Drupal 7 slower but more scalable

Drupal, the powerful and popular free and open source  Content Management System will be slower, but more scalable and more easily able to handle larger sites in version 7, which will probably be released sometime between June and September of this year. Scalability can imply a number of things in systems design, but in this context it means the ability to increase the size or load of a system without thoroughly redesigning the system itself. This is desirable if a web site is either a large and complex one or starts off small and experiences rapid growth.

The article Drupal Upgrade to Be Slower but More Scalable on the PCWorld website reports on Drupal project founder Dries Buytaert's statement on the release at the DrupalCon meeting in San Francisco.

For a shorter summary here's a clip from the YouTube channel BCS1957.

White House Web Team Releases Drupal Modules

The White House technology team released four Drupal modules to the free software community (as described in an article from Ars Technica).

Drupal is a free, open source Content Management System (CMS).

The main purpose of a CMS is to allow people who are collaborating on a website to post content without writing the code (HTML, Javascript, among others) necessary for the site to be displayed in a browser.

Content Management systems are in part based on the reality that writers are not web designers, and visual artists are not programmers.  The systems automate and modularise the work so a writer can focus on their craft without worrying about the details of how it gets displayed, and it also allows for a great deal more automation of common website behaviors.

So in the case of say, an online newspaper, the web designers set up the CMS framework, so that the journalists, editors, and photographers can focus on generating the content without also having to become programmers or web designers.  Once the content is generated, the journalists and photographers just upload their work, the editors exercise control over what gets posts, and the content management system takes care of the details of managing and displaying that content.

In the case of Drupal, programmers write modules to handle  a certain task.  One example would a blog module.  Another would be a module to accept and handle comments to a blog.  Another might be allowing an article to be downloaded as a PDF file.  These modules are made available to the development community, and can be freely downloaded and used by website designers.

The White House website uses Drupal to manage its content.  The WH  technology team developed a few specialized modules and released them so that other designers can use them.  In my view this is a great service to the Drupal community and the community of Drupal end users, and they should be commended.

Google's Agnilux acquistion

For the past two days there has been a great deal of discussion in the business and technology press about Google's acquisition of the secretive start-up company Agnilux. Agnilux was founded by individuals who had been part of the Apple team which developed the chip for the iPad.

There had been some speculation that Google would use Agnilux to develop low power processors for cloud computing servers.

The New York Times, however, ran an article asserting that the company was primarily purchased for its expertise in hardware-software integration, and that their primary focus may be to port Chrome and Android onto other platforms (tablets for example).

The founders of Agnilux include Amarjit Gill, Puneet Kumar, and Mark Hayter, all of whom were officials at P.A. Semi, and were absorbed into Apple when that company was aquired by Apple. At P.A. Semi Gill had been the VP for Sales and Business Development, Kumar had been the VP for Systems Software, and Hayter was the Chief Systems Architect and VP for Systems Engineering.

Red Hat 6 Beta released

Red Hat has released their beta version 6 today. Here's their press release.

Perl 5.12 released

Perl 5.12 has been released, and you can read about it at this link to the Perl 5 porters mailing list.

Among other improvements it brings Perl in closer compliance to the Unicode standard.

A complete list of changes and additions can be found here.

Ed Roberts, September 13, 1941 - April 1, 2010

Henry Edward Roberts, developer of the first popular personal computer, the Altair, died yesterday at the age of 68.

He is best know in the technology world for producing the Altair, based on Intel's 8080 microprocessor. This kit computer was popularized in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. It was also the host for the first Microsoft product, Altair BASIC, developed by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

Roberts made radical career changes in the 1980s, first becoming a farmer, and then entering medical school and becoming a physician in rural Cochran, Georgia.

More on Roberts can be found in this Wikipedia article.

More on OpenSolaris

Slashdot linked to this article from Katonda which states that Oracle has rebranded Solaris as Oracle Solaris and is no longer offering it for free. Further, new features in Oracle Solaris will not necessarily be added to OpenSolaris.