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Free Textbooks

I am going to make some suggestions to a company that might possibly sponsor development of free electronic text books for schools (suitable for running on an OLPC machine).

I would appreciate any suggestions for things I should include. I will make my suggestions as a blog post summarising all input I receive and send […]

Suse and LCA

I previously wrote about how I gave a talk about SE Linux at a conference spot when a talk about AppArmor was scheduled. It turned out that the Suse people had notified the LCA people some time in advance about the fact that John would not be attending the conference. The LCA people had removed […]

My LCA Talk

Last year at LCA Crispin Cowan suggested to me that I make a joint offer of a combined tutorial on SE Linux and AppArmor as a way of publicly comparing the two technologies. I ended up not accepting the challenge, among other things I had a long-term project going in production in early December that […]

Talking Fast

My previous post about my LCA mini-conf talk received an interesting comment from Christopher Neugebauer.

He said that he had some trouble understanding me because I speak quickly, he wasn’t the first person to make that complaint (it’s the most common complaint I receive). If a talk goes well then I have a lot to […]

Change of Rules for the Blogging Contest

Due to the lack of entries so far I am amending the rules. It is no longer required that an entry be on the blog of the person who submitted it. Being on any blog that is aggregated by the conference Planet will do.

This is known as a “guest post“. All it requires is […]

LCA 2008 Security Miniconf

Today I gave a talk about Debian security at the security mini-conf of LCA.

Before I started the talk I asked for suggestions as to how to get more entries in my security blogging contest [0]. During the talk I asked for suggestions as to how to get more people involved in security development. One […]

Write Intent Bitmaps

When previously writing about how I partition disks [1] I mentioned that I use smaller RAID partitions than the maximum size to reduce reconstruction time in the event of a crash.

Linux software RAID has a feature known as write intent bitmaps which means that every time some data is about to be written the […]

Other Planet LCA 2008

The Planet installation for the Linux.Conf.Au (the main Linux conference in Australia and one of the biggest and best Linux conferences in the world) is designed to only syndicate posts about the conference. I think that this is a bad idea, people who attend the conference actually see things and don’t have a great need […]

Organic Food in Melbourne

Yesterday when walking down Flinders St I noticed that a new store has opened up selling organic food. It’s Flinders Organics and the address is 260 Flinders St Melbourne VIC 3000 (just across the road from Flinders St Station, not far from the Swanston St intersection). I bought some fruit, some Green and Black organic […]

IDE DMA and Flash

I’ve just been working with a Flash device used as /dev/hda (the root filesystem) for a router. The aim is much the same as with my idea of using an EeePC as a router [1]. The client in question may consider the EeePC for future deployments but are concerned about the ability of ASUS to […]