Hypatia of Alexandria is the earliest woman scientist whose life is well documented; she was also the last scientist of the Golden Age of Pericles, before enlightenment gave way to the Dark Ages.

This is Europeana - a place for inspiration and ideas. Search through the cultural collections of Europe, connect to other user pathways and share your discoveries. Find out more

Ganeti is a cluster virtual server management software tool built on top of existing virtualization technologies such as Xen or KVM and other Open Source software.

Ganeti requires pre-installed virtualization software on your servers in order to function. Once installed, the tool will take over the management part of the virtual instances (Xen DomU), e.g. disk creation management, operating system installation for these instances (in co-operation with OS-specific install scripts), and startup, shutdown, failover between physical systems. It has been designed to facilitate cluster management of virtual servers and to provide fast and simple recovery after physical failures using commodity hardware.

This guide explains how you can install and use KVM for creating and running virtual machines on a Debian Lenny server. I will show how to create image-based virtual machines and also virtual machines that use a logical volume (LVM). KVM is short for Kernel-based Virtual Machine and makes use of hardware virtualization, i.e., you need a CPU that supports hardware virtualization, e.g. Intel VT or AMD-V.

In this post we will see how can we prepare a bootable USB Debian Lenny installation media to install Debian Linux on any storage device (IDE/USB hard drives). Note that this post is a bit different than the rest of the post

Installing Debian Lenny from a USB memory stick (USB HDD)

In this tutorial we'll see how to process N-Triples data by pipelining standard Unix tools such as grep, wc, cut, awk, sort, uniq, head and tail.

Here’s a great project that came out of the Adapative Architecture and Computation programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture. ‘Adaptive Fa[ca]de’ by Marilena Skavara explores the functional possibilities and performative characteristics of cellular automata (CA). In addition to the unique emergent behaviour of CA, a neural network enables a further computational layer to evolve CA behaviour to the context of its surrounding environment.

Building upon the early work of Conway’s ‘Game of life’ and Stephen Wolfram’s extensive research on the wider implementation of CA, ‘Adaptive Fa[ca]de’ becomes a living adapting skin, constantly training itself from the history of its own errors and achievements. For a more detailed description of the project, read Marilena’s article for Vague Terrain.

Joshua Noble’s new issue of Vague Terrain is definately worth a look. He described this issue as “an exploration of space, functionality in space, and the relationship of the body to the systems around it. All technologies reshape the body and the space around the body, from the bow and arrow to the steam engine to the telephone. It may be that we are beginning to truly see how computing and ubiquitous devices will once again reshape our bodies and our conceptions of ourselves in space. It is with this emphasis that we present a selection of thinkers, artists, architects, and designers and examine and explore how their ideas will shape art, aesthetics, design, living spaces, and social structures and how those ideas will ultimately be shaped by their users and their spaces.”

Articles have been written by Golan Levin, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Marilena Skavara, Mark Shepard, Pierre Proske and Joshua himself.