Open Sauce Software

Even though we're fans of the 2000-year old precision astronomical device known as the Antikythera mechanism, reports that it had been rebuilt slipped past us earlier in December.

The mechanism has been reconstructed, from recycled metal plates, by former Science Museum curator Michael Wrght. It's very ably demonstrated in a video, at New Scientist, along with a report from Jo Marchant, a New Scientist writer who's produced a book on the mechanism called Decoding the Heavens.

If you missed the reports - have a look. This is a machine built in 100BC, which accurately predicted astronomical events and human happenings such as the Olympic Games, using technology (clockwork) which would not be equalled for 1800 years.

What's so Christmassy about a nuclear bunker? Ask the Richter Scales, or BastionHost of Canada...

It could be I'm developing the bunker mentality, but nuclear bunkers are everywhere. Even a capella heretics the Richter Scales say "From now on we'll have to live in bunkers..." in their Christmas song.

Meanwhile Canadian hosting company BastionHost has bought a bunker in Nova Scotia, to turn into a data centre. Apart from the security of the site - which was one of seven emergency government headquarters Canada built in the Cold War - there are other factors making it ideal for datacentre use:

1. A low ping to key locations. Nova Scotia may seem remote, but it's on a great circle route between London and New York, so in theory the time to get traffic between the two is as low as it can get, "We are in the middle here, with round-trip ping times of just 54 milliseconds to London and 11 milliseconds to New York City - even less to Boston," the company's CEO told InformationWeek.

2. There's redundant back-up power, which BastionHost is going to upgrade. Canada's regular power supply is better than that of the US, too, says Self: "We see Atlantic Canada as a giant UPS between North America and Europe. Our grid was completely unaffected by the blackout of '03 in the Northeast, and we do not experience rolling brownouts or power shortages."

3. Canada's privacy laws are better than those in the US, he says, particularly since the US Patriot act: "In the US, authorities can get a special subpoena and go into an office and seize what they want. In Canada, we have stringent privacy laws, both at the federal and provincial level, and we can offer our clients the right to due process."

So far the bunker still has its 1950s fittings, including blast doors, air filtration, nuclear warnings and control panels. Self doesn't seem to have answered the question of whether he'll keep the retro-Strangelove look, or update to Bond-baddie chick, like Swedish service provicer Bahnhof.



( Apologies for the technical hitch. The above should be a picture, courtesy of David TS Fraser, showing Anton Self in his bunker, waving his hand perhaps a little casually near a control panel that seems to be still powered up. )

The price for the Nova Scotia bunker was not revealed, but iwas reported have been valued at around $290,000 (Canadian dollars) despite an original cost of $2.7 million) to build the bunker.

Meanwhile, the former Symantec bunker, near Twyford, sold last week, for arond $240,000 after an auction failed to sell it, according to reports at the Southern Daily Echo and elsewhere.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=4zaNuqLyGpA

A data centre on wheels might look strange, but it's an illustration of some fundamental changes in the way our systems are made.

"A single PC processor is now capable of driving systems that can outperform blade servers in a data centre," said a reviewer on another site. "You can expect the rules to be rewritten as far as computing expectations."

Did he expect something like this though?



Google has put datacentres in shipping containers and Microsoft has put them in trucks.

Rackable Systems' Mobirack uses multicore chips to produce a datacentre more at the shopping trolley end of the scale, but it can have 128 cores, and up to 40TB of data.

I want to see Dialogue Box put a system like this through its paces. Hof fast it processes, obviously. But also how fast can a couple of guys accelerate it? What sort of speed does it reach? And how well does it corner?

There are more lines of open source code out there, better annotated and more carefully licensed, than you might think. That's according to a "myth-busting" post this week from Black Duck.

The posting is more than just the usual "you don't know how well open source is doing" message from a Red Hat or a Novell. It comes from from Black Duck - a company which makes a very good business with software that checks its clients' software for open open source code. Black Duck does it so its customers can audit that they are obeying all the licence conditions of the software they use - but it gives the company a good insight into actual open source usage.

Here are Black Duck's thoughts:

Myth: Open Source is just source code. Nope, only 15 percent goes out as source, the rest is binaries, scripts, images documentation and the like

Myth: Open Source adoption is mostly application infrastructure. It's not all Linux and MySQL - the open source world is "dominated" by components which get re-used thousands of times (and Black Duck makes its money tracking them).

Myth: There are a only few billion lines of code out there. There are tens of billions of lines, says Black Duck.

Myth: Real programmers do NOT comment. Oh yes they do - about one line for every four lines of source, with Java programmers the most chatty.

Myth: GPL Version 3 is being ignored. Despite the controversy when it was released in June 2007, GPL has grown to over 6,300 projects, surpassing the CPL, Mozilla, MIT and Apache licenses, making it the fifth most popular open source licence.

There's lots more, with diagrams, at Black Duck.

"An unusual opportunity," says the estate agent. He's not kidding. It's a nuclear bunker that was converted to a data centre and used by security company Symantec.

For a nuclear bunker, the premises, near Twyford in Hampshire, has a short history. It was only completed in 1990 - as a partial conversion of a 1905 water reservoir - and decommissioned in 1997.



We visited it in 2005, when it was a secure data centre for security company Symantec. Now it is up for sale. On Dec 16, it will be sold by property auction company Clive Empson.

“This is not your average property, what with blast-proof fittings, a chute for ejecting people in an emergency, air filters and independent power and water supplies," Rob Marchant, the Whiteley-based auctioneer, told local news source This is Hampshire.

The bunker was actually put up for sale in February, but that fell through.

Now it's back, with £60,000 knocked off the guide price, reducing it from £300,000 to £240,000.

But will the recession produce a lower price? Or will global uncertainy (and the new series of Survivors) make the idea of a blast-proof bolthole more attractive?