If you’re into WordPress – the free and open source personal publishing platform – then you’ll love WordCamp – a casual, locally-organised conference catering both to budding bloggers and experienced developers alike. The first such event to be held in the city, WordCamp Melbourne 2011 features a range of guest speakers including Glenn Todd and Bronson Quick.
I hope everyone has a happy, fun and safe new year for all!
2010 was a good year for me, I changed jobs back in January leaving the great people of VPAC for a new challenge, working with a new group of great people to bring up a new HPC centre for life sciences from scratch based at the University of Melbourne (but open to all life scientists across the state). Since then we’ve brought up a 1088 core SGI Altix XE cluster (Intel Nehalem based), a 640 core IBM iDataplex cluster (again Nehalem) and an IBM Blue Gene/P with 8192 cores. This is just stage 1, the big systems are due to arrive in 2012! It’s been great fun and great to just be able to concentrate on running the HPC systems and not have to worry about anything else.
On a personal level life has also been great, my wonderful wife and I celebrated 10 years of marriage this December and look forward to many more! We’ve just had our longest amount of time off together since 2008 thanks to the university shutting down between Xmas and New Year and have spent it quietly pottering around the house and local area. Very relaxing!
Turns out that the day after Newtonmas is Babbagemas, the annual celebration of Charles Babbage’s birthday on 26th December 1791. As well as having something to do with computers he also had a good understanding of your common or garden politician and their scientific understanding:
On two occasions I have been asked, – “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
It is traditional (starting from now) to celebrate Babbagemas by blogging on the day.
Update: this issue has been fixed by the packagers. See the bug for more info.
I saw the notice about the KDE 4.6.0 RC1 packages being released for Kubuntu 10.10 today and decided to look at upgrading (or at least grab all the packages with aptitude dist-upgrade -d) and got a surprise that it wanted to remove 250 packages due to dependency problems. The issues were:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libqapt-runtime: Depends: libpolkit-qt-1-1 which is a virtual package.
polkit-kde-1: Depends: libpolkit-qt-1-1 which is a virtual package.
kdelibs5-plugins: Depends: libpolkit-qt-1-1 which is a virtual package.
libgpgme++2: Depends: libgpg-error0 (>= 1.10) but 1.6-1ubuntu2 is installed.
Turns out that libpolkit-qt-1-1 and the newer version of libgpg-error0 are in the alpha for the next version of Kubuntu (Natty Narwhal) but not in Maverick (10.10), hence the chaos. The bug is reported as LP bug #694053 and thanks to Murz for spotting that you can just grab and dpkg -i the missing packages – see the bug report for details and links!
Successful candidates will work with researchers on state-of-the-art interdisciplinary projects in areas such as structural biology, precision medicine, neuroscience and imaging, with an emphasis on high performance computing. Assignments could include implementing existing models or algorithms, porting existing codes, running scientific simulation software, developing mathematical and computational models and performing scientific research.
Very weird – for some reason the Twitter Tools plugin for my blog posted 3 copies of the same weekly summary. 🙁 Deleted the extraneous two, apologies for that!
I’ve seen that occasionally on other peoples sites but I believe that’s the first time it’s happened here.
Meant to blog this a while back, but work has been keeping me busy. A friend of mine in the US, Joe Landman, runs a business making serious HPC storage gear and has found a rather disturbing problem with Corsair CMFSSD-32D1 SSD drives. Here is how he describes it after Corsair went silent on him about this issue (ellipses are his):
We are experiencing about a 70% failure rate, within 3 months of acquisition. In many different chassis, in many different parts of the world, with many different power supplies, many different motherboards. This is a time correlated failure. I have never … ever … in 25+ years doing this stuff … ever … seen anything like this. Its either a really … really bad silicon error in a controller chip or a firmware bug … or some other crappy part.
