open source

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cafuego — Sun, 25 May 2008 14:24:40 +1000

A quick update on LCA2009. The zookeepr hackathon has been progressing nicely over this weekend, so it looks like the call for proposals can be opened as per scheduled, even if the computer says "no" ;-)

media slut

cafuego — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 20:46:05 +1000

Wow, I got my name mentioned in the press, I must be moving up in the world :-)

The school tech and head of IT at Westall Secondary College gave me a nice plug in an article called "Ubuntu breathes new life into school's abandoned hardware" just because I help them out with Linux stuff every now and then. Cheers guys!

Edit: And now a mention on slashdot as well, in a story titled "Gartner Analysts Warn That Windows Is Collapsing".

Taswegia

cafuego — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:47:53 +1100

The ghosts of conference(s) past meeting took place in Hobart over the past weekend and some members of the Mel8ourne team as well as a few other previous LCA organisers all got together with the LCA09 team to pass on information and share experiences.

I had been to Tasmania for a few days many moons ago, but had forgotten what Tasmania looked like. Wonderful, even though the grass is a sickly green instead of a healthy brown like on the mainland. If nothing else, 2009 will be the most beautiful LCA to date.

T plus 138371

cafuego — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 23:27:33 +1100

... not dead yet!

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cafuego — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:09:44 +1100

Looming it is, this conference. We've nearly sold out of non-keynote tickets as well now - 5 left!

This means we can shift the focus of promotion to Open Day, on February 2. We're hoping to attract lots of interested people and have cool stuff to show them. Donna did some posters yesterday, which we will put up at libraries and other public places around town.

In other news, there is a silly competition for LCA-goers. If you're attending you should bring a pencil sharpener and upload a photo of this sharpener to Sharpenr!

All attendees get to vote on the best/silliest sharpener and the winner receives a prize - provided they can both produce the sharpener at the conference and use it to successfully sharpen a pencil in front of an audience.

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cafuego — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 11:12:09 +1100

A mere three weeks from now we'll be in the middle of set-up for LCA.

Earlier this week the conference bags arrived at our storage facility (2 pallets!) and we've now organised a date and time to stuff the bags with conference shwag.

The badges and booklet designs are being finalised, so we can get them printed next week and we'll be confirming the various social events this coming week.

The planet is now live and the delegate wiki only needs linking in to the main site navigation.

Slowly but surely, things are taking shape :-)

linux.conf.au ticketing update

cafuego — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:07:11 +1100

Nearly one week ago tickets for linux.conf.au sold out, leaving a lot of people with a tentative (unpaid) registration - unable to attend the conference, as we have a hard limit of 600 on our keynote venue.

These people with tentative registrations are now on a waiting list, and as spaces are becoming available when we process cancellations, we will offer newly freed spaces to the people on this waiting list. Mini-conf speakers get priority, then we'll go in order of original registration date.

Don't despair though! In addition to processing cancellations, we've decided to make available a limited number (around 60) of non-keynote tickets. After all, we can fit more people into all the theatres combined than we can into the keynote venue.

Again, mini-conf speakers will be offered a ticket first, then the waiting list and if there are any left, we will open up registrations for these tix.

In addition, we will release a number of day-tickets for the mini-confs only. On one of these tickets you can attend a single day of mini-confs. They don't grant access to the penguin dinner or the main conference days and you won't get conference shwag (though you can of course order an extra t-shirt or dinner ticket).

If after all that you still miss out, consider volunteering. You'll be in the midst of things all week long :-)

you're about to miss out

cafuego — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 15:03:25 +1100

Nearly there.

With just on 38 days to go before linux.conf.au opens, we have 13 12 11 9 8 7 6 tickets left to sell, and they're going fast.

If you've registered - but not yet paid - you're probably missing out as you read this! Your place is not guaranteed until you've paid.

So, if you did miss out and you still want to go, consider volunteering. As a volunteer you won't be able to go to many talks, but you'll certainly be part of the buzz.

To volunteer, email v o l u n t e e r i n g @ m e l 8 o u r n e . o r g and we'll take it from there.

mythtv - it works!

cafuego — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 14:28:57 +1100

After over a year of using myth on my laptop (which has tv out) to view video files on tv, I now have an honest-to-god working mythtv setup with dual tuners, remote control and everything.

For my birthday I obtained a DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T Dual Digital 4, after doing a spot of googling about Linux compatibility. This is a PCI card that, after plugging in, is detected as two USB tuners and an input device.

Hardware

I had scrounged together a pile of hardware from various defunct machines in the house and been given a mobo by a friend (Thanks Steve!) The system is an Athlon64 2800+ with 512Mb ram, a fanless nvidia FX5200 with an RCA tvout connector and an 80Gb harddisk. (Though all recording is done to a 500GB LVM volume in another room via NFS over 100baseT)

Drivers

The drivers in the v4l-dvb sources do not yest support this card in Australia, but luckily a nice person called Chris Pascoe did all the hard work and has provided a pre-patched source tarball and firmware bundle on his site, which work find with Shannon Wynters HOWTO. (Just skip the whole patching bit, the patches don't apply properly to the current Mercurial version anyway)

Build the source against your current kernel via make; make install. Untar the firmware bundle into /lib/firmware and then load the required modules:

modprobe dvb-core
modprobe dvb-usb
modprobe dvb-pll
modprobe xc3028-fe
modprobe zl10353
modprobe dvb-usb-cxusb

And voila. I did not need to add these to /etc/modules, the tuners got picked up automagically after a reboot. (I use Ubuntu "Gutsy" 7.10)

Stay-On-Couch Device

The remote control works fine with lirc. I needed to make the input device name be persistent using udev; my rules file is attached. I found working config files for the remote that had been created by Craig Cook on the MythTV wiki. I've attached my lircd.conf and hardware.conf for your convenience :-)

The Caveat

Of course there is a caveat. There is always a caveat.

So all hardware was now detected and configured, but mythfrontend kept telling me the tuners were not available. If you have a setup like mine, with multiple frontends and backends, make sure you restart the master backend after adding a new piece of hardware. All frontends were able to access the tuners and watch (or record) tv after I had restarted my master backend. Kinda.

Hardware (Reprise)

That was all the configuring done, but mythtv crashed rather nastily each time I tried watching live tv or recording anything over 15 minutes in length. I spent a day checking all the software before giving up and blaming the hardware, after I found eth0 timeout problems in dmesg. So, I'll give you a tip: Make sure the tv tuners and network card do not share the same IRQ, especially when recording to an NFS mount. Fix it bymanually assigning IRQs to PCI slots in the system bios.

Working!

With the hardware problem fixed, myth behaved :-) I can now watch a show and record another simultaneously or record two shows and watch one or the other or an older recording at the same time. Yay!

osdc reprise

cafuego — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 17:07:28 +1100

Well, as it turns out Rasmus Lerdorfs filter made apache segfault, so I've disabled it again. XSS indeed!

On a lighter note, this work of art was created last night during the OSDC dinner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfVL_4uRLSo