Category Archives: Australia

Australia

Garden photos – gluten free grains, bees and trees!

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Donna and I had a fun time yesterday gathering in our first harvest of gluten-free grains from the garden – buckwheat and millet. It only took half an hour or so to get that much from the small patches we’d planted so we were quite chuffed about it, and there is still more to come as you can see from the buckwheat flowers yet to set to seed and an ear of millet (one of many) still waiting to be colllected.

Our first harvest of millet and buckwheat from the garden Buckwheat flowers in our garden An ear of millet in our garden

Our bees also seem to be enjoying the good weather of this weekend, and I’m looking forward to a cooler one so we can check the hive to see how they’re doing with filling the top box with honey (there is a queen excluder between it and the rest of the hive so she can’t get up there to lay any brood into it).

An active beehive Busy bees Bee on lavender flower

All in all our garden is coming on really well, it’s a far cry from the boring old lawn – largely of the weed nutgrass – which we inherited!

A view down our garden By Gum!

Cardinia Kangaroos at Sunset

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One of the great things about living on the edge of the city is that we’re only 15 minutes away from Cardinia Reservoir where kangaroos gather in the evening on the grass areas. Recently I’d gone for a walk there and spotted a kangaroo silhouetted against the sunset, but had no camera! So I returned a few nights later armed with my Nikon D90 and got these (click for a larger view on Flickr)..

2011-02-25T20:21:15.JPG 2011-02-25T20:21:30.JPG

Kangaroos scratching and feeding at sunset 2011-02-25T20:22:07.JPG

Aussie Silhouette Kangaroos hopping away into the sunset

VLSCI: Systems Administrator – High Performance Computing, Storage & Infrastructure

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/*
* Please note: enquiry and application information via URL below, no agencies please!
*
* Must be Australian permanent resident or citizen.
*/

Executive summary

Want to work with hundreds of TB of storage, HPC clusters and a Blue Gene supercomputer and have an aptitude for handling storage and data ?

http://jobs.unimelb.edu.au/jobDetails.asp?sJobIDs=715542

Background

VLSCI currently has in production as stage 1:

  • 2048 node, 8192 core IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer
  • 80 node, 640 core IBM iDataplex cluster (Intel Nehalem CPUs)
  • ~300TB usable of DDN based IBM GPFS storage plus tape libraries
  • 136 node, 1088 core SGI Altix XE cluster (Intel Nehalem CPUs)
  • ~110TB usable of Panasas storage

There is a refresh to a much larger HPC installation planned for 2012.

Both Intel clusters are CentOS/RHEL 5, the front end and service nodes for the Blue Gene are SuSE SLES 10. The GPFS servers are RHEL5. Panasas runs FreeBSD under the covers.

Job advert

http://jobs.unimelb.edu.au/jobDetails.asp?sJobIDs=715542

SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR, STORAGE & INFRASTRUCTURE
Position no.: 0022139
Employment type: Full-time Fixed Term
Campus: Parkville

Close date: February 3rd, 2011

Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative, Melbourne Research

Salary: HEW 7: $69,608 – $75,350 p.a. or HEW 8: $78,313 – $84,765 p.a. plus 17% superannuation.

The Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative (VLSCI) is a Victorian Government project hosted at The University of Melbourne which aims to establish a world class Life Sciences Compute Facility for Victorian researchers. The Facility operates a number of supercomputers and storage systems dedicated to High Performance Computing. The VLSCI wishes to recruit a Linux Systems Administrator with knowledge of file systems and an interest in working with technologies such as GPFS, TSM, HSM, NFS.

This position is an opportunity to become involved in leading science and computing fields and work as part of a small but self-contained team. Expect to find yourself learning new skills and developing new and innovative solutions to problems that have not yet been identified. You have every opportunity to make a real difference and will need to contribute to a high level of service and creativity.

More Details

Selection criteria and more details are in the Position Description (PDF) here:

http://bit.ly/fyIy3H

Apologies for the URL shortener, the original URL is a horribly long one.. 🙁

Volunteers for Flood Relief Sought at LCA2011 in Brisbane

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Pia Waugh has put up a page on the LCA wiki seeking to recruit and organise attendees who might want to help assist with the flood recovery in Brisbane. It says:

This page was set up for linux.conf.au attendees who are keen to do some volunteer work to assist the flood victims in Brisbane. A few hundred attendees throwing in a few hours or a day or so to help out will make an enormous difference to people who have lost so much. […] Specific volunteer activities will be planned for the Sunday before the conference and the Saturday following the conference, and there will no doubt also be odd jobs here or there for those who find themselves with a free hour or so throughout the conference.

The page asks volunteers to list themselves there but currently they only have a couple of people on the sheet and I think they could do with some more publicity!

Unfortunately I don’t get to go to linux.conf.au these days (SC in the US is my one work conf now) otherwise I’d be pitching in too.. 🙁

Celebration of Anne McDonald’s Life, St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne – Saturday 13th November

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DEAL Communication Centre have announced that there will be a celebration of the life of Anne McDonald at St Paul’s Catherdral in Melbourne on Saturday 13th November:

Anne McDonald – wonderful writer, powerful advocate, and good friend – died on 22 October, 2010. A celebration of Anne McDonald’s life will be held at 1.30 on Saturday, 13 November, at St. Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne, on the corner of Flinders and Swanston Streets, opposite Flinders Street Station. All of Anne’s friends, and those for whom her story was important, are invited to join us in remembering Anne and her unfinished fight for recognition of the right to communicate. No flowers, please. Donations to DEAL Communication Centre or Communication Rights Australia are welcome.

Sadly I cannot make it as I will be overseas on that day, but I’m sure there will be plenty of others there!