etbe – Russell Coker

Since writing my post about whether the National Broadband Network can ever break even [1] I’ve had a number of people try to convince me of it’s merit. He is my summary and rebuttal of some of the arguments for the NBN: The FUD Claims are made that Australia may fall behind the rest of [...]

Upgrade Requirements Debian/Squeeze (the next release of Debian) will be released some time later this year. Many people are already upgrading test servers, and development systems and workstations that are used to develop code that will be deployed next year. Also there are some significant new features in Squeeze that compel some people to upgrade [...]

The TEDxVolcano The TED conference franchise has been extended to TEDxVolcano [1], this is a small conference that features people who are stranded by the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. As usual TED is an inspiration to us all, so there is obvious potential for other conferences to be organised in similar situations – there’s no [...]

The Problem I’ve just upgraded my Dell PowerEdge T105 [1] from Debian/Lenny to Debian/Squeeze. Unfortunately the result of the upgrade was that everything in an X display looked very green while the console display looked the way it usually did. I asked for advice on the LUV mailing list [2] and got a lot of [...]

I’ve just upgraded my Thinkpad (which I use for most of my work) to Debian/testing with KDE4. Improvements Kde 3.5 (from Debian/Lenny) didn’t properly display the applets in a vertical task bar. I want a vertical task bar because my screen resolution is 1680*1050 and I find that a less rectangular screen workspace is best [...]

We Have to Make Our Servers Faster Google have just announced that they have made site speed part of their ranking criteria for search results [1]. This means that we now need to put a lot of effort into making our servers run faster. I’ve just been using the Page Speed Firefox Plugin [2] (which [...]

Health Monitoring Eric Topol gave an interesting TED talk about wireless medical monitoring devices [1]. The potential for helping diabetics and other people who need ongoing treatment is obvious as is the potential for helping pregnant women and other people who might suddenly need medical treatment at short notice. One significant positive potential for this [...]

Slavery Still Exists! We all like to think of slavery as a problem from the 19th century, but it still exists and is a significant problem! Kevin Bales gave an interesting TED talk about how to combat modern slavery [1]. Currently there are an estimated 27,000,000 slaves in the world, it’s a lot but it’s [...]

A Stupid Bisop breaks the Godwin Rule The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Catholic Bishop Anthony Fisher has just claimed that “GODLESSNESS and secularism led to Nazism, Stalinism, mass murder and abortion” [1]. This is a violation of the rule part of Godwin’s Law. We might not expect clerics to have enough general knowledge of [...]

Russ Albery has described why he doesn’t support comments on his blog [1]. I respect his opinion and I’m not going to try and convince him to do otherwise. But I think it’s worth describing why I want comments on my blog and feel that they are worth having for many (possibly most) other blogs. [...]