Facebook’s decision to release under open source a large-scale data management project similar to - and inspired by - Google’s BigTable has received backing from an unusual quarter: Microsoft.

Data center futures architect and distinguished database developer James Hamilton, has complemented the pimply faced social network for releasing what he said “looks like a well-engineered system.”

Hamilton spent ten years at IBM working on DB2 before joining Microsoft in 1997 to work on SQL Server, and recently collaborated with fellow database guru Michael Stonebraker on an examination of future database architectures.

Stonebraker put the cat among the pigeons by slagging off Google’s MapReduce database tool earlier this year - he called it a step backwards. Stonebraker also noted there are limitations in BigTable and its open-source equivalent Hbase.

Conspiracy theorists might find it interesting that Stonebraker’s co-author David de Witt joined Microsoft in April to head up a new research effort into large databases. They should also remember Microsoft is an investor in Facebook.

Adding insult to injury, Facebook has put its project - called Cassandra - up on Google Code. Cassandra is not alone on Google code. Another BigTable clone called Hypertable was set up on Google Code earlier this year.

Like BigTable, Cassandra is designed to get round the limitations of traditional relational databases in large-scale, online applications.

The cheapest way to get Ubuntu Linux is to download it, burn it to a CD, and then install it on your PC of choice. The easiest way to get Ubuntu is to buy it pre-loaded on a Dell PC. The U.S. consumer way to get Ubuntu may turn out to be buy it yourself at Best Buy.

Steve George, director of corporate services for Canonical, announced on a blog that Canonical along with ValuSoft, a U.S. retail software distributor, have paired together to get a boxed version of Ubuntu 8.04 into Best Buy retail stores. The retail box contains a “Ubuntu 8.04 CD, a Quick Start Guide and 60 days of support from the ValuSoft team, trained and backed by the Canonical support guys. The support covers installation and getting started using Ubuntu and is priced at $19.99.”

Google on Monday said that it has created an open-source project for a data interchange format called Protocol Buffers.

The software is meant to solve the problem of sharing information in a wide range of formats between servers at high speed. It’s also designed to let companies like Google upgrade software on a network of connected servers without causing hiccups.

Google thought of using XML as a lingua franca to send messages between its different servers. But XML can be complicated to work with and, more significantly, creates large files that can slow application performance.

Protocol Buffers is an alternative way of describing the format of data that is being sent over the network or stored to a hard drive. Unlike XML, it’s a compact format and is designed to be simple to use, according to Kenton Varda, from Google’s Software Engineering Team.

Varda wrote in the company’s open-source blog:

Protocol Buffers allow you to define simple data structures in a special definition language, then compile them to produce classes to represent those structures in the language of your choice. These classes come complete with heavily-optimized code to parse and serialize your message in an extremely compact format. Best of all, the classes are easy to use: each field has simple “get” and “set” methods, and once you’re ready, serializing the whole thing to - or parsing it from - a byte array or an I/O stream just takes a single method call.

Matt Cutts, a software engineering from Google’s Webspam team, said that Protocol Buffers automatically generates Java, Python, or C code.

It’s official: Mozilla has set possibly the geekiest world record ever with the release of Firefox 3.

The open-source company said Wednesday that the browser’s 8,002,530 downloads in its first 24 hours of release set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in that period of time.

Mozilla Vice President of Marketing Paul Kim thanked Firefox fans in a statement, calling them “instrumental in achieving this record.”

“Our community members came together and not only spread the word, but also took the initiative to help mobilize millions of people to demonstrate their belief that Firefox gives people the best possible online experience,” he said.

I’m experimenting with VirtualBox, and having Ubuntu 8.04 running on it I could not find an easy way to increase the screen resolution higher than 800X600.

Luckily I found this great tip that shows how to configure the screen resolution in Ubunto 8.04 running as a virtual machine under VirtualBox.

---

Start up your Ubuntu 8.04 guest. In VirtualBox, click Devices->Install Guest Additions and your virtual Ubuntu should recognize a new CD. Open a terminal and run this command:
sudo /media/cdrom/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

The installer should prompt you that it’s time to restart the virtual machine once it’s done. Just logging out and back in should work.

This is where things get sticky. For Ubuntu 8.04 guests, the VirtualBox video driver will not be enabled because of the minimalistic xorg.conf file.

