I had the opportunity to spend a few hours at Oscon yesterday in Portland, Oregon. Oscon is the Open Source Conference held by O’Reilly. I was pleasantly surprised by the size of the conference, the number of exhibitors and the presence of several large companies. Open source software has definitely become mainstream and accepted by…

We are heavy users of virtualization at Likewise Software. Since we develop software for over 100 different platforms (multiple flavors of UNIX, Linux and Mac OS X), we have to be able to boot up a Red Hat 2.1 machine one minute and a Open Solaris machine the next. Developers and testers, both, need access…

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about usability testing. Mostly, I talked about testing methodology and the value that it brings. We’ve now finished 8 sessions and I thought it would be good to revisit the subject. Once again, I’m amazed by how much value usability testing can provide. We’ve been testing our Likewise…