Christmas is upon us, and like the geeks we are here at Pingdom, we couldn’t help but check out how our fellow geeks worldwide are handling their Christmas decorations. We found some very cool examples where people have put together über-geeky Christmas trees, wreaths and other decorations. And then of course there’s that Christmas tree network monitoring system…

Now embrace both your inner geek and your Christmas spirit, and keep scrolling down.

Christmas tree made entirely from old computer parts

Photo by Sunny Brook.

Got RAM?

Found at Mediatinker.

Best. Tree. Ever.

Photo by dragon caiman (Carlos).

The iTree

Photo by Metromorphosis.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and other things for your Xmas tree

Photo by Lei Shi.

Proof that Tux IS a star

Photo by Maya.

These lights are connected to a network monitoring system.

White lights = all ok. Red lights = network trouble.

Photo by Jonathan Gaynor.

Computer geek Xmas wreath

Photo by Yoshi.

Computer geek Xmas wreath no 2

Photo by mcr25823 (Michael).

Computer geek Xmas wreath no 3

Photo by Bruce Hartman.

Computer geek Xmas wreath no 4

From TeamDroid.

Going old-school: Punch-card wreath

Photo by Jerry Gilbert.

And let’s not forget DESSERT!

Gingerbread laptop

Found at Mediatinker.

Gingerbread motherboard

Found at Mediatinker.

What are you waiting for? There’s still time to add some computer hardware to your Christmas tree!

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Microsoft and open source, those are two things that traditionally don’t mix. Quite the opposite; the more hardcore members of the open source community tend to view Microsoft as just one step below Satan.

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We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.

Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.

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Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

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