An email interview with myself following on from my ZFS/FUSE blogs has formed part of an article about ZFS/FUSE on LinuxWorld, which has also been noted on LWN.
Category Archives: Writing
Palestinian Democracy Overruled
An interesting op-ed piece from The Observer in London:
Here is how democracy works in the Alice in Wonderland world of Palestinian politics under the tutelage of the US and international community. After years of being hectored to hold elections and adopt democratic norms, a year and a half ago Palestinians duly elected Hamas with 44 per cent of the vote, ahead of Fatah on 41 per cent.
It was a good election, as former US President Jimmy Carter observed at the time, a free, fair and accurate expression of the desires of a Palestinian people sick of the uselessness, corruption and gangsterism of Fatah. The problem was that it didn’t quite reflect the wishes of Washington and the international community.
[…]
It is hard not to be cynical. Palestinian society was squeezed until it hurt – punished as a whole for voting for the wrong party.
I believe violence is wrong, and have no love for Hamas, but if you don’t have respect for peoples democratic choice when it isn’t convenient for you then there is no real hope for democratic change in the Middle East.
Found via this blog which came up via Google News.
One dead, two injured in Melbourne CBD shooting
So this is what all those police helicopters were doing overhead today. 🙁
Melbourne’s CBD is in lockdown after a gunman killed one person and wounded two more in a rush-hour shooting this morning. The shooting happened at about 8:20am on the corner of Flinders Lane and Williams Street. Witnesses said the shooter opened fire at almost point-blank range after two men tried to stop him from dragging a woman into a taxi.
LCA 2008 Call For Presentations
linux.conf.au 2008 Call For Presentations
linux.conf.au isn’t just a Linux conference. It is a technical conference about Free Software, held annually in Australasia. We invite submissions on any Free Software related subject; from Linux and the BSDs to OpenOffice.org, from networking to audio-visual magic, from deep hacks to Creative Commons.
** Please feel free to forward this email to any group **
** or individual who you feel might be interested. **
Important dates
- Submissions open: Friday, June 1 2007
- Submission deadline: Friday, July 20, 2007
- Email notifications from review committee: early September
- Conference begins: Monday, January 28 2008
Presentations being accepted
You can submit a 50 minute talk proposal, or a 2 or 4 hour tutorial proposal: tutorials are interactive and involve more audience participation. All presentations must be related to Free and Open Source Software.
How to submit
Please see http://linux.conf.au/presentations for more information on the types of presentations we’re looking for and full details of how to submit a proposal. You can even submit a video pitch!
About linux.conf.au
linux.conf.au (http://linux.conf.au/) is Australia’s annual technical conference about Free Software. Fun, informal and seriously technical, linux.conf.au draws together Free and Open Source Software developers from across the world. It will be held from January 28th to February 2nd, 2008 at The University of Melbourne.
About Linux Australia
Linux Australia (http://www.linux.org.au/) is the peak body for Linux User Groups (LUGs) around Australia, and as such represents approximately 5000 Australian Linux users and developers. Linux Australia facilitates the organisation of this international Free Software conference in a different Australasian city each year.
Court Rules Restaurant Review “Defamatory”
So now you can’t criticise bad, expensive food and service ?
The Court of Appeal agreed, finding that it was defamatory to say the food was unpalatable and the service bad.
It appears that only Justice Kirby had any common sense, saying that the jury was far more likely to know what the community standards were than the judges, saying:
Astonishing as it may seem, judges may occasionally lack a sense of irony or humour
Or even common sense, in this case..
It’s cheese Gromit, but not as we know it!
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Casu marzu:
Casu marzu (also called casu modde, casu cundhÃdu, or in Italian formaggio marcio) is a cheese found in Sardinia, Italy, notable for being riddled with live insect larvae. Casu marzu means “rotten cheese” in Sardinian and is known colloquially as maggot cheese.
I think I might just pass on this one..
Mabo versus Queensland – 15 years ago today
From the decision, handed down on June 3rd 1995.
The common law of this country would perpetuate injustice if it were to continue to embrace the enlarged notion of terra nullius and to persist in characterizing the indigenous inhabitants of the Australian colonies as people too low in the scale of social organization to be acknowledged as possessing rights and interests in land. Moreover, to reject the theory that the Crown acquired absolute beneficial ownership of land is to bring the law into conformity with Australian history.
The dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants of Australia was not worked by a transfer of beneficial ownership when sovereignty was acquired by the Crown, but by the recurrent exercise of a paramount power to exclude the indigenous inhabitants from their traditional lands as colonial settlement expanded and land was granted to the colonists. Dispossession is attributable not to a failure of native title to survive the acquisition of sovereignty, but to its subsequent extinction by a paramount power.
There is a summary of the (very long) decision at Wikipedia and a news report on the anniversary at the ABC.
Warmest May on Record
An ABC news report called “Climate report: record temperatures, not enough rain” says that:
The warmest May on record in the eastern states of the country will be the subject of a special climate statement to be released by the Bureau of Meteorology on Monday.
The eastern states of Australia have had temperatures about 2-3C above normal for the start of the year, and the Bureau of Meteorology’s head of climate analysis (Dr David Jones) said:
“If you look at Victoria, for example, there has been almost no frost despite the fact here we are at the start of winter,” he said. “That’s really almost an unheard of phenomena.”
Whilst we have had some rain recently the fact that the ground is so dry just means it’s getting sucked straight in without making it to rivers, or reservoirs..
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!
Congratulations Doctor Boakes!
Great news today, Rich Boakes has gotten his doctorate! He’s even got the photos of his viva on his thesis “Semantic Web based Log Analysis for Distributed Systems and Applications“.. 🙂
14:56 : phd awarded. 🙂
Nice one mate!
Update: Rich now has his own blog about his viva voce up.