Practical Technology

Canonical, the Ubuntu Linux and Juju Development/Operations (DevOps) program parent company, is turning Juju into a tool that makes setting clouds up  a drag-and-drop operation.

Drag-and-Drop Cloud Orchestration with Ubuntu Juju. More>

Let’s start with the good news: According to Kaspersky, in 2013, the proportion of spam in email flows was 70%, which is 2.5 percentage points lower than in 2012. The bad news is that spam that does get through is far more dangerous. According to John Levine, chairman of the Internet Research Task Force’s Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) and president of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, “The ongoing threat is that spam is now essentially 100% criminal, and it’s as likely to try to plant bank-account-stealing malware either directly or via links to compromised websites as to sell you something.” Ow!

The Spam Battle Report 2014. More>

In a Facebook engineering blog, Steaphan Greene, a Facebook software engineer, announced the creation of a new MySQL branch: WebScaleSQL. This is a version of Oracle’s MySQL for gigantic database loads.

WebScaleSQL: MySQL for Facebook-sized databases. More>

Napa Valley, CA: First things first. Here’s what Red Hat is not planning to do with CentOS: 1) Red Hat’s not going to charge you for CentOS;  2) CentOS will not be replacing Red Hat’s community distribution, Fedora; and 3) CentOS is not being put out to pasture to die. OK? OK! 

Red Hat reveals CentOS plans. More>

Napa Valley, CA: At an exclusive gathering at the Linux Collaboration Summit, some of the crème de la crème of Linux developers talked about what’s going on with the Linux kernel today.

Linux Kernel Panel: What’s what with Linux today. More>