Facebook Greg Dingle at Linux User Group Meeting 19th March 2010

This months Linux User Group meeting was different, we had a special guest appearance by Greg Dingle, a Facebook software developer from San Fransisco, CA. We had a chance to have an interesting QA session with him asking various questions about the technologies behind Facebook Platform.

Do you have a poor internet connection? Worry no more, You can still continue Facebooking on Facebook Lite.  Its a lighter version of Facebook we people in Africa will be happy with. It performs well on slow links. You can try it at lite.facebook.com. Also Greg Dingle gave an overview of how Hadoop, Hive and MapReduce can be used for distributed processing of large data sets on compute clusters.

Other showcases included

A live demonstration of Joikuspot running on a Nokia N900. I do own an N900 and can’t wait to try this out myself. We connected to the WIFI and started surfing the web. This tool comes handy when your home and you need to share an internet connection, or need to connect may be servers to sync data to a central storage center from a remote area.
See: http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/
See: http://www.joiku.com/

A live installation & configuration of Proxmox Virtual Environment software plus demonstrations of features such as live-migration, backup, restoration, etc. I should say I was impressed by this demo. When it comes to Linux virtualisation, I have always run to Fedora Core. Now I do have another option which supports KVM, OpenVZ and clustering out of the box. I will have to take it for a spin.
See: http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Main_Page

The UConnect Demo Truck was on-site to show off a recent upgrade to energy-saving Ubuntu thin-client technology courtesy of E-Tech Uganda Ltd.
See: http://www.uconnect.org/pics/aitec04/studentqueue33&66.jpg
See: http://www.uconnect.org/pics/aitec04/demotrk50.jpg
See: http://www.uconnect.org
See: http://www.etech.ug/

Images taken below:-