Category Archives: Computers

Miscellanious Computing

Comment for Michael Carden about comment spam

Posted on by

I read on PLOA that Michael Carden briefly tried to open his blog for comments, only to find:

The WordPress UI balked at deleting 194,000 (okay, I ignored it for a while) comment spams. I had to dig in as admin and run a fun sql query on the database to delete all 47 meg of them.

I guess I’ve got a couple of suggestions for Michael to make his life a little easier should he decide to try again.

  1. Akismet has an option to “Automatically discard spam comments older than a month“, that might help (though it’d be nice to be able to adjust the time).
  2. Run, do not walk, to Rich Boakes most excellent Worst Offenders plugin. This will both group comments for deletion based on various criteria but also (if you have permission) add Apache “Deny From” rules for the offending IP addresses. It’s also worth bumping the number of IP addresses it can ban up, Donna’s blog is up to over 8,000 at the moment!
  3. There are also tools like Bad Behaviour to try and catch bots before they get to you and if you are a member of Project Honeypot then there is the http:BL WordPress Plugin to check and block IP’s listed as baddies there.

Anyway, I hope that helps some people out.

Rails GIS Hacks

Posted on by

A good friend and ex-colleague of mine, Shoaib Burq, will be running an afternoon tutorial on the 17th September at RailsConf Europe called Rails GIS Hacks.

Since the advent of Google Maps and a number of other free web APIs for mapping, there has been an exponential increase in the number of mapshups and geography-related web sites. In this tutorial we will introduce what’s happening in the Ruby/Rails Geographic Information space. We will go from defining the key concepts behind the geospatial technology to developing a full-blown mapping application in Rails. In the process, we will make use of a number of cool Rails plug-ins that will let us integrate external geographic data sources as well us share our own data. […]

Sounds like fun.. 🙂

LCA 2008 Call For Presentations

Posted on by

linux.conf.au 2008 Call For Presentations

linux.conf.au isn’t just a Linux conference. It is a technical conference about Free Software, held annually in Australasia. We invite submissions on any Free Software related subject; from Linux and the BSDs to OpenOffice.org, from networking to audio-visual magic, from deep hacks to Creative Commons.

** Please feel free to forward this email to any group **
** or individual who you feel might be interested. **

Important dates

  • Submissions open: Friday, June 1 2007
  • Submission deadline: Friday, July 20, 2007
  • Email notifications from review committee: early September
  • Conference begins: Monday, January 28 2008

Presentations being accepted

You can submit a 50 minute talk proposal, or a 2 or 4 hour tutorial proposal: tutorials are interactive and involve more audience participation. All presentations must be related to Free and Open Source Software.

How to submit

Please see http://linux.conf.au/presentations for more information on the types of presentations we’re looking for and full details of how to submit a proposal. You can even submit a video pitch!

About linux.conf.au

linux.conf.au (http://linux.conf.au/) is Australia’s annual technical conference about Free Software. Fun, informal and seriously technical, linux.conf.au draws together Free and Open Source Software developers from across the world. It will be held from January 28th to February 2nd, 2008 at The University of Melbourne.

About Linux Australia

Linux Australia (http://www.linux.org.au/) is the peak body for Linux User Groups (LUGs) around Australia, and as such represents approximately 5000 Australian Linux users and developers. Linux Australia facilitates the organisation of this international Free Software conference in a different Australasian city each year.

Getting Some Perspective – The Earth from Space

Posted on by

The Planetary Society has some amazing images & animations of Earth taken by planetary spacecraft.

My favourite at the moment has to be the image of Earth from the surface of Mars, taken by the Spirit rover in 2004 and the first image taken from the surface of an object beyond the moon.

You Are Here

Shades of the Total Perspective Vortex, for those HHGTTG fans out there.

Speaking of which, Paulo Ang has a rather wonderful Flash animation entitled “The Total Perspective Vortex” which makes powerful use of planetary and astronomical imagery alongside music and a liberal smattering of Hitch Hikers quotes.

LCA 2008 – Call For Papers now open

Posted on by

Linux.Conf.Au 2008, which will be held right here in Melbourne, has just (( I started writing this around 11am, now I get to post it about 9 hours later.. )) opened up its Call For Papers, some come on in!

The closing date of the CFP will be 20th July 2007.

They are also accepting proposals for mini-confs too.

The mini-conferences are dedicated conference streams for specific communities of interest. The linux.conf.au organisers provide the space, and leave the rest up to the organiser of each mini-conf. Mini-conf speakers and delegates need to register for the main conference to participate.

Go on, give those of us on the LCA 2008 papers committee something exciting to read!

Multi-Core for HPC: Breakthrough or Breakdown?

Posted on by

At SC06 there was a panel discussion on the final day about whether the trend to more and more cores on a socket was going to be good or bad for HPC. The feeling was that because the fact that chip makers need to do something to make up for stagnating clock speeds coincided with having more and more blank space on the die as transistor sizes shrunk more cores was inevitable.

However, this puts all your memory on the wrong side of the pins from the cores, and HPC will (must) need to find a way to deal with it!

The presentations were really good and I was a bit sad that I couldn’t get enough notes as the session was packed and I was up near the back, but I’ve just found out that all the slides used are up on the web as PDF’s, courtesy of the most amiable Thomas Sterling, who chaired the session.

The most illuminuating HPC related quote was from the slides of Steve Scott talking about how RAM characteristics have changed over the years:

1979 -> 1999:
16000X density increase
640X uniform access BW increase
500X random access BW increase
25X less per-bit memory bandwidth

My favourite non-HPC quote is from Don Becker’s slides:

My nightmare: An 80 core consumer CPU means your web experience will be 79 3­D animated ads roaming over your screen

Be afraid, be very afraid (on both grounds)..

Microsoft / Novell Deal Terms Posted

Posted on by

LWN has this to say:

The terms of the Microsoft/Novell deal have been posted at last. There are three parts: the patent cooperation agreement granting the patent non-licenses, the technical collaboration agreement describing the technical work each company will do, and the business collaboration agreement on the business arrangements.

Groklaw also has an initial post about the SEC filing which details the agreement and quotes Novell on how GPLv3 may affect it.