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Tom's Blog

MythTV is Amazing MythTV is Amazing

Created on 13th January 2007 12:40 PM. Ubuntu | MythTV 2 comments
I've finally got around to playing around (wow, great language skills) with MythTV . It's amazing.

I've installed it on my laptop only so far, as I don't have a true "media center PC" (yet - MythTV has made me realise I need one), but I've got the DVD import,video manager and music features installed and working and I can see it's the future of my home entertainment needs!

Ubuntu makes it nice and easy to install as well with the 0.20 packages available in Edgy, And it means I can use Ubuntu as the base for the media center when I get around to it, and it can then double as anything else I want (I'm thinking centralised backup server for all computers at home, as well as a bunch of other things).

 If you haven't already checked it out, give it a try.

Rethinking the RDBMS Rethinking the RDBMS

Created on 10th January 2007 09:35 AM. Linux
Fascinating paper about specialised query engines that do things differently from a traditional RDBMS and how they can provide dramatic performance improvements.

Really made me think. Hard to get your head around, initially, but makes a lot of sense. Seems like with data-warehousing and such there's an implicit recognition that RDBMSes aren't always capable of addressing all storage needs. In that particular case, it seems like column stores instead of row stores have some dramatic advantages. 

Food for thought... 

Morons vs. Assholes Morons vs. Assholes

Created on 4th January 2007 04:19 PM. Python
In the eternal battle between morons and assholes , I would place myself in the moron camp.
Just hoping that as often as possible, I become a moron-turned-expert.

FOSS in Tamil Nadu FOSS in Tamil Nadu

Created on 3rd January 2007 11:17 AM. Linux | Microsoft | Open Source
This announcement about the adoption of FOSS in Tamil Nadu makes me think back to some comments about SUSE deployments from last year.

I remember reading about some deployment of SUSE Linux that I think Nat or Miguel had talked about a few months back. The gist of what they were saying was that there were some big deployments coming, but they couldn't be announced yet. Well, maybe this was one of those, and now it's got to the stage that it can be announced.

Will be interesting to see what effect this has on the IT landscape if it goes through. One successful large-scale deployment like this would make other organizations/governments/educational institutions sit up and take notice. I'm pretty sure that if it's done well once, the floodgates will open. What works to the advantage of FOSS is that something like this would make such big news if it is a success that it would be known about everywhere (in the IT industry). This means that even though there may be other projects that are quite happy sticking with MS, and even if a project like this is, in global terms of usage, not even a small blip, it would have an impact much larger than it's statistical importance because it represents the possibility that any large organization could do this.