Monthly Archives: October 2003

Linux things..

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Virus Emails

It’s come to my attention that some people have received viruses from an address claiming to be Gordon Heydon in the csamuel.org domain – this address does not exist (and never has) and the emails in question were forged by a virus on a Telstra subscribers PC.

Anyway, now that’s out of the way…. I’ve been a bit quiet here recently so just a couple of quick updates on things I’ve been playing with:

Jabber

An Open Source Instant Messaging system. All specified in XML so it’s easily extensible (and programable) plus has the ability to use connectors to interface to legacy IM systems such as MSN and ICQ. This means you only need to sign into your Jabber server and your Jabber server can sign into MSN, etc, on your behalf and act as a proxy, and your contacts think you’re using the legacy system natively.

My Jabber ID is: chris@jabber.org.au – NB: That is NOT an email address!

Scalable PBS (SPBS) and the MAUI Scheduler

SPBS is a queueing system used in clusters to share out and jobs between the compute nodes. I’ve been doing a fair bit of debugging at work with the guys who are maintaining this and they’ve been doing sterling work. Respect guys!

The MAUI scheduler interfaces with SPBS (and OpenPBS) and does clever tricks to work out the most efficient way to execute jobs in the PBS queue(s) based on policies and, most importantly, what the user tells SPBS is the maximum amount of time their job will run for.

NPACI Rocks

NPACI Rocks is a Linux distribution specifically for cluster computing. It’s based on RedHat 7.3 for the IA32 release (and there’s an IA64 version based on RedHat Enterprise Linux 2.1) and includes virtually everything you could want for running a cluster (apart from SPBS mentioned above, they still use the old OpenPBS at the moment).

Very impressed with it so far, especially the automated installation tools and the PXE network boot support for automatic installs. The only issue I’ve had with it has been its use of the autofs automounter, I much prefer permanent mounts and autofs also doesn’t work with our preferred way of partitioning up user areas so that we guarantee they fit on a single DLT.

Mandrake Linux 9.2 has arrived!

…well for MandrakeClub members at least! Grabbed it via BitTorrent (I’m a club member) – my first (and probably only) use of a Peer2Peer application (and legitimate too!).

I’ve been playing around with the pre-releases already and I’m impressed, but I need a bit of time to burn the ISO’s onto CD’s and have a real play with the release versions..

…and that’s about it for now!

Microsoft meets Monty Python

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I originally wrote this to go in an email in response to an email from a friend saying:
"Nothing wrong with office 2000 other than security concerns 😉" but I liked it so much I decided to put it on here. 🙂



In my defence I’ll just say that I’ve had a morning of mind-bending debugging…!















Cardinal Gates:

 Our main weapon is security holes!
Security holes and proprietary formats, are our two main weapons.

Security holes, proprietary formats and unwanted features are our three main weapons.

Security holes, proprietary formats, unwanted features and forced upgrades are our four main… I’ll come in again.


[exits & re-enters]


Cardinal Gates:
Amongst our many weapons are such diverse elements as
security holes, proprietary formats, unwanted features, forced upgrades, vendor lock in and a fanatical devotion to the stock market.



Cardinal Ballmer, the CDROM!

October 17th Melbourne Consultation on United Nations World Summit on the Information Society

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The COIN Internet Research Network (COIN-IRN) at Central Queensland University and the Centre for Community Networking Research (CCNR) at Monash University are being sponsored by the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) to coordinate the development of a Civil Society statement to supplement materials developed by the Australian Government for the World Summit on the Information Society(WSIS).

As part of this they are holding a consultation meeting in Melbourne on October 17th which you need to RSVP to the CCNR organiser if you wish to attend.

This process is intended to produce a response to a challenge to guide and inform this process to produce a "clear statement of political will and a concrete plan of action for achieving the goals of the Information Society".

This seems, to me, to be an excellent opportunity to try and promote strategies to permit open and equal access to information and documents through open standards for document formats so that everyone can gain access regardless of what they choose to use to access it, and to guarantee the ability for future generations to also be able to access it.

This is the reason that I support Open Source Victoria’s push for governments to use open document formats.