luv-talk October 2014

luv-talk@luv.asn.au

13 participants
14 discussions

East West Link - contacting the government

by Peter Ross

Hi all, Labor opposing East West Link - good news, at least for me. There is no contract signed yet - so all uncertainty claims are quite strange. It is up to the government in power to create certainty - by waiting with the contracts until after the election. The process is before the courts because the link did not go through a proper planning, assessment and consultation process yet. The lack of process created the uncertainty. So the government can correct it by honouring process. This would make it a decision made by a government which asked for a mandate from the electorate. Below my letter to Terry Mulder (terence.mulder(a)parliament.vic.gov.au). Maybe you would like to contact him too? Thanks Peter Dear Terry, the Labor decision to dump the East West Link is a good one for us in Melbourne. Please cancel the project if you care for Victoria. It may save hundred of millions or billions of dollars of claims when the project finally ends in the bin, as it should. The East West Link is not a properly planned project. I contacted you before about my concerns. Some of the events and claims are truly bizarre if you are familiar with the area as I am. I work in Kensington. I frequently use the bike track along the Mooney Ponds Creek you want to overshadow with another bunch of lanes. I also spend a lot of time waiting for and in trains from and to Craigieburn and Upfield which never go on time. It is not a surprise that the whole case is before the courts. The rush to lock it in resulted in a shoddy process which defies logic and did never satisfy requirements of proper consulting with the public. Even now, the design is still work in progress, and some of the "corrections" over time looked as professional as me designing a model train with my son. How can this being assessed? How can the community have a sufficient input in this process? How can you sign contracts with this uncertainty? It will be a liability for any future government and all Victorians. A tender process where you continue with one bidder only is another detail not making sense. I never do that if I want a good deal. You were elected with the Liberals claiming support for the Metro Rail Link. You did not advance the project. Instead it became another train wreck of "planning on the run". Please bring that back into action instead of tinkering with the East West Link if you want to do something for Victoria. Thank you Peter [contact details]

6 years, 9 months

(no subject)

by David E Payne

>From 7pm tonight, as well as their AGM SAGEau Victoria will also be discussing "Meta-Data, Surveillance, SysAdmins and the SAGE-AU Code of Ethics" www.meetup.com/SAGE-AU-VIC/events/214711562/ Dav* -

7 years, 6 months

Windows joke of the day: When all is mangled together

by Peter Ross

.. you have this: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-AU/windows7/windows-update-error-0x80243004 "If you receive Windows Update error 0x80243004 when Windows Update checks for new updates, the error means that the notification icon for Windows Update has disappeared. This prevents Windows Update from installing new updates." I wait until the error happens on Debian, maybe as "Cron cannot run because there is no gnome-cron-applet-icon in the current user session" The current direction of the Linux ecosystem and discussions ("Linux desktop needs Gnome and Gnome needs systemd and systemd grabs udev and.. in short Gnome=systemd=Linux") makes it a quite likely scenario in the future. How did the Windows update error appear? Maybe one developer wrote the code and released it. He had an Update icon on its desktop to send the important message "The update is running" to. After release they got complaints from obnoxious people called users. The developer was faced with the bug. Solution: "Make the icon mandatory and crate an error code!" Brilliant, just reminds me of .. nevermind. Regards Peter

7 years, 6 months

Fw: Re: All your base are belong to us

by David E Payne

From: David E Payne <spyder.king(a)yahoo.com.au> Subject: Re: [luv-talk] All your base are belong to us SNIP " German language source code comments are not acceptable .." "... LibreOffice started as StarOffice in Hamburg, Germany. Ich protestiere against this hideous attempt to uproot the software ;-) ..." SNIP _______________________________________________ See folks! That's why so called free software is anything but! Those filthy, sexually deviant, commie, moslem, NAZI spys have tried to hide in Liberal sorry "LibreOffice";- a counterfeit version of the good old American Microsoft Office which only contains coding style conventions from freedom loving Hungarian Office workers. you should only use new shrink-wrapped and sanitized software from great American companies like Apple and Microsoft. If anyone tries to get you to try something else, do what Austin, Texas middle-school teacher Karen did & report them to the authorities! Or as the Yellow Lord of the Seeth ("Lemongraß,") might say...."UNASSEPTABLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLE! GOOGOOLPLEX YEARS GOOGLEPLEX NAUGHTY CORNER NO TRIAL!!!!!! Dav*

