Category Archives: Announcement

Announcements

RIP Robert (Bob) Samuel (1925-2008)

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On Monday my father passed away at the age of 82.

SAMUEL Robert Alan Peacefully on Feb 25, 2008 at Llandough Hospital, beloved husband of Pat, loving father of Christopher and Alan, father-in-law of Donna and Jan, loving brother of Jean and her husband Tony, brother-in-law of Mike and Sue, uncle to Michael, Katherine and Richard. Resting at J Pidgeon & Son, Victoria Park, Cardiff until the funeral on Monday, March 3, service at 11.15am in the Briwnant Chapel at Thornhill Crematorium. Family flowers only, donations in lieu may be sent to Cancer Research (Wales), Velindre Hospital, Whitchurch, Cardiff.

You inspired a love of nature & history that will always be with me.

Love you, Dad.

I am Australian

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The deed is done, the affirmation is made, photos were taken and I now have a nicely framed piece of paper that says I am an Australian citizen! I was really grateful that an elder from the Wurundjeri people came to offer a welcome to country to all of us new Australians, and I only wish that she had been able to stay to the end so I could thank her personally.

Chris the Australian! Chris and friends at refreshments after the citizenship ceremony

This has been a pretty special Australia Day for me, especially because as well as having my wonderful wife Donna with me we had some great people join us for the ceremony. Our thanks to Edna, Phil & Janette, Brian, Lev & Erika and Julian for taking the time to join us and to Iain for coming to visit us at home afterwards with beer and a copy of “Australian Zen“. 🙂

Vacation 1.27.0 beta 5 released

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This release of vacation fixes a brown paper bag bug that broke compilation completely due to a duplicate case statement. Apologies to everyone for not spotting either the bug or the report on the tracker! 🙁

This release also fixes the case where a user who had configured a .forward file for vacation but had not created the database with the -i option (or had the database removed for some reason) would find that vacation generated an error. Vacation will now silently create the database if it is missing.

Please report any problems, I think we’re getting very close to a 1.2.7.0 release!

SourceForge has the released sources.

I’m going to be an Aussie! (Updated)

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Catching up on my backlog – a few weeks ago I received a letter saying:

13th December 2007

Dear Mr Samuel

On behalf of the Government and the people of Australia, I am delighted to advise that your application for Australian citizenship has been approved.

Yay! I’m going to be an Aussie (( well, OK, to be precise, a dual-national UK/Aussie ))!

Back in the middle of the year I decided that after having lived in Australia for almost 5 years it was about time to do the right thing and apply to be a citizen of my new home. I was hoping to get to vote in the 2007 general election, but changes in the process and travelling overseas meant that the interview that should have happened in September didn’t occur until the 7th December. So they moved pretty quickly from that to the approval! 🙂

I am still a PR (permanent resident) until I do the “Pledge of commitment” which will be some time in the next 6 months or so, but once that happens my PR visa will cease and I’ll need to get an Aussie passport to go with my UK one.

Update: Turns out that “in the next 6 months or so” is actually going to be this coming Australia Day, January 26th!

Emerging Linux Filesystems talk – LUV October meeting – 2nd October 2007

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Recently LinuxWorld commissioned me to write an article on Emerging Linux Filesystems (the formatting is a bit different from the original I sent, but the slideshow of graphs now works) and have kindly given me permission to present a talk based on my work at the October Linux Users of Victoria (LUV) meeting.

So if you can make it you can hear about my experiences with ChunkFS, btrfs, NILFS, ext4, Reiser4 and ZFS/FUSE, as well as with ZFS under OpenSolaris (in this case Nexenta).

I’d also like to thank Dragan at Xenon Systems for the loan of a shiny, Linux friendly, test system!

Alfred Deakin Innovation Lecture – Science, business and the law: Locking up innovation or sharing and harvesting it – which way to go?

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Details on the websites of the State Library (the venue) and DIIRD.

Science, business and the law:

Locking up innovation or sharing and harvesting it – which way to go?

Venue Village Roadshow Theatrette, State Library of Victoria
Date Monday 16 July
Time 6.30 pm – 8.00 pm
Cost Free Event
Seating General Admission - No booking required
Speakers Richard Jefferson, Prof Brian Fitzgerald, John Wilbanks, Robyn Williams

As open source software continues to transform the Internet – underpinning the phenomenal growth of businesses like Google, Ebay and YouTube, what can science learn from the computing revolution? Are we missing out on the full benefits of science and technology because of outdated ideas about copyright and patenting?

This lecture will consider whether in our rush to protect intellectual property we are locking it up and damaging our capacity to deliver solutions for the critical issues of the 21st Century.