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Predictions for 2009 and Beyond

Stewart has made some predictions for the future of computing [1].

He predicts that within 2 years the majority of consumer machines will be laptops and have SSD (not rotational media). I predict that by the end of next year more than half of all new consumer machines that are being sold will be laptops […]

How to Support Straight Marriage

There is currently a lot of discussion about how to protect “marriage“, such discussion is based on the issue of whether Gay Marriage should be prohibited to protect Straight Marriage. Some straight people believe that their own marriage would be better if homosexuals were allowed to get married, some have even declared that they won’t […]

Netbook Thermal Issues

Recently there has been increasing attention paid to thermal issues. The power used by computers not only impacts the electricity bill (and battery life for a portable device) but is a cooling problem. The waste heat from desktop systems and servers costs energy (and therefore money) to remove by the air-conditioning system and the heat […]

Voting and Linux Australia

Dhanapalan writes about the small number of voters for Linux Australia elections [1]. I guess that blacklist-voting is partly to blame for my inactivity in this regard. Linux Australia is running pretty well so I don’t think there’s a great need for me to go out of my way to vote.

One thing that could […]

It’s too Hot in Melbourne

The Bureau of Meteorology has forecast temperatures of 43, 43, and 35 for today and the next two days. Those temperatures are in celcius. Yesterday was also above 40C so my entire house is hot.

As my airconditioner is not overly large (a smaller unit is more efficient) the back part of my house will […]

Links January 2009

Jennifer 8 Lee gave an interesting TED talk about the spread and evolution of what is called “Chinese food” [1]. In that talk she compares McDonalds to Microsoft and Chinese restaurants to Linux. Her points comparing the different local variations of Chinese food to the variations of Linux make sense.

The CentOS Plus repository has […]

SE-LAPP

On Tuesday afternoon I gave a talk on behalf of KaiGai Kohei about SE Linux and the LAPP (Linux Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP/Perl) stack. KaiGai has blogged about this [1], unfortunately Google Translation does a poor job of Japanese and has particular problems with KaiGai’s work (could anyone who knows Japanese and English well please submit […]

Status of SE Linux in Debian LCA 2009

This morning I gave a talk at the Security mini-conf of LCA about the status of SE Linux in Debian. Here is a summary of the issues I covered:

General Status

In Lenny (the new release of Debian that will come out in a month or two) SE Linux is working well. Considerably better than […]

Security Lessons from a Ferry

On Saturday I traveled from Victoria to Tasmania via the ferry (to attend LCA), they grossly failed in their security measures and provide three lessons for others:

Make it possible for people to read security relevant documents . Make obeying the rules not be a cost and make the fact known. Don’t be lazy.

Here […]

Security Enhanced PostgreSQL

Today was the first day of Linux Conf Au 2009 [1]. KaiGai Kohei was unable to attend the conference and give a database mini-conf presentation about his work on Security Enhanced PostgreSQL [2], so I gave the presentation in his place. It was a fairly difficult presentation and required that I learn a lot about […]