7 years, 7 months

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD in the FreeBSD quarterly status report

by Peter Ross

Hi all, below from the last quarterly FreeBSD report in regards of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. Just stumbled across it, maybe worth sharing. Regards Peter https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2014-07-2014-09.html Debian GNU/kFreeBSD URL: https://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD URL: https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/ Contact: Debian GNU/kFreeBSD Maintainers <debian-bsd at lists.debian.org> Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a software distribution produced by Debian, based on the kernel of FreeBSD (instead of Linux) and GNU libc. Around 90% of Debian's software archive has now been ported to it, for amd64 and i386 architectures. It was first released with Debian "squeeze" as a development preview in 2011, featured again in the "wheezy" release, and hopes to be part of the official Debian "jessie" release in early 2015. In 2003 there were several attempts to bootstrap a minimal Debian system upon FreeBSD or NetBSD kernels, some also trying to use the native BSD libc. The most successful and longest-lived of these was a "GNU/FreeBSD" chroot bootstrapped by Robert Millan with the GNU libc that most of Debian's core packages were designed to work with. The "k" was later added to the name to reflect that it takes just the kernel from FreeBSD, with most everything else from the Debian archive. We do also package some FreeBSD utilities as needed to boot it and take advantage of certain features. FreeBSD support within GNU libc is now mostly maintained by Petr Salinger, who recently converted it from an older threading implementation based on LinuxThreads to NPTL, which is much more compatible with the software we run. We have the GNU compiler toolchain as well as Clang 3.4; Perl, Python and Ruby; and OpenJDK 7, based the on work done in FreeBSD's own ports collection. We use linprocfs for /proc because much of Debian GNU software expects this. The Linuxulator is not needed at all, but could make for interesting future uses. Porting work mostly focuses now on individual packages' build systems, on preprocessor #ifdefs that do not clearly distinguish between kernel and libc, or fixing testsuites' presumptions of Linux-specific behaviour. In the course of this, we even found the odd FreeBSD kernel bug, including EN-14:06 / CVE-2014-3880. GNU/kFreeBSD has already seen production use, mostly on webservers, email servers and file servers; one such machine has 475 days' uptime receiving around 10,000 emails per day. It has become increasingly practical for desktop/laptop uses thanks largely to new features coming in from FreeBSD 10.1. KMS graphics mean that 3D gaming and high-definition video playback perform brilliantly. We have great support for Intel graphics chipsets, but only an older nvidia Xorg driver. For radeonkms, Robert Millan was able to add firmware-loading support so that non-free binary blobs can be packaged separately, outside of Debian's main archive. Proprietary drivers are not useful to us as they would need to be rebuilt from source to port them. vt(4) was necessary for KMS to not break VT switching. But it has also improved the console's handling of non-ASCII character sets and we do look forward to having console fonts for non-Latin scripts. We have supported ZFS for some time, even as a root/boot filesystem (using GRUB 2; Robert Millan added the ZFS support which now FreeBSD itself is able to benefit from). Enhancements coming from OpenZFS, especially LZ4 compression, in combination with better memory management and GEOM improvements, mean that "jessie" should see a noticeable performance boost. debian-installer already allows for pre-seeded, unattended installs and there are PXE-bootable install images available. virtio drivers are new to the "jessie" release, enabling support for some public clouds. We are now compiling Xen domU and PVHVM support into our standard kernel builds. We already have userland tools to configure the PF firewall. As an experiment, we are compiling in IPSEC support by default for the upcoming release, and would like to see it put to good use against present-day privacy and security threats. We try to support the use of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD inside a jail on a FreeBSD host system, and hopefully vice-versa. Some of the jail utilities are not yet packaged, but we have documentation on the Debian Wiki on how to set up jails on "wheezy", which are fully functional. The init system we currently use is a parallel System V-style init, although Debian GNU/Linux will be switching away from that to systemd. For the next release we may switch to OpenRC, which is mostly ported already. Not having systemd or udev means that we will be unable to support GNOME 3.14 in the upcoming release. We have very good support for XFCE, also have KDE, LXDE and the recently-packaged MATE desktop environment. The Debian software archive provides many alternative window managers for Xorg such as IceWM, dozens of terminal emulators, and so on. As we approach the freeze of the Debian "jessie" release, we would love for anyone to test GNU/kFreeBSD, try to use it for whatever would be useful to you, and let us know what issues you run into. Ask for help on our project mailing list or IRC channel, and let us know of any bugs you find. We still have time to fix problems before release, and we would be happy to improve our documentation at any time.

7 years, 7 months

want a Dell PowerEdge 4400?

by Douglas Ray

On a nearby nature strip; if anyone wants it, I'll retrieve and store till Sunday. You must be able to pick up from Templestowe by Sunday. Unknown condition. *No power supply modules*. Has full complement of scsi disks (7 * 36G raid + 2 boot disks). Has key. http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/product-support/product/poweredge… Douglas

7 years, 7 months

All your base are belong to us

by Steve Roylance

from G+ this morning -------------------------------- Lennart Poettering Shared publicly - 04:39 German language source code comments are not acceptable in the +systemd source tree, according to our coding style conventions. In preparation for merging LibreOffice into systemd I have thus started translating a few of their source code comments from German into English. --------------------------------

