Category Archives: Computers

Miscellanious Computing

Melbourne school uses KDE and Kubuntu for library kiosks

Posted on by

Westall Secondary School in Clayton South, Melbourne, has started using KDE under KUbuntu Linux to allow them to replace the 3.0GHz Intel PC’s they were using with older 2.1GHz PC’s, extending their lives and avoiding landfill. The systems use KDE’s Kiosk framework to let the staff lock down the systems for their library system. The 3.0GHz machines released from this role will be going back into the main school for teaching duties there.

In explaining why the school went for Kubuntu, Stefyn said the students responded well to CDs put out by the Ubuntu project. Many had tried Ubuntu at home, which led to a decision to provide a familiar working environment at the school as well.

They got help both directly from Peter Lieverdink and also from the Linux Users of Victoria. They are also encouraging students to experiment with Linux, with old PC’s as a prize:

During our last hardware cleanout, we challenged the students to create the best Linux install and customization, and the winners would get to keep the hardware once it was decommissioned.

and all that apparently unnecessary desktop bling helps to get attention, according to the schools IT manager and teacher:

The kids were rapt with Compiz Fusion and this scored magic brownie points, because even the magical Vista couldn’t compete with the graphics. This was a great step into having them explore the other functionalities of Linux

Great stuff!

Australian “Open Source Industry & Community Report” published

Posted on by

So Jeff Waugh has announced the “Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report” has been published as a PDF (( or you can buy a hardcopy version )), hopefully the first of many.

Come and see what Open Source really does for Australia!

Our conservative projection of earnings suggests that the Open Source industry generates $500 million in revenue each year, with over 50% of that being directly related to Open Source.

The report is covered by a CC license:

The Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report is published as a freely downloadable PDF on the Census project website and is redistributable under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives license.

New Jersey Voting Bugs

Posted on by

Steve Bellovin reports:

Ed Felten has posted two articles describing bugs in New Jersey’s electronic voting systems. Briefly, the total votes for all of the candidates add up to more than the number of votes the machines believe were cast.

The voting machine company, Sequoia, has proffered an explanation of the bug, but Ed Felten points out in his second article that one of the tapes now analysed shows this to be inadequate as the total number of votes is more than the “public counter” which is the voting machines own total of the count. He writes:

Each machine has a “public counter” that keeps track of how many votes were cast on the machine in the current election. The public counter, which is found on virtually all voting machines, is one of the important safeguards ensuring that votes are not cast improperly. […]

The public counter is important enough that the poll workers actually sign a statement at the bottom of the tape, attesting to the value of the public counter.

Unfortunately..

The public counter says 105, even though 106 votes were reported. That’s a big problem.

Oops..

Mac.com email sillyness

Posted on by

You’d have thought Apple would know how to do email right, but sadly it appears not. A message I sent to the Beowulf list today generated a bounce from a mac.com email address back to me rather than to the envelope sender – very naughty as RFC-2821 says:

If an SMTP server has accepted the task of relaying the mail and later finds that the destination is incorrect or that the mail cannot be delivered for some other reason, then it MUST construct an “undeliverable mail” notification message and send it to the originator of the undeliverable mail (as indicated by the reverse-path).

I wonder if they read their Postmaster email ?

ZFS-FUSE Bonnie++ benchmark update

Posted on by

After the previous benchmark of btrfs I thought it’d be interesting to revisit ZFS using FUSE under Linux, so after updating to the current tip (02d648b1676c) in the Mercurial trunk I created a 30GB LVM volume for testing and gave it a go. Now you can’t compare it to previous results as this is completely different hardware, but the numbers look quite respectable in comparison to the in-kernel file systems tested yesterday.

Continue reading →

btrfs 0.13 and XFS benchmarks

Posted on by

Back in February Chris Mason announced btrfs 0.13, so I thought I’d give it a quick go as I’d not touched it since testing btrfs 0.5 back in August. Back then, on some pretty meaty hardware, there was a considerable difference between XFS and btrfs and I was curious as to how they’d compare now.

The test hardware this time is a quad core Intel box with 8GB RAM and a pair of 750GB SATA drives in a RAID-1 mirror. It is running Kubuntu Hardy Heron (now in beta) with a 2.6.25-rc6 kernel.

A quick blast with Bonnie++ surprised me, btrfs matched XFS for read, writes and rewrites (though with higher CPU usage, presumably due to the fact that it’s checksuming all the data) and then blew XFS away for meta-data operations.

Operation XFS btrfs
Block write (KB/s) 50572 42087
Block rewrite (KB/s) 23739 23296
Block read (KB/s) 52512 53108
Sequential creates (/s) 4095 23569
Sequential deletes (/s) 3404 15901
Random creates (/s) 1819 27919
Random deletes (/s) 1397 21561

Here are the full results:

Continue reading →