Open Source Software

I talk pretty frequently about Open Source or “free” software and people often ask me what that is. So here’s a list of the top 50 apps that are Open Source.

Get it in their hands when they’re young.

My children amaze me. It truly fascinates me at how fast they pick up technology. Everything from digital cameras, to a laptop, iphone and even the DVR on the TV. Here’s a picture my daughter took of herself with my phone, not bad for barely aiming:

If you have young kids, I highly recommend getting the technology into their hands to see what they can do. I always like to just give it to them and see what they come up with. Where their ideas take them.

Here’s a few great apps we’re using at the Elementary buildings in Saline, TuxPaint and TuxMath are two great programs and the best part is they’re free. But if you ask Abbey she likes the noises TuxPaint makes.

File Services

In the past week we had some opportunities with our file services here in Saline.

First, we nearly reached max capacity on our main file cluster. It was time to let everyone know to do some cleanup on their server space. I really appreciate all the cleanup that took place. It allowed me to bring the server back into full operation and allocate more space to the server.

Second, District Shared has become a bit unruly so I’ve asked to implement a 14 day rotational automated deletion. What this would do is run everyday and clean out any files on District Shared that were older than 14 days. This would bring District Shared back to it’s original intent which is to be a place for teachers and student to transfer files, hand in and hand out.

We are also beginning to research new ways to handle our file services. We’re looking at new philosophies and architecture. It seems these days distributed file systems and pooling of resources is the way to go when it comes to storage. With drives being so inexpensive I can easily see the reasoning behind that.

Until next time,
Ken