America to Accidentaly Prohibit Buying Computers for Dept of Homeland Security ?

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Quoted from CNet, found via the infamous /.


The legislation was authored by Rep. Don Manzullo, an Illinois Republican, and passed by the House on Wednesday. It would require more than 50 percent of the components in any end product procured by the department to be mined, produced or manufactured inside the United States.


“With this purchasing prohibition, I guess (the department) will have to learn to do without computers and cell phones,” ITAA President Harris Miller said in a statement. “I cannot think of a single U.S. manufacturer that could meet this 50 percent threshold for these devices, and I doubt that those charged with protecting our safety here at home can either.”

The ITAA is the Information Technology Association of America.

Australian Autumn

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Whilst Australia is not perfect it’s really, really nice to come back to autumn here from late spring in the UK and find that the weather is warmer and sunnier than any day you’ve had in the UK for the last 3 weeks.

21C, cloudless skies, not a lot of wind or people.. Fab! 🙂

Back in the sun!

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After 3 weeks in the UK for CCGrid 2005 plus Donna’s talks, not to mention a slightly early celebration for my fathers 80th (we had to fly back the day before alas)! For his birthday we presented him with a Clarks Pie with lit candle on top as a tidy treat for him!

Unfortunately whilst we were away our ADSL modem got reset as part of a blackout here and came back up in the wrong configuration, which stopped our email working here at csamuel.org, plus the Nobody Nowhere and Auties.org websites. Despite sterling work by our house sitter via an hour long phone call to me in a car park on my mobile I couldn’t properly diagnose what was wrong and it was only when we got back last night that I was able to figure out what was wrong and revert it to the correct configuration.

Unfortunately as part of “fixing it” I streamlined some of the firewall rules by merging some together, forgetting that the rule I was merging them into only applied to a single class C subnet, so even though ADSL was up and running email came to a screeching halt. I spotted my thinko today and corrected it, leading to a new law: Never Change Firewall Rules When Jetlagged.

Now it seems like everything is tickety-boo again, so if you’ve emailed me or Donna and had it bounce then can you please retry it!

Dumb LCA Keysigning Oops :-)

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Found the reason why my MD5 sums didn’t match anyone elses! I stupidly had written down the MD5 checksum for the file containing the MD5 checksum for the key signing list, and not the MD5 for the file I wanted to!

The actual MD5 checksums were correct.. ENOCAFFEINE!

Back from LCA!

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Well, we’re back from Canberra and LCA 2005 went really well, and I even survived presenting at the Clustering Mini-Conference which was worth the trip in itself.

Anyway, no time to write more at the moment, been very busy fixing up the new mailsystem on one of these (with 128MB RAM and a 40GB hard disk) running Gentoo Linux using Maia Mailguard to control Amavisd-new with SpamAssassin and Clam Anti-Virus.

Just wish I’d been able to afford the model with 256MB when I’d bought it!

Off to Linux.Conf.Au 2005

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Well today we’re off to Linux.Conf.Au 2005, and Monday 4:10pm I’m going to be presenting at the Clustering Mini-Conference with a talk called:

Herding Cats – Clustering with Linux at VPAC

The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC) is Victoria’s
peak HPC organisation, and Linux based clustering has become the mainstay
of our HPC facilities.


As VPAC’s Deputy System’s Manager I will be taking you on a tour of the
clustering technologies we use and how Linux and Free/Open Source software
helps us meet the needs of our users (and where it doesn’t). Finally,
we will take a peek at what promise future technologies may hold for
our organisation.

Wish me luck!

United Revised Church Of Google

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I’ve been bouncing the idea of a Church of Google around at work for a while now, but of course consulting Google itself leads me to the knowledge that I am not innovating (again). There is already a Church of Google, but they hide away on Orkut, shame on them!

I hereby declare that there has been a schism, and the Church of Google has forked. We now have the United Revised Church Of Google (URCOG) (v0.42beta)!

All you need to do is:

  • Be faithful to Google
  • Blog occasionally about how Google has helped you in your life

In the meantime here are some a collection of deep and/or silly thoughts in relation to Google from 2003 from Philipp Lenssen’s blog coverage of Google..

Follow Up to “Administrator” Post

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Well, I got an email from Todd in reponse to my posting his story about not being able to contact me. Todd runs the Fall Creek Place Community website that looks like a nice idea, an attempt to help foster a real community through the web (in addition to real life, needless to say!).

Turns out what he was after was not quite related to the xBackends.php script that generates my RSS feed, but the little HTML tags that I used to tell Firefox and Konqueror/Akregator that there is an RSS feed associated with the page that they are viewing, and so to show the little RSS indicator at the bottom of the frame.

I wrote about it before, somewhere, but to recap here’s the little HTML tag that does the magic.