jimmyblake.com

On October 5 1991 a young Finnish programmer called Linus Torvalds made an annoucement on comp.os.minix about an open source project he was working on that later morphed in Linux.

Now in 2008 Linux has Microsoft running scared in the data centre and is displaced Windows on user’s lap’s through netbooks.

I  spend a lot of my time designing technology to help people overcome people using technology for bad purposes.  In my line of business email isn’t just a critical communications tool helping elderly relatives in New Zealand view the photos of their great-grandchild’s birthday or allow small one-or-two person companies compete with multi-national corporations - no, it is a seething pit of malware, data leaks and social engineering attacks.

Every-so-often a piece of software comes out that restore my faith in the fact that technology can make the World a better place.  This kind of software melds several different underlying technologies and provides some innovative or new use through the synergy of the different components.

Consider the Global Positioning System (GPS) was designed to aid the military in operations.  Once it was opened up for public use after a Korean Airlines flight was shot down after entering Soviet airspace, a whole myriad of new uses where found for it.  One of my favourites is geotagging: my camera is capable of taking a photo, putting the exact location of where the photo was taken into the metadata and then uploading it to a photosharing site such as Flickr.  Now other people have no extended this by creating mash-ups that tie together Googlemaps with these stored photos allowing you to view all photos taken in a specific area by just clicking on a map.

One application I have been reading about is Oops, I’m Late.  This piece of software is installed on a GPS-enabled smartphone, it knows where you are meant to be because it has access to your calendar, it knows who you are supposed to meet there because it has access to your address book and it knows where you are because it has access to your GPS data.  What it does is automatically sends an SMS apologising for you being late and giving an Estimated Time of Arrival if it calculates you can’t make a meeting in your diary - this is absolute bloody genius.

The popular Fedora linux distribution closely related to Red Hat is to include a security tool called secTool that will audit the security posture of the operating system once installed according to an article on ann an article on InternetNews.`

At one time Fedora was the most popular Linux distribution available, but both Ubuntu and SuSE have become more popular in recent times.