John’s Tidbits

Moo - Development, Trouble-shooting and Random thoughts…

SFD2006 - Return to sender

Published July 11th, 2007 in FOSS | 1 Comment »

Pia posting about Software freedom day, software freedom day online shop is up, reminded me about something I’ve been meaning to post for a while.

When you send in the address to get your team’s t-shirts and goodies, make sure you get it right!

Last year I helped pack all the goodies that we sent overseas, this was sometime in August if I remember correctly. We needed to put a return address on the packages so I offered the use of Bulletproof’s address.

6 months later the following turned up on our doorstep.





Notice the use of hemp rope and wax seal. This box has been through a lot!

SLUG VoIP Slides

Published January 3rd, 2007 in Presentations | 2 Comments »

I’ve finally gotten around to putting the slides from my SLUG talk up. Funnily enough linux.conf.au has kept me pretty busy, as usual I’ll take this opportunity to just blame Pia.

You can find the slides on my presentations page, and here is a direct link to the PDF.

A couple of people have asked me which VoIP phones and ATAs I recommend. I don’t have a load of experience with different brands but have done a fair bit of research and really like the SNOM phones and the Linksys (Sipura) ATAs the best.

The main advantages of these units is that they are of fairly high quality a very good price. They are very configurable and have the advantage of being mass deployed via DHCP, TFTP and CGI based config files.

250!

Published November 11th, 2006 in FOSS | No Comments »

We’ve just hit 250 registrations for linux.conf.au, only 5 days to go before early bird registrations close.

So here are some interesting stats of the attendee breakdown so far:

By Country

Country Number
Brazil 1
Canada 1
France 1
Ireland 1
Liberia 1
Nigeria 1
China 1
Singapore 1
Spain 1
UK 1
Croatia 4
Germany 4
Japan 4
Romania 9
New Zealand 13
USA 18
Australia 188

Australia by state

State Number
NT 1
TAS 3
WA 19
QLD 20
SA 20
ACT 23
VIC 24
NSW 77

Open Source in the Data Centre

Published October 12th, 2006 in Presentations | 1 Comment »

Next Tuesday (17th Oct) I’ll be giving a presentation at Thinking Linux ‘06 in Melbourne.

The talk is entitled Open Source in the Data Centre and I’ll be covering things like

  • Load Balancing “Stuff” (IPVS, keepalived, heartbeat)
  • Monitoring using Nagios and MRTG/rrdtool
  • Authentication with OpenLDAP anf FreeRADIUS

and a whole lot of other random things I can fit into 40 minutes.

I choose to blame Pia for putting me in a position to give this talk but only because it’s Jeff’s fault and there isn’t a justblamejdub.com :)

If anyone wants to catch up on the Monday night down in Melbourne then let me know.

I’ll put slides up after the event.

Software Freedom Day - AV and ISPs

Published September 15th, 2006 in Presentations | No Comments »

This Saturday is Software Freedom Day, the main Sydney event sponsored by SLUG will be being held at UNSW, more specific details can be found at the Sydney SFD page.

As part of the lead up to linux.conf.au 2007, the AV Team is going to be using this day as a trial run to test out some of the technology we will probably be using at the conference, this currently includes

  • Flumotion for streaming of talks
  • Streaming from a scan converter for slides
  • Recording to DVDs using a consumer DVD recorder for post production and upload to the website
  • Standard recording to DV Tape as a backup :)

Apparently I will also be giving a workshop at 1pm, I say apparently because as usual we get to justblamepia.com. For the unwary, suggesting to Pia that you might be able to give a talk means that you will :) The talk is currently titled How to build your own ISP - But why you shouldn’t, it will focus on the right way to set one up from scratch from my experiences at ZipWorld and Beagle Internet.

just blame Pia!

Published September 12th, 2006 in General | No Comments »

At a couple of linux.conf.au meetings we kept coming across the same recurring theme, everything just seemed to be Pia’s fault :)

So one dark and rainy night justblamepia.com was born.

We even get to blame Pia for this post because the site isn’t even ready yet, it is supposed to get a spruce up (I have no artistic skills you see), but she seems to have stumbled over it overnight.

Just blame Pia!

linux.conf.au 2007 Technical Guru

Published September 8th, 2006 in FOSS | No Comments »

Most people probably aren’t aware that a few months ago I became Head Technical Guru as part of the seven team organising linux.conf.au 2007. All blame for this shall lie solely with Pia.

<Pia> Hey John are you still interested in helping out with the conference?
<John> Yeah sure
<Pia> Cool. Can you come to a meeting tonight at my place?
<John@meeting> Pia, why are you writing my name down on the seven page?

The next months are going to be pretty interesting. Those who know me well will know it’s not like I had much else going on :).

Basically it’s my job to organise all the technical infrastructure and make sure it works, this includes

  • Internet Connectivity
  • Wireless Access
  • AV Team - Streaming, Publishing of videos etc (This team is being run by Silvia)
  • Random other servers for things like the website, IRC, portal etc

In the next few weeks I’ll be gearing up towards a much clearer plan as to what actually needs doing and then I’ll be looking for volunteers so if you are interested in helping out whether it be during the conference setting things up or during the lead up hacking on code to make all the infrastructure work then please let me know.