Linux.Conf.Au (LCA) 2008 has announced its first keynote presenter – Bruce Schneier!
Category Archives: Announcement
Donna’s first YouTube video – From Autism to Artism
Last night Donna and I managed to get her first YouTube video online called “From Autism to Artism“, based around her photos from childhood, her paintings and the song “Beautiful Behavioural Mutations” from her Mutation album (and no, I can’t keep up with her creativity!).
LCA 2008 – Call For Papers now open
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!
Oddpod – Donna’s new Podcast with Caiseal Mor
Well after a few months of tinkering around my fab wife Donna has her new podcast Oddpod off the ground!
Her first guest is Caiseal Mor:
Caiseal Mor is best known as a bestselling fantasy fiction novelist. Those managing his public image have portrayed him to the public in many ways, none of them as a man with autism. Here Caiseal talks to autistic author, Donna Williams, about his decision to go public with his autism, a diagnosis he had in late childhood.
ObTech: The podcast is recorded using Cubase and then some extra tweaking done with Audacity under Linux. We’re using WordPress with the excellent PodPress plugin to deliver it from our Debian Etch Linux virtual machine (using Xen) hosted with those nice folks at Rimuhosting.
Vacation 1.2.7.0 beta 4 released
This beta release updates the build process to remove the -m486 flag on non-PPC systems as the distros are already doing this.
This may break backwards compatibility on AMD64/EM64T based systems, the fix is to run vacation -I to reinitialise your database of addresses you have received email from.
The option ‘-i’ has been added as an alias for ‘-I’ and documented in the manual page.
This release includes the Makefile changes from Marshal Newrock to build (hopefully) on FreeBSD with automatic detection of whether it is necessary.
There have been a few other housekeeping changes.
Please report any problems!
SourceForge has both the released sources and the ChangeLog.
VPAC publishes RFP’s for a new Linux cluster and additional storage
Well I’m happy to say that today I got the Request For Proposals (RFPs) out of the door for the proposed replacement of VPACs ageing Linux cluster Brecca (180 cores of 2.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 Xeon) and a significant amount of additional storage. Needless to say the new cluster must run Linux!
Please see the announcement on the VPAC systems blog for more information and copies of the RFPs.
This has been keeping my very busy recently and so I’m looking forward to a nice quiet break over Easter!
VPAC & Linux Users Victoria off the air – all RMIT networks down (Update: RMIT back)
RMIT came back online at around 09:30, hopefully it will last!
VPAC systems are unreachable from the outside world as it appears that all RMIT networks failed at around 8am.
This means that the Linux Users of Victoria (LUV) server is also down as it is hosted at VPAC, so no LUV email or website for the moment.
The systems themselves are still functioning normally, just needs the RMIT ITS networks folks to track down the problem and fix it (good luck people!).
Upgraded to Debian Etch
Phew, after a long struggle I’ve managed to upgrade from Debian Sarge to Debian Etch (what will be the next release) on this Xen VM at RimuHosting, so here’s hoping it’s worth it! 🙂
One benefit is that Etch now has a libc6-xen package which should be useful.
Please report any problems you see here, or by email to chris at csamuel.org!
Vacation 1.2.6.3 released
This is a minor bugfix release to the 1.2.6 series of Vacation inspired by looking at the sorts of things Linux distros patch for their own usage.
Vacation no longer builds as -m486 by default, though it will build as 32-bit on AMD64/EM64T because GDBM is not 32/64-bit portable and trying to run a 64-bit version against a 32-bit created GDBM causes it to fail and syslog a success message. This is sub-optimal.
The Makefiles CFLAGS handling has been tidied up a fair bit as a consequence and will hopefully make life a little easier for distributors and it no longer tries to strip the vaclook Perl script on install, which was very silly.
Vacation also now accepts the -i option as well as -I to initialise its database.
Vacation 1.2.7.0 beta 3 released
Another quick release, this time changing the address parsing for From: and Reply-To: headers to use Eric Raymonds rfc822.c library from his Unix Cookbook and fetchmail rather than the old homebrew code which couldn’t parse many RFC2822 addresses. You can enable the old behaviour by compiling with the -DOLD compiler option (though you probably won’t want to).
It also fixes the bug that broke the -r option, there was a stray “:” in the getopt(3) call that meant it expected an (unnecessary) argument.
There’s a couple of trivial tweaks too.
Please report successful and unsuccessful uses!