Category Archives: Writing

Writing

VPAC is looking for an Operations Manager

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Don’t panic, this isn’t about me.. 😉 No agencies please!

The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC) is looking for an Operations Manager:

We are looking for a dynamic leader with excellent IT knowledge to lead and manage our High Performance Computing (HPC) team based at VPAC (housed at RMIT University in Carlton).

Your ideal background would include management of similar teams and the provision of strong hands-on experience, coupled with full responsibility for technical infrastructure. The Operations Manager will build and maintain strategic relationships with key stakeholders such as Victorian Universities and national initiatives such as ARCS, NCI and ANDS.

Reporting to the Chief Executive Officer you will be a key member of the VPAC Management Team and lead a growing team of around 15 Systems Administrators and Developers. As VPAC is aiming for industry best practice and holds ISO accreditation it will be expected that you will have worked in similar environments that provide a process based approach to IT service management.

A senior level remuneration package will be negotiated with the successful applicant. To obtain a copy of the position description and/or to apply for this exciting opportunity please email recruitment@vpac.org

There is also a copy of the PD on the VPAC employment positions web page.

As ever please contact VPAC recruitment, not me, about this position..

CSamuel.org Now IPv6 Enabled

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Well thanks to those nice people at Rimuhosting for migrating this Xen host to a 2.6.27.x kernel and pointing my at the Hurricane Electric IPv6 TunnelBroker.net service this blog is now IPv6 enabled (as is Donna’s site, blog and podcast)! Slowly updating DNS for all the other sites hosted here but I’ll finish that off tomorrow night.

Congrats to Brian for being the first person to hit the site by IPv6! 🙂

Tsunami Warning for South East Australia (updated – no impact)

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Just got back from a talk Donna was doing to find that the BoM has issued a tsunami warning for Victoria after a large earthquake near New Zealand.

An undersea earthquake of magnitude 7.9 has occurred at 07:22 PM EST on Wednesday 15 July 2009 at 45.960S , 166.470E off W. COAST OF S. ISLAND, N.Z. Sea level observations have confirmed a tsunami has been generated.

ABC News says:

The weather bureau says there is a potential tsunami threat to New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria, Norfolk Island and Lord Howe Island.

No risk to us, being well inland, but hopefully those nearer the coast will be OK.

Update: Well it was tiny – 774melbourne (ABC local radio) on Twitter reported:

774melbourne Correction: TV NZ reports the NZ wave was around 17cm.
774melbourne Observations of a very small Tsunami in Tas. No major land impact expected.

Linux Based Open-PC Project Launched

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The KDE News website has the announcement of a new Open-PC project to create a PC shipped with Linux and other FOSS software. Why another ? Well, as they say:

The project was initiated in response to the lack of quality in the Free Software-based hardware solutions currently on the market. As many reviewers and end-users have stated, the pre-installed software used by hardware vendors generated a bad image for Free Software with potentially interested end-users. Much of the software was buggy and not widely tested and device drivers were often unstable, non-free or not available at all.

There’s a lot of questions to answer yet – what form factor, what software, etc – so they are running a survey to try and gauge peoples thoughts. The site says there is a second survey planned for a later date, presumably focusing in on options once they’ve got general ideas. The other interesting thing is that they’ve apparently already got a major PC manufacturer lined up and they are aiming to be shipping by late 2009 with part of the profits going to funding FOSS projects.

There is more information in Frank Karlitschek’s presentation (PDF) from the Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria.

Google Chrome OS

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I suspect that the world and its dog will have heard about this by now, but in case you’ve somehow missed the announcement from Google..

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

If (and I emphasis if) this takes off then MS might be in for something of a rough ride in the Netbook market. The Netbook vendors have been unable to stand up to the MS monopoly with Linux on Netbooks until now, perhaps Google can start to rebalance the marked a little ?