Monthly Archives: May 2007

Blocked by the Great Firewall of China

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Inspired by Alec, I just checked using the Great Firewall of China checking site and found out that my site, along with Donna’s, her blog, her podcast, the site for her first book and the web site we set up to promote self-employment for folks on the Autism spectrum, Auties.org, are all blocked!

Blocked by the Great Firewall of China

Presumably it’s working by IP address and so anything that happens to be on that IP address is persona non-grata in China. 🙁

I did a bit of testing and found that VPAC (where I work) is blocked too, as is Melbourne Uni.

Oddpod – Donna’s new Podcast with Caiseal Mor

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Well after a few months of tinkering around my fab wife Donna has her new podcast Oddpod off the ground!

Her first guest is Caiseal Mor:

Caiseal Mor is best known as a bestselling fantasy fiction novelist. Those managing his public image have portrayed him to the public in many ways, none of them as a man with autism. Here Caiseal talks to autistic author, Donna Williams, about his decision to go public with his autism, a diagnosis he had in late childhood.

ObTech: The podcast is recorded using Cubase and then some extra tweaking done with Audacity under Linux. We’re using WordPress with the excellent PodPress plugin to deliver it from our Debian Etch Linux virtual machine (using Xen) hosted with those nice folks at Rimuhosting.

Vacation 1.2.7.0 beta 4 released

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This beta release updates the build process to remove the -m486 flag on non-PPC systems as the distros are already doing this.

This may break backwards compatibility on AMD64/EM64T based systems, the fix is to run vacation -I to reinitialise your database of addresses you have received email from.

The option ‘-i’ has been added as an alias for ‘-I’ and documented in the manual page.

This release includes the Makefile changes from Marshal Newrock to build (hopefully) on FreeBSD with automatic detection of whether it is necessary.

There have been a few other housekeeping changes.

Please report any problems!

SourceForge has both the released sources and the ChangeLog.

Dell to ship Ubuntu Linux

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Dell have announced they will sell systems bundled with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), though the details are yet to be announced. Here’s hoping that this time they escape beyond the USA (hello Dell, there is a world outside the US!). There’s also a report on the BBC, which is where I first saw this mentioned.

On the Direct2Dell page that announces this there is a video interview with Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical in a variety of formats, including the free Theora codec. Props to Dell for including that.

If this gets to Australia I suspect my next laptop will be ones of these Dell’s (as long as they have a model with an Intel graphics card).