"If you're in San Diego, California, we heard about a really interesting event you'll want to attend. Two topics that are always of interest to robot builders are the Singularity and Free Software. The Free Software Foundation is holding a pizza party and Vernor Vinge, the originator of the modern version of the Technological Singularity idea, will be there..."

"Science fiction writer Vernor Vinge is best-known for novels like A Fire Upon the Deep and Rainbows End, as well as the concept of The Singularity -- the idea that, in the next couple of decades, humans will become or create a super-human intelligence. What is less well-known is that Vinge has been a free software supporter since the earliest days of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

I'm totally tortured with agonizing over Microsoft's Singularity. See, I have a standing moral obligation with myself as follows: If Microsoft ever released a purely Open-Source or Free Software system - as defined by the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, or common conventional wisdom - I have said (and will repeat here) that I would download it, try it out, review it, and possibly adopt it, to be treated no different from software from, for example, Red Hat Inc. or BSD.

I was at another meeting of the Editorial board of the Skibbereen Eagle yesterday. Hopefully you read the outcome of the last one. Some clever clogs suggested that it might be a spiffing wheeze to write something about the possible implications of the much mooted singularity (is that a proper noun, with a capital S?) and what it might mean for the future of both free and proprietary software.

Open source software encourages learning, the exchange of knowledge and information, and project improvements that rely as much on its users, and its developers' colleagues, as it does the developer. It's not unlike education. Ideally, learning is a continuous cycle of taking in, processing, and giving back, with modifications.

show disk size in Unix is a very popular request visitors use to arrive at my Unix Tutorial pages. Since I never addressed the question of confirming the number of hard drivers available on your system or the task of finding out a disk's capacity, I'd like to document a quick and easy way of doing just that.

"The Pragmatic Programmers recommend learning a new programming language every year. I thought for a long time that this was a good idea, but didn't really act on it. Instead I'd dabble in a dozen languages a year. While this has built my intuition as to what various languages are like it has not made me a competent programmer in a new language.

So I’ve decided to start learning a new shell. I see so much talk about zsh and finally, I’m going to attempt to learn to use it. I installed it and started using it and a few things are immediately different.

Sugar Labs has launched a beta version of its Sugar Learning interface designed to run directly from a USB memory stick.