The wait is going to over very soon since Drupal 4.7.0 RC4 has been released yesterday. There were several critical issues reported in Drupal 4.7.0 RC3. Thanks all contributors, all of them were fixed quickly. I will definitely try it out in this weekend. In addition, the code was freeze and no new features will be added to 4.7 anymore. In other words, Drupal 4.8.0 development is going to start immediately after 4.7 will be released soon.

E-Commerce, including enterprise computing, need Grid technology to fulfill their requirements. First of all, let us start from traditional high-performance computing needs in business sector. Actually, businesses do need high-performance computing. Unfortunately, almost businesses in Thailand have been absolutely believed in expertises. What does it mean? I’m talking about large-scale decision support system. There are so many decision support algorithm to predict the future markets based on historical and statistical analysis theories. You might argue that it’s not that large and a high-end computer could fit the job. Well, to accurately predict the future, you have to consider lots of variables. The system with a few variables may be done in a short time but you must not underestimate the realistic problems.

Grid is becoming more popular in last recent years. What can we do with this technology? Below is just a short list to help you answer this question easier.

• E-Commerce
• E-Government
• E-Military
• E-Healthcare
• E-Entertainment
• E-Learning

I will explain in more detail in separate posts.

Have you ever heard about High-Performance Computing or HPC, for short? Generally, HPC is a kind of technology that lets applications run faster. You might argue that today processors are so fast and you don’t need HPC. True and false. Single processor is not as fast as ones want it to be. Let me give you some example. Assuming you want to play a 2-player game, e.g., chess, and you want to win this game. How to win this game? It’s very easy to win any games. You have to do something that your opponent will have lowest chance to win the game. If you don’t have a computer, you must predict possible steps on your own. Actually, nobody predicts in action. They just believe in their experiences. If you play the game for so long, you will remember some patterns. Computer could help you a lot to simulate all possible playing to find the best solution for current state. Well, single processor or a few processors are not enough in most cases. For example, to play a chess game, you have 16 pieces on the board and your opponent has another 16 pieces. So you have to simulate 16^10 = 1,099,511,627,776 cases to find the best move for just 10 steps ahead. Suppose that your computer could simulate 10,000,000 cases in just a second. That means you could finish this simulation in 30 hours. Your opponent will never wait for that long. However, if you have 256 processors, it would take only 7 minutes.

According to previous review, I discuss about Grisbi. Now it’s time for a bigger one, GnuCash. GnuCash is a full feature open source accounting software. It seems to be the most powerful open source solution suitable for SME or even larger corporates. GnuCash is absolutely different from Grisbi in term of principle and objective.

I’m looking for a simple, easy, and good financial tracking software to running on my laptop. It seems there are 3 famous open-source options in the wild; GnuCash, Grisbi, and KMyMoney. Ok, I will start by Grisbi since it is also available to run on Win32 platform.