Imagine for a moment, you have these in a RAID 1 configuration. And because of the the failure, the unit refuses to get past the POST section. So there you are, with a remote machine, say, I dunno, 6000 miles away from you, and an SSD, with a putative 100+ year MTBF fails, and fails in a way that stops POST. So the system on reboot, freezes at the drive detection phase.
Vacation 1.2.7.1 beta1 is the first beta for the first bug fix only release in the 1.2.7 branch.
It contains only two bug fixes, firstly adding the Auto-Submitted: header as required by RFC 3834 and secondly stopping vacation munging the GECOS information of the user and instead just passing it in a quoted form for the MTA to deal with.
Both of these patches are from Dr Tilmann Bubeck who is the packager of Vacation for the Fedora project. I’m very grateful to him for his time and patience in submitting these!
This coming Saturday, 21st August 2010 will be my first opportunity to participate in Australian democracy. My citizenship came through a few months after the last election, had I’d been able to vote then I’d have cast my vote for Labour and against John Howard.
However, with the Australian Labour Party (ALP) lurching to the right on a number of issues such as immigration, continuing the failed intervention in the Northern Territory, failing to legitimise same-gender marriage, and their crazy idea of mandatory Internet censorship combined with a new do-nothing strategy on climate change (“let’s hold a citizens assembly to tell us what to do, just like we did in 2008!”) means my conscience does not permit me to give them my first preference. They at least have some vision with the NBN, but that’s about it.
As for the Coalition, well they’re just laughable. A leader who doesn’t understand science or technology, policies that promise to deliver half the current speeds of ADSL2+, obscene exaggeration and fear-mongering about refugees coming in by boat (here’s some much needed facts on the matter), wanting to make bible classes compulsory in schools (I suspect aimed at the even more right wing Family First to whom they are directing preferences) and even worse policies on climate change and greenhouse gases. Even more FAIL than Labour. 🙁
They want to enshrine basic human rights in law (Australia is the only western democracy without legal protection of freedom of speech)
They’re against the mandatory Internet censorship scheme
They take the science of climate change seriously, and the challenges it poses
They believe that people who love each other should be able to get married, irrespective of orientation
They wish to treat refugees as people, not some mythical threat
They understand free, open source software and use it themselves
Most importantly I’m voting Green because THEY WANT YOU TO THINK! Not just about their policies, or other parties policies, but to think about how you direct your preferences. Sure they have preference deals, but what most impressed me was when they were announced Bob Brown said:
I don’t like back room preference negotiations with other parties. In fact I’m sick of it. And I think that we should be very well aware here that voters can get misled into believing that they should put their preferences where the Labor party or the Liberal party or the Nation party or the Greens or somebody else says. No that’s not true. People have a right to put, and I think an obligation to think about it, and put their preferences where they want to. That’s what’s important.
Watch the video on that ABC news article to hear that, it’s sadly not in the text of the report. They also have the best election advert that never was – The Gruen Transfer has been getting two advertising agencies a week to do an advert each for a political party and this one won the week they did The Greens.
Now I’m not under any illusions that they’ll form the next government, but voting for them will send a signal that I’m not happy with either of the major parties, and they should (hopefully) get the balance of power in the Senate.
After a long hiatus I’ve restarted work on Vacation and have kicked off proceedings by migrating from SVN to Git (which SourceForge started offering about 18 months ago) (( I ended up using the svn2git Ruby Gem to do this as the usual “git svn clone” didn’t seem to work that well. )). This means you can now clone the Git repo to do work with and have the complete history of the project available to you, even if you’re not connected to the Internet at the time.
You can find more information on using Git with SVN here: https://sourceforge.net/scm/?type=git&group_id=3852
I’ve realised from this that a lot of the bug fixes that had been done on the 1.2.7 branch had not been merged back into trunk whilst working in SVN, so I’ve now made those changes to the ‘master’ (what Git calls SVN’s trunk) and pushed those back to SourceForge.
I’m hoping to roll a 1.2.7.1 release in the near future to pick up a few changes on the 1.2.7 branch that should really be out there.