This year is a big year for grid computing. After so long waiting more than 2 years, grid technology has been commercialized successfully and all of us could see significant impacts in a few months. I have just seen 2 interesting press news.

• Crosswalk launches iGrid Storage System

Have you ever heard about magic quotes? Today I have just realize why it must be called magic quotes. My objective was just to install phpMyAdmin on CentOS 4.2. I supposed it should be done in an hour. However, I stucked on generating the configuration file, config.inc.php. The symptom are as follows.

Have you ever watched screencasts of Ruby on Rails to create a weblog site in 15 minutes and TurboGears to create a wiki site in 20 minutes? If you haven’t, give them a try. This is not a language war. I just want to explain my principle of how to develop a web site effectively. First of all, I will summarize the result of comparison of those two movies.

I have so many instant message accounts, says an ICQ, a Yahoo! IM, 2 MSN, a Google Talk, 2 Jabbers, and an IRC. To online on all of them, running standard IMs are not working properly. For example, MSN don’t let me online 2 accounts on my laptop at the same time without unofficial patching. So, I have to choose other IM. Running ICQ, Yahoo! IM, MSN, Google Talk, Jabber, and IRC client on my laptop is not funny thing. They might consume all my physical memory.

According to the official announcement, Steven expected that RC2 would be the last release candidate. Anyway, I didn’t upgrade howforge.com to RC1 yet so the plan is to upgrade to the official 4.7.0 when it is available in next few weeks.

To help Drupal development, I will upgrade my test instance running in VMware to make sure it works. Go to get it right now at http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-4.7.0-rc2.tar.gz.

Have you ever tried OpenOffice.org? OO.o is a multiplatform and open-source office suite. It could replace MS Office someday, not today, due to lacking of some features and its default performance. Current version of OO.o is only suitable for geek because of its highly configurable options. Yes, the problem is its options being too configurable and defaults suck! I have just tried OO.o 2.0.2 for a week without impression according to its very slow response time. For example, I have to wait more than 30 seconds to start Impress.