LGH Blogs

The Big Dogs

Take up the executive's burden.

"There's a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hands. It's almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high-hat and tuxedo. . . . I mean, couldn't you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled or something to get here?"

- Rep. Gary L. Ackerman (D-N.Y.)

We're not going to follow the red herring and start barking about executive compensation for the big dogs, but these guys need a good image consultant.

Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?

Bullish on Innovation

Houston Street

The information is laughing at us
The ticker tape feeds the night
Looking for a lost transmission
A heaven that we left behind

When the information comes
We'll know what we're made from

- Beck

We put a damper on more than one dinner party conversation a couple of years ago when asked for our opinion on the future of The Economy. These days, of course, it is hard to tune into any media without being bombarded with doomsday information 24/7. Our favorite financial news source continues to be Bloomberg which offers up the stuff that trades are made on.

While news reports focus on the global financial crisis and the U.S. debate on bailing out dinosaurs, we remain bullish on innovation and entrepreneurship.

It's Global Entrepreneurship Week
A series of events promoting entrepreneurship is taking place around the globe this week. Details on Global Entrepreneurship Week are at unleashingideas.org.

Nemein is going to Ubuntu Server

At Nemein we do maintenance for quite a few servers of our customers. While some customers have their own Linux distribution preference - usually RHEL - in most cases we have a say what distribution runs their servers. So far this has been debian, but now we're going for Ubuntu Server.

The reasons for this are quite simple:

• Ubuntu follows the same synchronized release model as Midgard does, offering a predictable upgrade schedule
• In many cases the stable Ubuntu version has newer PHP and GNOME packages than debian stable. As these are Midgard dependencies this makes our life easier
• Ubuntu is one of the distributions supported by the openSUSE Build Service
• Ubuntu is still basically the same familiar rock solid platform that debian is

While not everybody is happy about the way Ubuntu has established itself in the market, there seems to be a strong gravitation towards switching to it, on both desktop and server.

LinkedIn Applications: automatic data into your resume

LinkedIn, the popular resume maintenance tool just got a little smarter: they added an applications catalogue that can make your profile there more dynamic. This is good as then potential business partners can find out more about myself from a single source, and I need to do less work to keep it up-to-date.

I immediately added three apps, displaying my latest conference presentations, upcoming trip plans and posts on my blog:

This is great as the applications already were part of my workflow. However, in general it is not a good idea to trust web apps to be the only place where you keep your things.

In my case, I'm using my Midgard-powered website as the backup where I automatically gather information I publish on other services like Jaiku or Flickr. This means that I can use the convenience and collaborative features of social web applications but still remain in control of my data. In the future I may move this to an even more replicated setup...

Global Dialogue on the Impact of Open Source Software in Transforming Government

This year's GOSCON in Portland, Oregon opens with an international panel and videoconference on open source and government.

When: October 20th, 12 - 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
Where: via videoconference and live webcast, see details at:

World Bank Live Webcast

Participating countries include Brazil, Ghana, Senegal, Russia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka and the United States.

The participants in Ghana include a group of students and

The Passing of Paul Newman

Paul Leonard Newman, 1925 - 2008

Just the other day we were reminded of The Sting, a film carried by the rhythm of its actors. We will miss Paul Newman, husband, father, actor, activist, auto racer and generous philanthropist.




Mr. Newman is survived by his wife actress Joanne Woodward and their daughters Susan and Nell; he is also survived by three other daughters, Stephanie, Melissa (Lissy) and Clea; two grandchildren Peter and Henry Elkind; his brother older Arthur; and his sons-in-law: Raphe, Kurt and Gary.