Vacation 1.2.7.1 beta1 is the first beta for the first bug fix only release in the 1.2.7 branch.
It contains only two bug fixes, firstly adding the Auto-Submitted: header as required by RFC 3834 and secondly stopping vacation munging the GECOS information of the user and instead just passing it in a quoted form for the MTA to deal with.
Both of these patches are from Dr Tilmann Bubeck who is the packager of Vacation for the Fedora project. I’m very grateful to him for his time and patience in submitting these!
This coming Saturday, 21st August 2010 will be my first opportunity to participate in Australian democracy. My citizenship came through a few months after the last election, had I’d been able to vote then I’d have cast my vote for Labour and against John Howard.
However, with the Australian Labour Party (ALP) lurching to the right on a number of issues such as immigration, continuing the failed intervention in the Northern Territory, failing to legitimise same-gender marriage, and their crazy idea of mandatory Internet censorship combined with a new do-nothing strategy on climate change (“let’s hold a citizens assembly to tell us what to do, just like we did in 2008!”) means my conscience does not permit me to give them my first preference. They at least have some vision with the NBN, but that’s about it.
As for the Coalition, well they’re just laughable. A leader who doesn’t understand science or technology, policies that promise to deliver half the current speeds of ADSL2+, obscene exaggeration and fear-mongering about refugees coming in by boat (here’s some much needed facts on the matter), wanting to make bible classes compulsory in schools (I suspect aimed at the even more right wing Family First to whom they are directing preferences) and even worse policies on climate change and greenhouse gases. Even more FAIL than Labour.
They want to enshrine basic human rights in law (Australia is the only western democracy without legal protection of freedom of speech)
They’re against the mandatory Internet censorship scheme
They take the science of climate change seriously, and the challenges it poses
They believe that people who love each other should be able to get married, irrespective of orientation
They wish to treat refugees as people, not some mythical threat
They understand free, open source software and use it themselves
Most importantly I’m voting Green because THEY WANT YOU TO THINK! Not just about their policies, or other parties policies, but to think about how you direct your preferences. Sure they have preference deals, but what most impressed me was when they were announced Bob Brown said:
I don’t like back room preference negotiations with other parties. In fact I’m sick of it. And I think that we should be very well aware here that voters can get misled into believing that they should put their preferences where the Labor party or the Liberal party or the Nation party or the Greens or somebody else says. No that’s not true. People have a right to put, and I think an obligation to think about it, and put their preferences where they want to. That’s what’s important.
Watch the video on that ABC news article to hear that, it’s sadly not in the text of the report. They also have the best election advert that never was – The Gruen Transfer has been getting two advertising agencies a week to do an advert each for a political party and this one won the week they did The Greens.
Now I’m not under any illusions that they’ll form the next government, but voting for them will send a signal that I’m not happy with either of the major parties, and they should (hopefully) get the balance of power in the Senate.
After a long hiatus I’ve restarted work on Vacation and have kicked off proceedings by migrating from SVN to Git (which SourceForge started offering about 18 months ago)1. This means you can now clone the Git repo to do work with and have the complete history of the project available to you, even if you’re not connected to the Internet at the time.
You can find more information on using Git with SVN here: https://sourceforge.net/scm/?type=git&group_id=3852
I’ve realised from this that a lot of the bug fixes that had been done on the 1.2.7 branch had not been merged back into trunk whilst working in SVN, so I’ve now made those changes to the ‘master’ (what Git calls SVN’s trunk) and pushed those back to SourceForge.
I’m hoping to roll a 1.2.7.1 release in the near future to pick up a few changes on the 1.2.7 branch that should really be out there.
I ended up using the svn2git Ruby Gem to do this as the usual “git svn clone” didn’t seem to work that well. [back]
I, myself, have spoken with two credible sources that told me HPC engineering talent is also being axed. Although this has been rumored to have been going on for some time, the recent RIF last week was said to cut particularly deep.
One thing I hadn’t noticed though was:
If I still haven’t convinced you that Oracle is cutting HPC from its lineup, consider that the company has no exhibit at the Supercomputing Conference (SC10) in November, and as far as I can tell, is offering no presentations. Given that this is the largest HPC exhibition of the year, this should be a clear signal that Oracle is going to be leaving the teraflopping and petaflopping to others.
