OK, it’s not the latest news as I started on the 14th July, but I am now a sysadmin and network admin for
VPAC, the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing. I’m involved in looking after their new
IBM Linux Cluster and the forthcoming connection to GrangeNet.

All good stuff, and very good fun with good people and various other things to use the adjective good with.

Open Source Victoria (OSV) has issued a press release which urges governments to adopt open source document & file formats as well as network protocols.

As a member of OSV I would ask anyone who deals with government bodies to point their contacts towards the press release and especially the methods we advocate to ensure that governments use open formats to promote interoperability and communication.

Sad news today, I
read on the BBC News Website that one of my old physics professors, Phil Williams at Aberystwyth died suddenly at the age of 64.

Very sad, he was a real character and a very likeable person, one of the most approachable people there (no offence to the other staff!). He was very much a Welshman and was strongly involved in Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales for many many years. Most of this I didn’t know until I read his obituary on the BBC, but I did hear that he was planning to stand as a candidate for the European Parliament (but I don’t think he got elected) and I was very glad to hear that he did managed to get elected to the Welsh National Assembly.

Diolch yn fawr Phil, your self-described “arm waving” explanations of Cosmology & your saxaphone playing were great fun, have a good rest now.

It’s been some time, but we’re back on air again. Numerous hardware failures (including several dieing hard disks and two completely dead PC’s) meant quite a bit of time off air, and some lost email.

We also lost email when the CGI script my webhosting company uses to administer the mail system corrupted my settings, resulting in the deletion of all users and my not being able to log in again to fix it. Eventually they got around to blanking the account and I had to start again from scratch.

Anyway, all that seems to be behind us now, so here’s hoping luck will hold for at least a little while!

This was written in 2003 – I’ve since migrated from the Post-Nuke install to WordPress so it’s just here for posterity now.

Rather than role my own “content management system” (CMS) in PHP I decided to use Post-Nuke, a highly capable CMS with lots of useful features.

So that new system is up and running over here!

As a result I won’t be updating this part any more, I’ll be trying to migrate content over to Post-Nuke as an when I have time.

– Chris

Well we made it. We’ve been in Australia for some time now but only just really got the opportunity and access to be able to add anything to the log!

We’re at the inaugral World Autism Congress in Melbourne and having a good time. Donna spoke this morning both online at 8am and then at the plenary session, followed by a questions session later on. Donna seemed to enjoy herself and the fact that her old teacher met us there was nice too. Donna made him stand up when she thanked him for his help!

The organisers have got an organisation called ComputerBank to set up a small network of customised Debian Linux systems so that people on the Autistic Spectrum anywhere in the world can communicate with people at the conference – a really great idea from some really nice people (Hi Grant!). People seem to be working quite happily with them!

Anyway, we need to get back to the Congress as Donna will be on a panel at 3:30pm here.

Oops.. got a bit overenthusiastic with my .htaccess controls on the directory with the contact form script in, which resulted in no-one being able to contact me..

Fixed now! (Actually fixed earlier this week, but been too busy with emigrating things to be able to write about it)

Well after a few weeks of faffing about with this on my home machine I’ve finally gotten around to sync’ing it up with the real thing.

Just in time for us to go to Australia.. 🙂