2007-03-06 The Royal Oak, Dorchester

There were eight of us there: me, Peter, Terry, George, Kelvin, Laura, Andy, Marti.

Some things I can think of that cropped up, in no particular order:

• VMware to turn multiple PCs into a single Windows server. I could have the wrong end of the stick on this one. http://www.vmware.com/
• Qemu, the Free Software machine emulator. http://www.qemu.org/about.html
• The Python programming language. http://python.org/
• That Python comes with Tkinter for cross-platform GUI work. http://www.pythonware.com/library/tkinter/introduction/index.htm
• The pygame Python library. http://www.pygame.org/wiki/about
• TinyCAD (Win32) for drawing circuit diagrams. http://tinycad.sourceforge.net/
• Plan 9 from Bell Labs http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/
• Google's internal technology, specifically the Google File System, http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html
• and their MapReduce programming model. http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html
• openMosix, alternative way of spreading heavy computation across machines. http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/#What
• Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services
• Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Simple_Storage_Service
• The AWK programming language. http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/awkbook/
• sudo, in particular “sudo -i” being a good way to get a root shell. http://www.gratisoft.us/sudo/man/sudo.html#item__2di
• Free beer, “free” as in speech, not free as in beer. http://free-beer.dk/blog/about/

— Ralph Corderoy