Some time ago, in true Team Hardcore spirit, Mick put up a sign on the Honours room door.

It has a picture of me on it, and it said:

The Andy Botting Memorial Room

Mick: you know how we have that Andy Botting Memorial Room sign up on the honours room door
Andy: hehe
Andy: you told me
Andy: i still haven't seen it yet
Mick: at least 3 people have asked what Andy Botting died of
Andy: bawhahahahah
Andy: that's gold
Andy: i need to see this room
Mick: so the explanation is: "Honours will do that to you"

Now that’s funny! Big up’s to Mick

UPDATE: Needed to put up the second picture that Mick sent me. This one is great, because it has the LinuxConf sign up too.

After recently getting my insanely fast ADSL connected last week, I wanted to rebuild Gentoo on my desktop machine. I found the document Installing Gentoo 2005.0: Stage 1 NPTL on a Stage 3 Tarball on the Gentoo forums and thought it sounded quite interesting. The document outlines step-by-step how To Build a Fast and Bulletproof Gentoo System — Stage 1 NPTL Installation on a Stage 3 Tarball Using GCC 3.4.3.

The tricky part is that GCC 3.4.3 is still marked as unstable in portage, and the live-cd still contains GCC 3.3.4. This means that you have to do a stage 3 install, then do a stage 1 again over the top (something about keeping better track of installed apps in portage) and recompiling your GCC, glibc, libstdc++v3, etc a couple of times so that you end up with GCC 3.4.3 compiled by GCC 3.4.3 (and not by GCC 3.3.4 – which is available on the 2005.0 live-cd). Also, the guide provides some pretty crazy GCC optimisation flags, which seem quite stable.

After the very long process of recompiling the GCC suite a couple of times, and using the GCC flags:

CFLAGS=”-O3 -march=athlon-xp -fforce-addr -momit-leaf-frame-pointer -fomit-frame-pointer -ftracer -pipe”

I can notice a huge increase in speed over the old system, and it even seems more stable. Although, GCC flags like these reminds me a lot of The Gentoo is Rice page.

Also, I wanted to just rave about VMWare 5. I emerged the latest unstable from portage (vmware-workstation-5.0.0.13124) and it rocks! I love the new GTK2 interface, and it does some really nice stuff. One of my favourite things is the dynamic resolution of desktop size. You can resize the VMWare window, and it will automatically adjust the screen res of the OS running inside it. I don’t know if this works in Linux, but Win2k does it.

Check out the screen res

I still do feel kinda dirty by having this, but I can’t seem to get around it at big T.

Since moving in at North Melbourne, I signed us up to iiNet’s new broadband2 light plan. What makes this special is that iiNet have been installing their own DSLAMS in the close-to-city areas, including North Melbourne, and I happen to live about 1km from our exchange.

Since ADSL has been available in Australia, Telstra have regulated the speed to a maximum of 1500k. One of the reasons this may be is due to the distance limitations of ADSL, and customer expectations. The following graph from Internode sums up the speed and distance issue pretty well.

The graph shows that after about 2km, the speed of ADSL1 begins to drop. At about 4.8km, the signal drops to a max of 1500k. ADSL2 and ADSL2+ is a whole other kettle of fish…

So, iiNet and other ISP’s decided to install their own DSL infrastructure, and open these speeds right up. What I don’t understand is, why wouldn’t Telstra open their speed up if their infrastructure supports it? Even people between 2km and 4.8km would benefit from the speed increase!

Last night, I got an SMS from iiNet to tell me that my ADSL was activated. After some technical issues, I got it running, and it was FAST! I was downloading a gentoo live-cd, using a multithread downloading app called prozilla, using 16 threads, I downloaded the ISO at an average of 850k/s. It was bitchin!

And therefore, I believe that everyone should move to the city

Who would have thought… a Gentoo graphical installer! Mick, you should have tried this before rebuilding your system

Gentoo Linux Installer Project Page and the mirror.

This reminds me a little of the old Mandrake installer that I was using around the v7 mark maybe? Once this installer goes mainstream, will it mean that more people will use gentoo because they were scared off by the text based install? Only time will tell.

I was just thinking about Apache web serving statistics (go figure), and had a look at my Webalizer log. My webcam snapshot which hasn’t been updated in about 3 months is the most active item. My spider senses tell me that it’s probably Mick using the GKrellKam plugin to GKrellm. Nice one bruvva

It was a HUGE night last night. I had good intentions in going to the presenations today, but it didn’t quite work out that way. I ended up getting up at about 9:00am – 9:30am and had a shower and stuff. I may have been a little sick too
I sat in T1 for the keynote by Eben Moglen who is a lawyer working for free software. He was a real champion. I made it about half way through, then I just had to go home. I went back to bed and missed almost the whole day after I finally got up at 4pm. Nick, a guy who we met here from Sydney said that we woke him at at 5am when we were coming home. Apparently we (probably just me) made a heap of noise. Ooops. Sorry to everyone I woke up! The four of us just got back from Hungry Jacks in Belconnen where we cleaned up with the vouchers. I feel so much better now!

