A few projects that I am currently working on:

1) Quad-booting one system with Windows Vista Business, Windows 2003 Enterprise Server, Windows 7 Beta and Fedora 10.

2) Researching ITIL methods for Change/Release Management.

3) Establishing a Beowulf Cluster for special research projects (ie: hurricane/tornado modeling, protein folding, SETI)

4) Establishing an IIS web server for ASP.Net / web services development.

5) Building a 5 tera-byte file server for network distribution.

6) More collaboration and features of my intrusion detection system and sharing of IP black lists.

7) Modification to family website.

So stay tuned…

Just because C and C++ do not have such memory management does not mean that will no longer have a place in the industry.  C has been around for ages and is still being used to write new code.  Have you heard of LINUX?   The Linux kernel is written in C.  Does this mean Linux is losing ground also, because it will eventually lack developers that know C?   C++ code is found everywhere, including most of the computer games that are being enjoyed today.  Does this mean those games are losing ground as well and should be rewritten in Java or C#?    You also mentioned that Python replaced Perl on the index because Python was object oriented.  Your group needs to research that a bit more as Perl also has an object oriented structure now.

 While I like coding in C# and Java, I seriously doubt they will dominate the market completely.   Not only due to maintenance of legacy applications, but also because speed and overall performance is superior to automated memory management, especially when such memory management is still available in C and C++, if the programmer is able to implement it correctly.  You will need a bigger bullet than garbage collection to kill off these languages.  

 On a side note, are you sure that the level of web presence a programming language has on the web is truly indicative of its actual usage or value to the industry?   I wonder if I were to post thousands of videos on YouTube  showing how to write code in C++, if it would “regain” its position on your index?  Bah.

 Being the nice guy that I am… I didn’t retaliate with an attack of my own.  Because I realized that the owner’s of this website had no clue what was going on.   The site appeared to be an unauthorized web server that contained company information.  My guess is, someone in the shipping department thought they were technically inclined and wanted to track the shipments by uploading the slips to a centralized server, which appeared to have been bought and hosted outside of the company.   To bad the system administrators forgot to secure such important content.

 I discovered their official company website… and contacted the info and abuse staff to let them know that they may need to re-evaluate their security policies.  I wrote the message in English, but translated it into French as well.  For starters, they have business sensitive information in public view.  Not to mention the fact that this particular server is probably a nest from which attacks on other servers are staged.  

 The first thing to resolve was the fact that my home web servers are running Apache over Linux.  Obviously ASP.Net favors IIS over Windows for the web server.  Being that I have had experience in writing portable applications between Windows and Linux via Mono… I decided to take a look at Mono to handle running ASP.Net over Linux.

 The solution was mod_mono available and documented here:  http://www.mono-project.com/Mod_mono.   Mod_Mono is an Apache 1.3/2.0/2.2 module that provides ASP.NET support for the Apache web server.  Stay tuned for a few web apps I have coming down the pipes…

There is also a $100 million iFund for startups developing applications for the iPhone.

For those of you who do not know what a Beowulf Cluster is… it is a collection of personal computers that are connected together to acheive high performance computing. Google it to see some pretty cool pictures (if you are into that sort of thing).

I do not have the funding of a enterprise company, a university, a hospital, a research center, or some government… so the cluster I build will be relatively small in comparison. My plan is to start off with 5 nodes, including the server… and add nodes as I streamline the process.

Primarily, I am doing this to mentally torture myself… really just to learn more about parallel programming. In the process, I may be able to offer researchers the ability to simulate chemical reactions, atmospheric modeling, protein folding for cancer research, physics simulations, etc… or in the end, I may just have one huge system to serve all of my favorite games 24/7.

I was starting off with setting up the master node with Fedora Core 8. Which was a mistake, because OSCAR does not support it yet. So, I can either drop back to an older version of Fedora, change Linux distributions to say… Redhat… or, download the source from their subversion directory and modify the code and recompile it… thereby creating support for Fedora 8 myself. The SVN content is still downloading… Pending how much time I anticipate wasting, I may just switch distros or replace OSCAR with a different clustering utility.

More later…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B0x

I went from about 21 computers in my home office down to 10. The other computers were either scrapped for parts, combined into a single computer and given away, or thrown to the garbage. I could not bare to part with my SGI workstations or the 72 port network hub, so I decided to store them in my attic… until I had a new project in mind that may require them.

I imagine that the number of remaining systems will be cut in half again soon. Although, I plan on making a dedicated computer room soon when I get the power requirements figured out, I will end stacking in the rack mounted servers. and take the system count down to two, while probably boosting up to 12 to 24 rack mounted servers. Depending on if I am still interested in the beowulf cluster and parallel processing projects at the time.