The high tech wheel alignment

I had to schedule a front end alignment for my car today (bought new tires and figured it was time to get the wheels aligned too). So, I called up my local auto repair shop for an appointment. The friendly voice asked about the year and model of my car. To my surprise, he then said, "Let me see if we have the software upgrade to do that car." Now, I know cars are high tech and all, but front end alignments that require software upgrades?!? Can anyone point me to the open source software for front end alignments? :)

All I wanted was frickin' sharks with open source laser beams on their heads!

Where can't open source philosophy be relevant these days? Beer - check. Medicine - check. Routers - check :)

Slashdot.org reports on a New York City company doing laser etching on electronics devices - and doing it all open source, of course :) Check it out here. Very groovy baby!

Hey - we're compatible!

Today Vyatta announced their latest code update, version 1.1! While there are a lot of interesting features in this release, the most interesting and exciting feature is the Debian package compatibility. I've written about the upcoming extensibility and I'm excited to see this feature get released!

With release 1.1 you can load nearly any Debian package on your OFR. Here are some examples of network packages that could be interesting (from the collection of stable network Debian packages):

• 6tunnel: A TCP proxy for non-IPv6 applications
• argus: IP network transaction auditing tool
• autossh: Automatically restart SSH sessions and tunnels
• bing: Empirical stochastic bandwidth tester

...and that is after a 30-second perusal and not scrolling down past the b's :) I could go crazy finding interesting packages to run on an OFR if I ventured into other Debian software packages.

Many of you have already voted for your favorite open source package on our TopEnhancements wiki page and I am sure we'll start to see these integrated into OFRs across the globe.

What Debian package are you going to load onto your OFR first? Let us know!

The Washington Post on the "New Dot-Economy"

I can't believe that it's been over a month since my last post. Time sure does fly around the holiday season! I have no real good excuse, except that my full-time job as a venture capitalist has kept me pretty busy of late :)

Back in September you may have seen the Forbes magazine cover story on Cheap Revolutionaries that recognized the power of open source software married with commodity compute. Now, the Washington Post has an article that comes out tomorrow on the New Dot-Economy that covers the current wave of Internet startups. Of course, Vyatta has a prominent mention! :)

This is great press for Vyatta and one of our customers, Adify. As the article mentions, Adify recently replaced a Cisco router in their infrastructure with an OFR and it's working great - look for more news coming about Vyatta soon!