Now back at SC’09 in Portland I asked the Sun folks (whilst the whole Sun/Oracle deal was going through) what they thought, and they said they reckoned it would be OK because Oracle had already told them they would have a booth at SC10. Well sadly it seems that’s not the case and to me that is the clearest indication that Oracle are exiting the HPC market. Of course they won’t say that (Oracle don’t seem to say much at all, even to the OpenSolaris folks, and when they do it doesn’t see to be very nice).
Last week I was invited to take some publicity shots for the Software Freedom Day Melbourne crew at the State Library of Victoria Experimedia centre. Asides from occasional complaints from my camera (the infamous Nikon ERR CHA happened 3 times) I managed to get about 200 shots which I’ve whittled down to 26 of the best and put them up as a set on Flickr.
All done with free software (well, asides from the firmware in the Nikon D90) – Digikam rocks!
The Melbourne Free Software Interest Group (a group of Melbourne computer folks with an interest in software freedom) have put together an open letter to Senator the Hon Kim Carr, the Minister for Innovation, to request that software be excluded from patenting as part of the Australian governments review of patents in general.
We are currently collecting signatures to the letter and if you are in Australia and of a like mind we would really appreciate it if you would contribute your signature too! Just click on the link, read the letter and the form to sign it is at the bottom of the page. Please also pass this on to others you know who may be interested.
The most excellent Joe Landman has a blog post looking at the performance of an anonymous SSD with a Sandforce SF-1200 controller chipset on it, and comes up with some very interesting benchmark results. But first he comes up with a nice way of quantifying the distance between benchmark results and real life:
I need to understand how close the marketing numbers are to the actual numbers. We need to establish a ratio for this. Call this the Benchmark Significance Ratio, or BS Ratio for short. Define BS Ratio as:
BS Ratio = (what they claim) / (what you measure)
A BS Ratio close to 1 is good. A BS Ratio much greater than 1 is bad. Of course, a BS Ratio much less than 1 is either an indicator of a failed test, or an accidentally released product.
What Joe finds is that the performance of the SSD, in terms of basic things like read/write speed, depends on what you write to it. If you write lots of zeros you find the performance is almost 4 times as much as if you write random data to it. Now as Joe rightly points out, this smacks of compression somewhere in the path between the program and the disk which means that most of the benchmarks you see/do (unless they/you, as Joe does, take care to use random data) will be pretty much meaningless unless you plan to just store zeros. Mind you if you do plan to just store zeros then I suggest just using /dev/null for writing to and /dev/zero to read from – they will give you much better speed and far better capacity for free!
What intrigues me though is not so much the speed difference but what that means for the capacity of the device – does it claim to be a X GB device but actually store Y GB (where Y > X dependent on compressibility of data) or does it enforce the amount that it can store to the quoted capacity ? Even worse, does the stated X GB capacity depend on your data being compressible and more random data results in less space ? I think the last can be ruled out because I can’t see a way how you would fake that failure to the SATA layers unless you returned failed writes which could cause chaos, especially in a RAID environment. I also suspect that it must enforce a fixed limit as I presume they must fake some characteristics of a spinning disk (heads, etc) for compatibility.
Which is a real shame because you’ve actually got a storage device that could (given the right sort of data) store far more than its stated capacity, if only you could address it in a non-spinning disk like manner. This echo’s other issues with SSD FTL’s like bad wear levelling implementations, etc, which would go away if we had an open interface into the device exposing the internals, that way you could (with this controller) get extra storage for free and potentially even a better wear levelling system into the bargain.
I guess even if that were available I don’t know if filesystems could cope with that (yet), but I wouldn’t mind betting they’d be up for it!
In China, eight of the nine members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau, including the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, have engineering degrees; one has a degree in geology.
Contrast that with the US:
Of the 15 U.S. cabinet members, six have law degrees. Only one cabinet member has a hard-science degree — Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1997, has a doctorate in physics. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have law degrees.
Basically it comes down to political will and understanding on the part of the people with the power.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta is supported as a Xen guest for the x86 and x86_64 architectures. Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta can be used as both a Xen paravirtualized (PV) guest or as a Fully virtualized (FV) guest with PV drivers. Due to paravirtualized operations (pv-ops) being included in the kernel, the same kernel can be used for either mode of operation as well as for bare metal. There is no support for using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta as a Xen host.
If you are using Xen with RHEL as the base for your virtualisation you’ll be wanting to look for alternatives..
