Friday’s New York Times had a fascinating article focusing on the work of Robert Ryang at New York post production house PS260. Robert created a reworked trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, as an entry for a competition being run by the New York chapter of the Association of Independent Creative Editors. The new trailer is a wonderful piece of work, but when word of the trailer spread across the Internet, it’s popularity had the almost inevitable results - PS260’s web servers almost crashed under the load.

 It looks like the [Xen Virtual Machine Monitor](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/) is going to get a copy on write memory sub-system sometime soon, removing one of the few remaining performance limitations on the platform. Thanks to the work of researchers at [UCSD](http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/) which will be presented in a [paper](http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~savage/papers/Sosp05.pdf) at this years [ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles](http://www.sosp-20.com/), a copy-on-write memory sub-system has been developed for the Potemkin Virtual Honeyfarm. Whilst the existing implementation is specific to the honeyfarm, future versions should be able to provide a more general solution much like the similar [VMware resource management](http://www.

I am a big fan of instant messaging, and of XMPP in particular as an open standard. So much so that I run our own Jabberd2 server at work, and we have done a bunch of work on using XMPP services as the basis for wide-scale system management and eventing systems. Having said that, I have always found the open source servers to be a little fragile. My latest issue was to get into work this morning to find that a routine bug fix for the mysql libraries had broken my jabber installation.

Portland Community College have organised a photo rally (a treasure hunt really) at their Sylvania campus. I decided to take up the challenge today, and here are the results. [ ](/u/2007/03/11/bark.jpg) Start at the library, just to the left and behind the bus kiosks. Head to the red. While walking, take a close-up picture of the peeling white canoe construction material used by Native Americans in the East and Midwest.

I’ve been interested in Soft Systems Methodology for many years, including taking serveral courses based on the work of Peter Checkland and others as part of my BSc, but I’ve always been disappointed by the lack of tool support for the approach. Last week I was looking for a light weight Wiki solution to deploy on an older machine, and I came across Wikka Wiki, which had built in support for FreeMind, a superb free (as in speach) mind map solution.

It’s a funny old world sometimes, this morning I was busy explaining to one of our developers at work how to package up files using RPM, and this evening I am sitting through a presentation at the Portland Linux/User Group on building RPMs. Since I’m all self taught, I am really interested to get input from someone else whose been there. It’s an ‘Advanced Topic Talk’, short presentation with lots of audience interaction, so there should be lots to learn.

You might have seen her in my photographs, well my darling Donna is now playing in the blogoshere at MSN. Check it out :-)

Today be the official [Talk Like A Pirate Day](http://www.talklikeapirate.com/about.html ) matey, so you'd better hoist the jolly roger and batten down the hatches or the'll be a mutiny fer sure. 

[ ](http://pdx.pm.org) I attended my first [Portland Perl Mongers](http://pdx.pm.org/) meeting yesterday, with a talk by [chromatic](http://www.wgz.org/chromatic/), technical editor of the O'Reilly Network on **The Seven Sins of OO Perl**. Both the conversation and presentation were informed, eclectic and sharp. I’ve been lurking on the mailing list for a long time now, but I hadn’t realized what a great group existed on my doorstep. If you are serious about Perl, this group is well worth seeking out.

As a non-resident alien on the long road to attain American citizenship, I find the Lisa Comrie’s recent pointing both inspiring and frustrating. It is good to see that the process can work, but I still fail to understand how America benefits be making intelligent, hardworking, highly motivated foreigners wait 15 or 20 years before they can take on the responsibilities of citizenship. The latest backlog in immigration processing occurred after the passage of a new law that allowed undocumented or out of status immigrants to apply for green cards if a family member or employer sponsored them, but they had to do it by April 2001.