesday, March 18, 2009
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by Mark Stone on March 16, 2009
I’m going to tell a story that starts in Indiana, but really it’s about Brazil. Once upon a time “scientific computing” was nearly synonymous with “Fortran”. Today, though, just about any high level language can be used to write High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. These days that language choice also includes C#. At Indiana University , the Open Systems Lab has pioneered work to implement... more
- Monday, March 16, 2009
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by Mark Stone on March 12, 2009
"Open source at Microsoft." My friends still find that phrase surprising. Yet for those of us who have worked so long on open source, if we really believe the principles we have espoused, shouldn't this be the expected outcome? In 1994 I did my first Linux install. It was an early version of Slackware, running the 1.0.8 kernel. The term "open source" was still several years in the future. While I never... more
- Thursday, March 12, 2009
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