Bad bad bushfires in South Australia – it looks like 9, possibly 10 dead and maybe 14 missing according to the ABC, making it possibly the most lethal bushfire in Australia since the "Ash Wednesday" fires in 1983 when 75 people died, 47 in Victoria.
There are more updates at Google News.
This is pretty good fun.. A Lego animation of Spiderman. 🙂
More a case of “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence” (Napoleon) but Sun have revoked the FreeBSD project’s license to bundle Java.
Read on for the excerpt from the FreeBSD newsletter.
Continue reading
Andrew Cowie has written an interesting article about Gentoo Linux over at Linux Journal.
Now, I too have a confession to make. Ladies and Gentlemen, I use Gentoo. Thank you.
Actually, that’s not the complete truth, I currently use Gentoo (my workstation at work), Mandrake (my workstation at home, at least until I get some time to upgrade it to Gentoo), Redhat 7.3 and Fedora Core 3 (the clusters at work) and soon, SuSE (the latest cluster due to arrive shortly). I’ve also played with Ubuntu which was pretty nice, but they’re a GNOME based distribution and I’m a die-hard KDE user.
They’re all good for various tasks, and I’ve found that for what *I* want, which is to have the latest KDE, the minimum of cruft and a large selection of packages, it is the best. Oh, and there are no new releases as there are with distros like Redhat, Mandrake, etc, you do rolling updates in the same way as Debian.
Here’s an interesting one, something I’ve thought of doing myself ever since I first came across RCS and then CVS back in the early 90’s, but never quite got around too.. Basically it’s keeping everything in your home directory under revision control, so that whatever happens (as long as you remember to constantly make sure you’ve checked things in) you can get any file back, or revert it to any date.
It’s an interesting project, but given that my home directory here at home is currently about 24GB and I’ve only got about 4GB of disk free, I think it’ll be a while before I can try this out. 🙂
Anyway, you can read the entire article at the O’Reilly network, here’s the blurb they automatically create for folks to blog with:
Keeping Your Life in Subversion by Joey Hess — Revision control is great for collaborative projects and distributed projects. How well does it work for individuals? According to Joey Hess, fantastically. He’s kept his home directory under revision control for years–here’s how he does it with Subversion.
Donna has put some of her artwork (prints and originals) up on eBay Australia.
For those folks who need to do computer security stuff, whether that’s as a sysadmin or as a consultant, there’s a nice Knoppix based Live CD called Auditor that you can run on your laptop or system without needing to install it.
It’s also handy if you’re doing WiFi stuff such as site surveys..
Found on Groklaw, there is a website with links to many amateur videos of the Tsunami coming ashore in Asia, India and Africa.
Absolutely terrifying.. 🙁
The Australian Governments official Tunsami Assistance website has been launched. Includes hotline numbers, lists of appeals from charities, etc.
The Australian ABC is reporting that the US is working on plans for detaining suspects for life without trial when they don’t have enough evidence to take them to court or to a tribunal, as part of their “war on terror”.
Two quotes spring to mind: