Okay, so I nearly never read slashdot comments… but sometime’s they’re really funny (and often really stupid). This one caught my eye:
I hear Kentucky has already started the port of Creationism to Windows. Lets hope the right team delivers first.
MemberDB – A Membership Database
I released 0.3 today. Contains all the election code as used in the LA 2005 Election.
Yes, there’s known bugs in this release.. check bugzilla for current ones.
Linux Australia members can log into the membership site and view the preliminary results of the 2005 election.
Yes, I took images on my camera phone. I feel dirty, they look so bad. This is scaled down so it looks okay. Behind all those ethernet and fibre channel cables are some machines that we used to test CXFS on when I was at SGI.
When I was working at SGI, I bought a camera phone. So what do I then go and take a picture of? The insides of an Indy!
You can even see the bottom of Owen’s O2 at the top left!
Let’s see if this works…. strategically placed pants….
Got the two cards today. Ordered from i-Tech (mob in Sydney, had it delivered here). Were $59AUD each (plus shipping, which was $15 for the two of them).
Really painless setup!
One was for the Ubuntu system my mum uses, the other for the Windows system my brother uses. Well, the Ubuntu setup was easier than the windows one (try to get Windows to tell you the MAC address of the adapter… well… *of course* it’s under “Support” – where else would it be?).
I got the drivers from CVS from http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com as the CVS ones have a few more fixes (makes it easier to build for one).
I got the following packages:
build-essential
cvs
linux-source-(whatever version it was).
cd /usr/src
tar xfj linux-source-whatever.tar.bz2
ln -s /lib/modules/the-right-version-number/build /usr/src/linux-whatever
cd /usr/src/linux-whatever
cp /boot/config-whatever .config
make modules
(as long as it builds the first few you’re fine and can ctrl-c the rest)
then i got the CVS drivers and built it like their docs say (make with the -C parameters).
depmod -a
then used the GUI tool to set it up (the Ubuntu one). The ralink graphical utility (install the kde-devel package to build it) lets you monitor link quality etc.
so, success!
This has been gathering in my brain, I figure I should write it all down:
X
GNOME (note that this is only long because I love it so much and spend so much time using it)
General Utils
there’s more… i just can’t be bothered writing any more at the moment :)
If anyone wants to know my really brute force method of getting rid of comment spam, shoot us a mail. I’ll send you a script that will just about solve the problem for you.
I’d publish it… but then we’d have the spammers trying to work around it. This sucks.
I still maintain it should be legal to kill them.
Yes, that goes against my usual more non-harming ways (I’m vegan okay!) – it just seems like the morally correct thing to do with them….
It’s been 35 degrees C for a while now. It’s a bit warm.
Hot day + a cold beer = good
(inspired by jimw talking about it on Planet MySQL)
I take a bit of a different approach…
I’ve got directories for 4.0, 4.1 and 5.0, and within them, i have clones of the main ndb tree (called ndb, so there’s a path like “MySQL/5.0/ndb”). I don’t ever edit in this tree, it’s my clean one. I use it for pulling and pushing.
I then ‘bk clone -lq ndb foobar’ (where foobar is what i’m doing, or ndb-foobar, depending on mood). If i have a seperate part to foobar (e.g. stage2 foobar), i’d clone it off the foobar tree (e.g. ‘bk clone -lq foobar foobar2’). The idea being I can work on stage 2 before stage 1 is pushed (and find any problems with stage 1 and pull before i pull into stage2 and can no longer do work).
i use the -q option (quiet) to bk often because printing out a few thousand lines to screen tends to slow things down.
It would be interesting to investigate ways to improve hardlinking performance as a clone takes longer than it really should (read about 20000 inodes, write about 20000 inodes). Although (i haven’t checked this) – a clone probably *copies* the checked out files, not link them. So it’s really copy about 10000 files and link about 10000 files.
A ‘du -sh’ on a 5.0-ndb clone says 232MB. After ‘bk -r clean’ (i.e. have no files checked out) is 136MB. i.e. you are saving 136MB for cloning with the -l option. Now, if BK (and us really), we’d check out files always as read-only, which would also be hard linked across clones. This would further save 96MB per clone. When you check out a file for writing, it then creates a copy of it – so you only use the disk space for the files your editing (and only use the disk space for the sfile when you check in).
“What about directory disk usage?” I hear you ask. Well, a MySQL 5.0 clone has 1053 directories. So, for each clone, we’re using 1053 inodes. On XFS with 256 byte inodes (the default) this works out to be 263kb of disk space. Let’s consider a bad case where we need another block of disk space for each of these directories (to hold all those directory entries for those 10000 files). This would mean 4MB of disk usage.
For a really clever bk (and config) you could have a clean tree of 232MB and each clone only take up less than 5MB of disk space. As it is, the checked out files aren’t hard linked, so each clone takes up an extra 96MB of disk space.
In essence, we’re using 19 times more disk space per clone than we need to.
Now, if ccache is really clever (i don’t know if it is) it would hardlink object files so we use even *less* disk space for a compiled tree (a ‘du -sh’ on a compiled max-debug tree is about 1GB).
Why have I gone on about this so much? Well, disk is cheap – except in laptops where replacing disk or getting a big one isn’t easy or cheap.
Also, backup is expensive, slow and awkward.
maybe at some later time i’ll talk about the theoretical IO usage of some things….
Given the growth and success of LA it has become apparent that the the way the managing committee is run needs to be changed. We need to become effective in concentrating volunteer effort. Committee members have taken a lot and they have been getting burnt out. Reaching out and engaging others in the community is crucial to the future of LA. This includes improving communication with conference organisers, the community at large and inside the committee itself.
Several specific tactics I plan include: reducing the number of formal committee meetings (reducing administrative burden), implementing efficient ways to decrease the length of meetings while increasing the amount achieved, implementing a better way to track tasks that we want to achieve and the progress made on them, starting informal conference calls to help co-ordinate projects, committee thoughts (so that everyone is on the same page) and community participation. Last but not least, it is the main goal of LA to make sure that linux.conf.au runs and is a success.
For those who don’t know:
Stewart lives in Melbourne, breathes code, has been VP of LA for two years and works for MySQL AB.
attacked outstanding bugs for 0.3 release today. only 2 or three left now (well.. i should fix another one but i really do have to start chanting “release early, release often” louder).
things are on track there at least.. .well… sort of… :)
Have set up a bugzilla. Mainly for memberdb stuff at the moment, will probably put other things there as they need it.
http://bugzilla.flamingspork.com
say no more.
Operational Dynamics – Reference – Software – Cool hacks – slashtime
Arguably better – i’m using it now.
The funeral was on Saturday. It was held at Robert Blackwood Hall at Monash – and the auditorium was just about full – and it holds a bit over 1,200 people – which was enough to totally overwhelm her family. They thought it would be big, but there were wide eyes!
There were lots of familiar faces – and every one of them wished that there was catching up being done over better events. The standard greeting of “How are you?” was constantly postfixed with, “well, apart from”.
but there was laughter and tears – and stuff that was just sooo Becky it couldn’t be anyone else.
(these people left notes after they found my blog entry – it just took me a while to moderate due to the horrible thing that is comment spam.):
miranda
jess
Therase Weeks
ella fortin
Anonymous
thanks for your words.
I will write more over the coming days – there is so much to do and so little time.
Rebecca Tomilson – you will always be missed.
as soon as i close the door to my office (to block out the inevitable noise from the rest of the house) – the office temperature goes up a couple of degrees fairly quickly. I guess this is my punishment for buying a Pentium IV.
Opening the window is working okay at the moment… although I’m not looking forward to when it hits 40 degrees.
I think i’m going to have to get a little portable cooler. Evaporative cooling works pretty well in Melbourne, and since it’s significantly cheaper than full on air conditioning – i’m thinking of getting one of those.
Somebody needs to do this for the Australian Business Register web site.
“Help” on the forms for registering for an Australian Business Number and GST can be “if yes, click yes”. Oh really… I thought i’d just click ‘no’ when I really meant ‘yes’.
Plus, it can ask you all sorts of strange questions that befuddle the reader if they have no real idea on the fine details of australian taxation law (i have no such knowledge, and don’t care for it).
And they have a field in the form – “declaration completion date”. which is, (from the help) “The declaration
I’d like to know why they can’t auto-complete that field. Today is probably a safe bet.
On the brighter side of life – talking to someone at ING Direct was a lot more pleasurable.
and one more thing…. the ‘Exit’ button at the end of the ABN process doesn’t work. I’ll never get out now! NOOOOOOO!
hrrm… grrr… at 192kbits VBR using lame.. still hear them.
maybe i’m going to have to encode everything at 256 minimum or something.
buying good headphones can sometimes be a curse as well as a blessing.