Open your guest machine’s xorg.conf file:
gksu gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Find the device section, which should look like this:

Section "Device"
  Identifier "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

And replace it with this to enable the VirtualBox driver:


Section "Device"
   Identifier   "Configured Video Device"
   Driver    "vboxvideo"
EndSection


Changing screen resolutions in Ubuntu 8.04 is done with RandR, which is not supported by VirtualBox. So you’ll also need to set a resolution manually. Find the screen section, which should look like this:


Section "Screen"
   Identifier    "Default Screen"
  Monitor    "Configured Monitor"
  Device    "Configured Video Device"
EndSection


And replace it with this, but change 1024×768 to your preferred resolution:


Section "Screen"
   Identifier    "Default Screen"
   Device    "VirtualBox graphics card"
   Monitor    "Generic Monitor"
   DefaultDepth    24
   SubSection "Display"
     Depth    24
     Modes      "1024x768"
   EndSubSection
EndSection


Save, exit the editor, and log out. You should now have a large virtual machine window, as well as mouse pointer integration.

On Monday, Orbitz Worldwide plans to announce the creation and release of two open-source projects, Extremely Reusable Monitoring API (ERMA) and Graphite. Though there were hints of these projects at JavaOne earlier this year, Monday’s announcement will add significant context to the work Orbitz has done to create two highly compelling open-source projects, whose applicability extends far beyond the travel industry.

On Friday, Orbitz gave me a preview of the announcement and the opportunity to talk with its sponsors, Winthrop Short, senior director of Orbitz Worldwide, and Matt O’Keefe, senior architect of Orbitz Worldwide. In talking with Winthrop and Matt, it’s clear to me that Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst’s vision for enterprise collaboration through open-source communities is going to be led by companies like Orbitz, companies for whom technology is not necessary drudgery but rather competitive advantage.

Following the announcement of Sun’s plans to make Java free and open under the General Public License (GPL) at JavaOne 2006, there have been a few struggles on the path to open source. At the time of the OpenJDK release in May last year, around five percent of the code–the portion not owned by Sun–was still closed.

Simon Phipps, the chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems, said: “We released under the GPL everything we had the rights to release under the GPL and that was last summer. There were a couple of holdouts there. One was the area to do with raster graphics and 2D graphics. That turned out to be owned by a company that didn’t want us to release that code as open source. We negotiated with them and because they’ve said ‘yes, you can open source the code’, I can tell you they’re Codec […].”

The only element that’s left now is actually a sound-related component within Java. We finally decided that the vendor that’s involved there just isn’t going to play ball and we’re rewriting the code from scratch. That’s going to be done within the next couple of months.”

Phipps says Java is expected to be completely free within the coming few months.

It’s here: a new major release of Novell’s community-supported distro is now available, and can be downloaded from the mirrors. Linux Format has a hands-on look at the new installer, SLAB menu and Compiz Fusion, and weighs up whether the distro can fight competition from Ubuntu and Fedora. Is this the start of a new era for SUSE?

Just before the official release of the open source browser, Firefox 3, Google updated their excellent toolbar and it is now support Firefox 3. Some users of the popular browser tend to wait with upgrading to a new version of Firefox since their favourite add-ons would not work with new versions of the browser. Now with the updated Google toolbar people who were waiting for this add-on now have one less reason to wait and install Firefox 3.

The updated Google toolbar works on both Linux and Windows.

Google has announced the official release of Desktop Gadgets for Linux and is distributing the source code under the open-source Apache software license. Although there are still bugs and the implementation is not yet entirely complete, it works well enough for day-to-day use.

Desktop Gadgets is one of the primary features of the Google Desktop suite, which also includes a search mechanism. Gadgets are small, interactive, web-oriented applets that the user can place on the desktop or in a sidebar. Google publishes a complete Gadgets API that enables third-party software developers to create components for the platform. It also supports Google’s web-based widgets.

In a few clicks, you can see VirtualBox create a Vista instance and run it on the Mac. There are many options for virtualization at this point, but I would expect Sun to make this its weapon of choice (versus Xen), since it owns it and can tweak it for Solaris.

VirtualBox is a free download available under the General Public License, or GPL.

The Firefox evangelists at Mozilla have a novel goal: they want to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. To get there, the open source browser builders declared a Download Day and are soliciting pledges to grab the browser on release day, which hasn’t yet been announced.

Interesting idea, and I sure hope the marketing folks had a long talk with the network group before running with this one. It’s normally sound practice to try and spread out major traffic so as to not overburden your network. Mozilla learned that lesson when it first implemented automatic updates in Firefox- it didn’t stagger them out well enough and ended up slamming their network.

Here’s hoping they’re better prepared this time around (I strongly suspect they are). In any case, I’m eager to see the new browser launch, and even more eager to see my must-have add-ons (like Foxmarks) update for version 3