Looks like we’re going out again tonight before we go home tomorrow morning. I think I might not drink tonight…..

Here’s some photos LCA2005 photos from Tuddy and Josh, if you’re interested

• Tuddy’s LinuxConf photo gallery
• Josh’s LinuxConf photo gallery

From the Linux.conf.au Wiki there is plenty of stuff, including some links to some people’s photo galleries. Here’s two that I thought looked pretty good.

• Samuel Gordon Stewart’s LinuxConf photos
• John Hewitt’s LinuxConf photos

Funny. Very funny night. Here’s a photo of me.

Horses… and more horses. Being poured into sideways glasses… and drunk by my peeps in pubs. Carlton Draught. Made from Beer. Not stolen at all from some random Irish pub in Canberra.

Also, before I got to bed (it’s currently 5:12am!!! OMG WTF BBQ!) the Cats rule for a kick ass win over Port. Boo hoo for Tredrea for not getting a free kick from Scarlett right in the last seconds of the game. Woooo hooooo my nizzle.

Unfortunatly, I still haven’t won one of the IBM X40 ThinkPads that the LCA organisers have been giving away. I still haven’t given up hope though. There is one left tomorrow, so fingers crossed.

This morning I went to the keynote by Andrew Morton, who is the Linux 2.6 kernel maintainer. Although he wasn’t much of a speaker, he was still interesting. Talked alot about the new development cycle of the kernel which the LWN guy talked about the day before.

Going to play some pool tonight and drink lots of beers. Later fools!

The actual conference started on Wednesday, with the tutorials. The four of us (Me, Timmy, Tuddy, and Josh) went to the PHP session. Timmy and I stayed for the first bit, but left soon after. It was kinda dry, and Rasmus was talking lots about the differences in PHP5 compared to PHP4. Looks like they have implemented a heap of Java-style OO stuff.

In the afternoon, Timmy and I went to Building User Interfaces with Video and 3D Graphics For Fun and Profit!. It was run by Wayne Piekarski, who is a research guy from Uni SA, and was playing a lot with augmented reality, and overlaying 3D video over normal video to create an half-virtual world. He is using lots cool stuff, but I haven’t got the energy to write about it all. Have a look at Timmy’s blog for that

That night, the four of us cooked a BBQ dinner which ROCKED!

Sausage sizzle my nizzle!

Today (Thursday) we heard an awesome presenation by Tridge. He was basically talking about the software engineering practices that he’s using in Samba, which include: code generation, static error checking, runtime error checking and other stuff. He mentioned at two things which changed the way that he codes are Valgrind and talloc.

Next we had Tracking 2.6: what the kernel developers are up to by Jonathan Corbet, who writes for Linux Weekly News. He talked about what has been going on the 2.6 kernel, and about how Linus is not doing the whole odd number kernel revision number for unstable/testing kernels. Apparently, there has been a shift from using a devel kernel series for implementing new kernel changes to putting them straight in the 2.6 series, mainly to get more mainstream users testing the new features.

Also, I forgot to put this on my last post, but we got the place in North Melboune that we applied for! Fo shizzle my nizzle!

I like my women, like I like my software

Discuss.

I dragged myself out of bed at about 8am this morning. Needed to get there early for the GNOME miniconf. It was really awesome to actually put faces to the blogs of some of these GNOME guys, that I have been reading so much about on Planet GNOME.

Luis Villa started the morning off by talking about the issues of making a GNOME live-cd based on Ubuntu Linux, and what would happen if the Ubuntu guys suddenly started changing stuff, for example, stop packaging some of the top GNOME apps. We had a quick demo of the wobbly windows thing and then Robert Love stepped up and gave a bit of a demo on Beagle and F-Spot. These are two very awesome apps.

Beagle is for GNOME what Spotlight is for Mac. It also helps that the guy who wrote the indexing engine for Spotlight has now written the engine for Beagle. It allows you to search through anything on your machine, including emails, address book, IM’s, Blogs (using Liferea), files and heaps of other stuff. I think it’s still a bit rough, but it has a lot of potential. Also I think that beagle will become the new backend for Nat Friedman’s Dashboard.

F-Spot is another mono app (like Beagle), but is an all-in-one photo importing and cataloging system. I haven’t had much of a chance to play with it yet, but from what Robert Love was showing off, it looks pretty sweet.

Me, Timmy, Tuddy and Josh took the arvo off, had some lunch and played pool here at Burgmann College (where we are staying). Later, we went into the City (which is soooo dead) and had some Kebabs. Very unsatisfying. Don’t ever eat at one of the Ali Baba stores, you’ll be disappointed!

I’m going to take it easy tonight and maybe get to bed a little earlier tonight and go to the PHP presentation tomorrow morning.

This is us at Linux.conf.au