The idea is you build a virtual machine image of some developer friendly operating system and have developers build their software on that. You can then deploy the VM to your live servers. Dealing with dependancy issues like a new version of Python or Ruby, a particular C library or a particular verion of Tomcat is much easier on a virtual machine and the sysadmins get to manage the hardware operating system independantly.

While virtual machine image virtualization is a massive step forward the biggest difficulty is the size of the files you end up with. moving VM images around is tough, they're big. This is ok for live, you can even go to the lengths twitter.com go to and deploy with bittorrent. But here at WooMe even our dev servers are very remote so pulling down a new VM to work on or pushing one up when it's complete is a real problem.

virtualenv is a tool to create isolated Python environments.

mercurial-server gives your developers remote read/write access to centralized Mercurial repositories using SSH public key authentication; it provides convenient and fine-grained key management and access control

D3 allows you to bind arbitrary data to a Document Object Model (DOM), and then apply data-driven transformations to the document. As a trivial example, you can use D3 to generate a basic HTML table from an array of numbers. Or, use the same data to create an interactive SVG bar chart with smooth transitions and interaction.

Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs.

DreamPie features a new concept for an interactive shell: the window is divided into the history box, which lets you view previous commands and their output, and the code box, where you write your code. This allows you to edit any amount of code, just like in your favorite editor, and execute it when it's ready. You can also copy code from anywhere, edit it and run it instantly.

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