The Musings of Chris Samuel

Taken the plunge and upgraded from Wordpress 2.8.6 to 2.9.1, so if you’re seeing issues with the site leave a comment here, or if that doesn’t work catch me on Twitter.

Welcome to 2010, it’s not quite Arthur Clarke’s version.

Happy new year all!

After almost six and a half years working at VPAC it’s time to move on, in January I’ll be taking up the position of Senior Systems Administrator in the University of Melbourne for the Victorian Life Sciences Computational Initiative (VLSCI). For those who’ve not come across the VLSCI it describes itself thus:

Under the Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative, The University of Melbourne will host a $100 million supercomputing program and facility, with $50 million provided by the State Government. The goal of the initiative is for Victoria to retain its standing and enhance its leadership in world life sciences. This will lead to major improvements in public health outcomes in the areas such as cancer, cardiovascular and neurological disease, chronic inflammatory diseases, bone diseases and diabetes.

Their ambitions aren’t what you could call small, they want to be a supercomputing facility ranking in the top 5 in life sciences world-wide. It’s going to be a fun ride and a lot more than just going from a 4 letter acronym to a 5 letter one.

I’ve really enjoyed my time at VPAC over the years and I’m really going to miss the people there, but it’s gotten to the point where I want to be able to focus on running large HPC systems without distraction and the opportunity at VLSCI was too good to ignore!

Don’t panic, this isn’t about me.. No agencies please!

The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC) is looking for an Operations Manager:

We are looking for a dynamic leader with excellent IT knowledge to lead and manage our High Performance Computing (HPC) team based at VPAC (housed at RMIT University in Carlton).

Your ideal background would include management of similar teams and the provision of strong hands-on experience, coupled with full responsibility for technical infrastructure. The Operations Manager will build and maintain strategic relationships with key stakeholders such as Victorian Universities and national initiatives such as ARCS, NCI and ANDS.

Reporting to the Chief Executive Officer you will be a key member of the VPAC Management Team and lead a growing team of around 15 Systems Administrators and Developers. As VPAC is aiming for industry best practice and holds ISO accreditation it will be expected that you will have worked in similar environments that provide a process based approach to IT service management.

A senior level remuneration package will be negotiated with the successful applicant. To obtain a copy of the position description and/or to apply for this exciting opportunity please email recruitment@vpac.org

There is also a copy of the PD on the VPAC employment positions web page.

As ever please contact VPAC recruitment, not me, about this position..

Well thanks to those nice people at Rimuhosting for migrating this Xen host to a 2.6.27.x kernel and pointing my at the Hurricane Electric IPv6 TunnelBroker.net service this blog is now IPv6 enabled (as is Donna’s site, blog and podcast)! Slowly updating DNS for all the other sites hosted here but I’ll finish that off tomorrow night.

Congrats to Brian for being the first person to hit the site by IPv6!

Just upgrade to 2.8.1 and managed to make the SVN version work with judicious use of svn revert and svn switch.

Let me know if anything is broken (email chris at csamuel.org or send me a message on Twitter)!

I’ve been doing photography for over half my life now¹ and after having my first ever exhibition jointly with Donna recently I’ve now ended up with my first solo exhibition!

I’ve got 5 large prints and 7 small ones (all framed limited editions) on view at the “Cafe Have Ya Bean” in Upwey, so please do come and see it. It’s a lovely place run by Terry and Liz, nice food and they do a great cappuccino!

1. there’s a scary thought! [back]

Donna convinced me that I we should do a joint art exhibition with her paintings and sculptures and my photography and ceramic work, and so in my usual timely manner (not) our “Wonderment” exhibition opens tomorrow (Saturday 18th April) at the Jarmbi Gallery, Burrinja Cultural Center, 352 Glenfern Rd, Upwey here in Victoria and runs until the 10th May.

Tomorrow (Saturday 18th April) is our opening event running from 1pm to 3pm – if you can make it we’d love to see you!

As is traditional at this time of the year I must embarrass my brother through a public proclamation of his birthday..

Happy birthday Alan!

We’ve been watching smoke up on Mt Dandenong for a few hours now, apparently the result of a grass fire over Tecoma/Belgrave way. We’re fine, but keeping a weather eye on things and gathering our important possessions and documents in case we need to evacuate.

Update: it’s now under control according to the CFA site.