7 years, 7 months

A Digression Concerning Bugs was Re: The rise or fall of systemd

by Rohan McLeod

trentbuck(a)gmail.com (Trent W. Buck) wrote: > "Peter Ross" <Petros.Listig(a)fdrive.com.au> > writes: > >> to start with Douglas Adams: "There is a theory which states that if ever >> >> >> I have this sometimes in my mind if I look at Linux related development. >> Especially in the area of desktops, btw. > I refer my learnèd colleague to The Kid: > http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html From thinking about the failure to remove all the bugs before the new version ; and the creation of new ones in the next; I started wondering whether anyone, was taking a fundamentally different approach; to " secure and bug free OS's". After all as OS's become larger and languages more powerful; then if error rates per 1000 lines of code stay roughly constant (to err is human ?); then source-code errors and security holes will become more numerous as the source increases in size ?; The prospect seems to be, we may never be certain that all the catastrophic ones a have been found, and (for example)our airplane won't fall out of the sky under rare and specific circumstances ? By chance I came across the following idea: http://files.qubes-os.org/files/doc/arch-spec-0.3.pdf I was wondering about peoples thoughts about this and the general problem ? regards Rohan Mcleod

7 years, 7 months

Re: [luv-talk] All your base are belong to us

by Peter Ross

From: "Steve Roylance" <roylance(a)corplink.com.au> > > from G+ this morning > -------------------------------- > Lennart Poettering > Shared publicly - 04:39 > > German language source code comments are not acceptable in the +systemd > source tree, according to our coding style conventions. In preparation > for merging LibreOffice into systemd I have thus started translating a > few of their source code comments from German into English. > -------------------------------- Maybe we all got it wrong ans systemd is a distribution slightly more religiously motivated than others and not an init replacement. LibreOffice started as StarOffice in Hamburg, Germany. Ich protestiere against this hideous attempt to uproot the software;-) LibreOffice is just a word processor which wanted to be portable and compatible with MS office. It says a lot that it is still the "de facto non-MS office" standard and even contains some German comments written 30 years ago. Many tried to write "big replacements" for particular software and failed.. Regards Peter

7 years, 7 months

Events among those coming soon I think likely to be of interest to some of you.

by David E Payne

. > To: micommem(a)googlegroups.com > > Tonight 2014 October 8th 6pm > The Wearable Technologies Australia and Melbourne Wearables > Meetup are > combining into one meetup group. > http://www.meetup.com/Wearable-Technologies-Australia/events/200924722/ > > We expect you'll be wearing your favourite wearable tech > product. If you've > ditched one because it didn't meet your expectations, > definitely bring it > along. > > <http://www.meetup.com/Wearable-Technologies-Australia/events/200924722/> > > *Grants* > > Business Victoria's Technology Challenges program is > currently accepting > proposals. Three of the Technology Challenges seek wearable > solutions. The > program has three stages offering up to $75,000 for > Feasibility Study, $1 > Million for Proof of Concept and $500,00 for Market Ready > stage. > > http://www.business.vic.gov.au/grants-and-assistance/programs/driving-busin… > <http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.business.vic.gov.au%2Fgrants-a…> > > ***************************************************************** > > ALSO Tonight 2014 October 8th 6pm . Nicole Foss "How to > build resilient > communities" <http://www.meetup.com/footscraymakerlab/events/211052582/> > > http://www.meetup.com/footscraymakerlab/events/211052582/ > part of City of > Maribyrnong's "Challenge to Change" program. > > http://challengetochange.info/ > > ******************************************************************* > > 2014 October 11th 10:30am Saturday > > Melbourne Zombie Shuffle > > http://www.meetup.com/The-Melbourne-Sci-Fi-Fantasy-Meetup-Group/events/2073… > > ******************************************************************* > > 2014 October 11th Saturday & 12th Sunday > http://www.melbournemeccanoexhibition.com.au/ > > ******************************************************************* > 2014 October 12 2:00pm Sunday MESH Makers Meeting in > Ringwood > > https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/e9b158z2rr4m/?&v=c&th=148e3ce604070e04 > > ******************************************************************* > 2014 October 17 Friday to 19th Sunday Grand Designs Live > ATA sent me details of a free double pass ticket offer which > seems to be > from the show organisers so may be for anyone in the know. > If not, someone > should explain this. > ------------------------------------------------------------ > Simply visit https://tickets.granddesignslive.com.au > <https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Ftickets.granddesignslive.com.au&…> > and > follow the steps below to redeem your tickets: > 1. Enter promo code SANCTUARY > 2. Follow the prompts to select which event and days you'd > like to attend > 3. Select 1 complimentary double pass > 4. Proceed to check out (free of charge) and print your > tickets > > > *One double pass redeemable per person. Not to be used in > conjunction with > any other offer. > > https://tickets.granddesignslive.com.au > <https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Ftickets.granddesignslive.com.au&…> > > > ****************************************************************************************** > > 2014 October 19th Sunday 2-5pm > > > > > *Foostcray Maker Lab - Launch for Co-design Members (& > Open Day.) (I think > my recent mistyping was more apt. > "Footscary" http://www.footscraymakerlab.com > <http://www.footscraymakerlab.com> * ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Dav* > "Some of the above comments seem to be critical of Allen > Shaheen for > being a slimy, incompetent, "MBA-weilding moron" with no > qualifications whatsoever to run a software product company. > As > someone who has worked with him, I'd just like to set the > record > straight: Allen does not have an MBA. > > -- Ex ArsDigita, April 25, 2001" > http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/ >

7 years, 7 months

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luv-talk October 2014