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Disclaimer: this article does not pretend to be a complete picture of using swap on UNIX. Most of the time, recent GNU/Linux distributions insist on creating a swap area. Swap is generally used to temporarily store memory used by running(/sleeping) applications, but might as well be used to store a copy of RAM to disk for hibernation.

GNU/Linux supports swapping to a file on any filesystem, with reasonable performance impact since kernel 2.4.

I've been looking around for nice ways to build mindmaps that would not require nor Java nor Flash widgets to display them in a navigator.

I had a problem with a very old Compaq PC not detecting the keyboard anymore. I used the PC as a local server, not a real problem, except that the BIOS didn't allow the PC to boot when the keyboard was not plugged in. One solution there might have been to use some USB keyboard (I didn't get a chance to try that - didn't have any USB keyboard lying around). Luckily enough, I happened to have a clone of this computer, so I just swapped the disks from one PC to the other, and booted.

Those of you watching closely the Dokeos code will have noticed... I stopped contributing to the project in December 2009, along with my team of 12 and all of our fellow community members. The only changes we sent were actually customer requirements, so no way to avoid that. But that's it. I officially stopped working with Dokeos on January 1st, 2010. As many huge actors in the open-source (MySQL/MariaDB, OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice, ...) and PHP development world at the end of 2009, it was time for a big change.

Note: I'm talking about free, public, open-source software here, not that hacked open-source stuff that you just provide to your customers. Mostly, the difficulty of managing an open-source business is that there are even less good management people that know what free open-source software is than there are good management people at all. And then when an open-source business in launched, it's most probably because the initial entrepreneur knew what open-source software was and thought he had a good idea on how to make business with it.

In BeezNest Latino (the new name of Dokeos Latinoamérica), we have lunch together every Wednesday at a nearby restaurant. It's a tradition, and it's on the company. Today though, a few of us got there about 5 minutes later than the firsts, and were greated  with no seats left and two separate tables with people having lunch independently. This already happened once in the past (in over a year), but today I was in a particularly bad mood (doesn't happen much) so I decided to take action and avoid this repeating itself.

We're preparing a great training course for PHP in Lima (not remote though) that will start in February, exclusively in Spanish and exclusively during the week-end. I'm telling this here because we managed to gather 4 (and possibly 5) of the only 5 Zend certified engineers of Peru to teach it. I'm sure that's going to be a great event. It's going to be a high-level course, so there will be a qualification exam to enter it. If you have developer friends in Peru, pass the word: http://www.dokeoslatino.com/cursos/php