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David was giving his kid brother, Anthony, one more motorcycle ride before the 1968 Triumph Bonneville was put up for the winter. David bought the motorcycle in a government auction with the major components packed in cosmoline for long-term storage. It was the love of David’s life. After the ride, the oil would be removed from the crank case, the gasoline drained and cleared from the fuel lines and then the center kickstand deployed to insure no tire contact with the cement floor for the next four months.

It has been a busy couple of weeks for Ansible, a provider of powerful automation solutions designed to help enterprises move toward frictionless IT. First, Red Hat acquires Ansible two weeks ago, which is both no small feat and a coup for the folks in Raleigh. The acquisition was a smart, yet expected, move: It marries Ansible’s ease of automation to the wide portfolio of Red Hat clientele, driving down the cost and complexity of deploying and managing both cloud-native and traditional applications across hybrid cloud environments. In short, by writing a check, Red Hat expanded its leadership in hybrid cloud management.

Ubucon will take place on Jan 21-22, 2016. With Mark Shuttleworth giving the Ubucon keynote, the event will be structured as a traditional conference with presentations, demos and plenaries on the first day and as an unconference for the second one. There will also be two tracks grouping sessions by theme. The Users track is intended for those interested in learning about the non-tech, day-to-day part of using Ubuntu, as well as how to contribute to Ubuntu as an advocate. The Developers track will cover the sessions of interest to the amateur/professional developer, including topics like app development, IoT, convergence, cloud and more.

The odd thing was that if you didn’t know that attendance was up, you might’ve thought that the numbers were actually going down. That’s mainly because IT-oLogy, the folks behind the event, spent some extra bucks and rented the entire second floor of the Raleigh Convention Center, which gave them a whopping thirteen meeting rooms to use for presentations, plus the third floor Grand Ballroom — large enough to hold a Learjet, with room left over for a Cessna or two — for the keynote addresses. The later addition meant that the keynotes were no longer SRO, with plenty of room for attendees to spread themselves out and get comfortable.

Evidently, the news was that the company is looking for more than a few good men and women who know their way around open source software. I use the word “evidently,” because the announcement was made rather subtly and without fanfare near the end of the keynote. It was slipped in as just another note in a talk about how Microsoft is serious about becoming a good open source citizen.

Linux and FOSS have a wide cast of Coopers and Shelbys making high performance versions of mass-produced distros, building on the foundation of one of the “big three” Linux distros to make fire-breathing, pixel-burning distros; distros that are the digital equivalent of vehicles that are more than just for taking the kids to soccer practice or zipping over to the grocery store.

Doctorow kicks off the Friday edition of SCALE 14X at 9 a.m. on Jan. 22 with the topic, “No Matter Who’s Winning the War on General Purpose Computing, You’re Losing.” The keynote will be given at the new SCALE venue, which is the Pasadena Convention Center.

I thought about ignoring this one and letting it slide, but it’s too priceless, too typically Microsoft, not to pass on. It seems that Redmond has been inadvertently infecting Windows computers with ransomware through its MSN website. Not to worry, however. The company is happy to hand you a tool to remove the malware, which is akin to locking the door after the horse is gone, as your files will by then be locked up tighter than a waterproof safe.

Gamers like myself should be excited about the idea of a cross platform currency. In-game purchases aren’t often transferable between consoles or even different game launchers. For example, if a user were to spend money while playing on a console, any remaining amount would be useless if that person primarily plays on Steam. With GameCredits, it’s possible to save money and avoid the hassle of buying from multiple sources every time.

Upon opening the app, just type something in the input field at the bottom and hit enter. It will “speak” the text you typed in. At this time, if it runs across a word that isn’t recognized or if it’s a potty-mouth word, it will tell you in the upper right hand corner that the word isn’t recognized.

But to those of us looking at this from the outside, what we see is a magnificent irony of good code being produced in what can arguably be described as a toxic environment. That in and of itself is a remarkable achievement, but I would argue that the same work — if not better work — can be done in a realm that fostered more cooperation instead of sniping.

A while back I was fitted for a tinfoil hat by some because I had the audacity to suggest that it would be a shrewd business move by the now-Linux-loving Microsoft to buy Canonical because a.) Canonical had technology that Microsoft would want and need to advance in mobile (like the Ubuntu Phone technology, which blows Microsoft’s out of the water currently), and b.) by this time, Mark Shuttleworth is beyond tired of flushing millions after millions down the toilet (though, as a half-billionaire, he still has several decades of current spending before his bank account resembles, well, mine), and who can blame him?

Actually, it’s something of a miracle that the event is still good-to-go. IT-oLogy, the organization behind ATO, is headquartered in Columbia, S.C., which was subject to massive flooding last week in the wake of hurricane Joaquin. In fact, the organizations headquarters are located only blocks away from the Congaree River, the source of much flooding.

Keeping in rhythm with using names from Toy Story characters, Raspbian Jessie was released this past week for Raspberry Pi users. This latest release marks many improvements and updates that Raspberry Pi users have been longing for. After using and experimenting with Raspbian Jessie for the past week, I have to say that I’m very pleased with the update.

This seems to fit with news from early September, when reports began to surface on Twitter, Reddit and Facebook that Oracle was giving the ax to Java evangelists. The fact that these layoffs were coming less than two months before Oracle’s JavaOne conference in San Francisco was considered quite disturbing by the Java community.

BunsenLabs Linux, a successor to CrunchBang GNU/Linux formed by a group of the CrunchBang’s admins and other adherents when CrunchBang lead developer Philip Newborough decided to move on, is in the starting blocks with its first release candidate now available online.

Several posts on Saturday morning, mostly on social media, report that Bassel Khartabil Safadi has been moved from Adra Prison in Damascus, Syria, and may have been transferred to the civil court of the military police area in Qaboun, Syria.

While all the speakers and keynotes are not yet chosen, one of the speakers already tapped for the show is FOSS raconteur Bryan Lunduke, who will bring his annual “Linux Sucks” talk to the first-of-the-year Linux/FOSS event in 2016. Lunduke’s talk, oft given at SCALE and LinuxFest Northwest and other events, will be given in a venue that can fit his popularity, for starters, as well as being professionally filmed this time around.

What we do know is that the two companies have agreed to work together on a host of patent issues, which is a surprising turn around. Even more surprising is that Redmond has agreed with Google to work against non-practicing entities (NPEs) or trolls, companies that seek to license patents without making products of their own. In the past, Microsoft has joined forces with Apple and others to form trolling companies.

It wasn’t long ago that gamers avoided Linux like the plague, citing the lack of games as their main reason. When I was growing up, there were next to no major games to play on Linux and it seemed no developers cared to try. However, with the help of companies like Valve, 2K, and Aspyr Media, that’s quickly changing. More and more games are becoming available, with even some being Linux exclusives, including a launch on Steam of Don’t be a Patchman this past July.