The Musings of Chris Samuel

Well, I asked for feedback on putting adverts on the previously and got all positive responses, so I’ve now activated Google AdSense text-only adverts using the excellent no-adverts-for-friends WordPress plugin.

So, if you don’t like adverts, just leave an appropriate comment somewhere and you won’t see them. Either that or use Firefox and the great Adblock Plus plugin!

If for some reason you want to see adverts after leaving a comment I’m afraid you’ll need to go and delete any cookies for www.csamuel.org from your browser first.

Well I’ve just completed an amazingly painless upgrade to the first release candidate ofWordPress 2.5, the only thing that caught me out was an old functions.php file left over from a previous release that caused a PHP5 error about redefining a function!

There’s bound to be some hidden breakage that I’ve not yet spotted, so leave a comment (if you can) or drop me an email as chris (at-the-domain) csamuel.org with the details please.

Update: After a few days of playing around with it I’ve got to say I like it the new admin interface. I’m finding it much easier to navigate and compared to the other WP 2.3 sites I admin the dashboard seems a lot less cluttered and that ever-so-subjective word, “clean”.

The only niggle I’ve got so far is that now in the widgets view you can only see the one column of widgets at a time, so if you’re using a 3 column theme (as the current one here is) you can no longer move a widget directly from one column to another. But I can live with that.

You’re getting old, my little brother..

Mum put the following acknowledgement in the local paper to thank everyone who was involved both with my fathers last few years and for the funeral.

SAMUEL Robert - Pat and family would like to thank all the carers, past and present, especially Sue Lewis and Carole Lovell from Homecare, the Fairwater District Nurses, the Doctors and Staff of Fairwater Health Centre, especially Dr Shon Phillips, the Doctors and Nurses of Ward East 2 at Llandough Hospital for their care of Bob, and help to Pat. Thanks also to Andrew Forse from J Pidgeon & Son, for his courtesy, and the Rev Martin Colton for the lovely service.

On Monday my father passed away at the age of 82.

SAMUEL Robert Alan Peacefully on Feb 25, 2008 at Llandough Hospital, beloved husband of Pat, loving father of Christopher and Alan, father-in-law of Donna and Jan, loving brother of Jean and her husband Tony, brother-in-law of Mike and Sue, uncle to Michael, Katherine and Richard. Resting at J Pidgeon & Son, Victoria Park, Cardiff until the funeral on Monday, March 3, service at 11.15am in the Briwnant Chapel at Thornhill Crematorium. Family flowers only, donations in lieu may be sent to Cancer Research (Wales), Velindre Hospital, Whitchurch, Cardiff.

You inspired a love of nature & history that will always be with me.

Love you, Dad.

The deed is done, the affirmation is made, photos were taken and I now have a nicely framed piece of paper that says I am an Australian citizen! I was really grateful that an elder from the Wurundjeri people came to offer a welcome to country to all of us new Australians, and I only wish that she had been able to stay to the end so I could thank her personally.

This has been a pretty special Australia Day for me, especially because as well as having my wonderful wife Donna with me we had some great people join us for the ceremony. Our thanks to Edna, Phil & Janette, Brian, Lev & Erika and Julian for taking the time to join us and to Iain for coming to visit us at home afterwards with beer and a copy of “Australian Zen“.

This release of vacation fixes a brown paper bag bug that broke compilation completely due to a duplicate case statement. Apologies to everyone for not spotting either the bug or the report on the tracker!

This release also fixes the case where a user who had configured a .forward file for vacation but had not created the database with the -i option (or had the database removed for some reason) would find that vacation generated an error. Vacation will now silently create the database if it is missing.

Please report any problems, I think we’re getting very close to a 1.2.7.0 release!

SourceForge has the released sources.

Catching up on my backlog - a few weeks ago I received a letter saying:

13th December 2007

Dear Mr Samuel

On behalf of the Government and the people of Australia, I am delighted to advise that your application for Australian citizenship has been approved.

Yay! I’m going to be an Aussie¹!

Back in the middle of the year I decided that after having lived in Australia for almost 5 years it was about time to do the right thing and apply to be a citizen of my new home. I was hoping to get to vote in the 2007 general election, but changes in the process and travelling overseas meant that the interview that should have happened in September didn’t occur until the 7th December. So they moved pretty quickly from that to the approval!

I am still a PR (permanent resident) until I do the “Pledge of commitment” which will be some time in the next 6 months or so, but once that happens my PR visa will cease and I’ll need to get an Aussie passport to go with my UK one.

Update: Turns out that “in the next 6 months or so” is actually going to be this coming Australia Day, January 26^th!

1. well, OK, to be precise, a dual-national UK/Aussie [back]

Recently LinuxWorld commissioned me to write an article on Emerging Linux Filesystems (the formatting is a bit different from the original I sent, but the slideshow of graphs now works) and have kindly given me permission to present a talk based on my work at the October Linux Users of Victoria (LUV) meeting.

So if you can make it you can hear about my experiences with ChunkFS, btrfs, NILFS, ext4, Reiser4 and ZFS/FUSE, as well as with ZFS under OpenSolaris (in this case Nexenta).

I’d also like to thank Dragan at Xenon Systems for the loan of a shiny, Linux friendly, test system!

Today the people organising the SysAdmin Miniconf as part of LCA 2008 posted the following CFP, please read and consider responding to them if you have something interesting to report there! ¹

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1. I’m not involved with this, but the one at LCA2006 in Dunedin, NZ was good. [back]