We just got into November which means that it’s just one week till proposals for the Sysadmin Miniconf at Linux.conf.au 2009 close. We have a bunch already but still some space left ( since we have a two days space allocated ).
Have a look at our call for proposals page for details. One thing we are trying to encourage is a wide range of talks so even a 10 minute talk about how you did something is welcome.
Proposals close on the 10th of Novemeber so don’t delay.
Some links from the world on online newspapers.
The Christian Science Monitor today announced that it was going to stop publishing a daily print edition, switch to a weekly print edition and expand it’s online edition. I’ve been following a bunch of the the Monitor’s RSS feeds for a few years now and I find it’s independent voice ( it doesn’t tend to use wire feeds) interesting. See also the New York Times story on the news.
Journerdism has “10 ridiculously cheap, relatively easy, small steps you can take to change an old school newsroom culture to be more forward thinking and web friendly” . I’ve added Number ten to my todo list.
and Xark has 10 reasons why newspapers won’t reinvent news .
Nothing much close to home although I did see Keith Locke campaining on Saturday and took a couple of photos of him for Wikipedia. I mentioned that it’s a shame that the new Green’s Website has a default ( meaing “all rights reserved” ) copyright on it unlike the old one which allowed photos of MPs and other stuff to be used. I mailed their webmaster a few weeks ago but nothign back, maybe I’ll try again in a few weeks when things calm down after the election.
Over Labour Weekend I was in the Merv Morrison Chess Tournament at my local club, The Auckland Chess Centre. I was in the under 1700 rating division. I thought I’d post a little about it. It also gives me the excuse to test the Chess by Blog plugin for wordpress.
The Tournament was 6 rounds over 4 days ( 1 game Friday evening at 18:30, then 2 games at 09:30 and 16:00 on Saturday and Sunday plus one game at 09:30 on Monday) with 90 minutes for each player plus an additional 1 minute added for each move.
There were two divisions, a over-1700 ( NZCF rating points ) with 11 players and an under-1700 with 21 players.
The New Zealand ratings are due our at the start of November so I was hoping for a good result to push up my rating a little. I’m currently at 1261 by I’m probably playing closer to 1400.
My first game was against Bella Qian, who has a 650 rating against my 1260 rating, which means I should beat her 90-something percent of the time. However I wasn’t being careful ( silly really considering the fairly long time control ) and completely blew the game. You can follow the game below and my comments below.
In the past this blog has been mostly a tech orientated one with around 2/3s of the posts I make being about computers and the Internet. With the new software I’ve decided to split things a little so I can post on some other subjects. WordPress makes it fairly easy to provide alternative feeds on a per-category basis so I’ve split things as follows:
Posts ( like this one ) that cover multiple topics will be posted to multiple feeds. But I’ll guess I see how things go.
I’ve just moved this blog’s software from nanoblogger to wordpress.
Things appear to be mostly working but I’ve got a bit of tweaking to do, plugins to add, tags and categories to create etc. However old article links mostly work.
Also as covered in techcrunch bloglines appears to be having serious problems with at least 10% of feeds completely broken and other unreliable. So if you are using bloglines you probably want to seriously consider moving to google reader or some other alternative.
Recently [Jurgen Appelo](http://nooperation.typepad.com/about.html)
listed the [Top 100 Blogs for Development Managers](http://www.noop.nl/2008/09/top-100-blogs-for-development-managers-q3-2008.html) .
Now the list looks okay except for the first entry – [Joel on Software](http://www.joelonsoftware.com). Now I’ve been subscribing to
the site for a few years along with at least 100,000 other people (
about 10,000 times more than read this blog) but I really question it
being number one anymore.
Sure there are great articles and Joel is a smart guy who creates things
like [Stackoverflow.com](http://stackoverflow.com) but I doing really
think his blog deserves the Number 1 ranking anymore.
The main reason is that Joel doesn’t really write any articles. Looking
at his [archive page](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/Archive.html) we can
see the recent history:
Year Number of articles 2000 42 2001 23 2002 14 2003 12 2004 9 2005 22 2006 20 2007 12 2008 4 so far
Yes, just 4 articles this year so far and the [last one](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html) was in May, over
6 months ago.
Now Joel is doing the odd smaller post, he podcasts and writes articles in Inc
but the point of reading the blog is the content there, not somewhere else.
So really, you can’t rate a blog that hasn’t had a real post for 6 months as being
the top blog in the world for software development managers. Even [Paul Graham](http://www.paulgraham.com/) posts more often.
END
We got word a couple of days ago that the [Sysadmin Miniconf](http://sysadmin.miniconf.org) had been accepted
for [Linux.conf.au 2009](http://linux.conf.au/) and [the media have been informed](http://www.techworld.com.au/article/260982/linux_conf_au_lineup_ready_go)
so I can can say so publicly.
It looks like the following Miniconfs have been accepted:
* Open Source databases
* Kernel
* Sysadmin
* Virtualisation
* Linuxchix
* Myth TV
* Gaming
* Mobile
* Multimedia
* Free As In Freedom
* The business of open source software
I guess the main differences from previous years are the MySQL and PostgreSQL
miniconfs have been merged. There is no Debian, Education or Gnome miniconfs
and I guess Mobile has replaced Embedded. It’s interesting to see the loss of the regulars, I guess
in some cases it is because they have their own regular conferences.
The last two miniconfs ( “Free As In Freedom” and “The business of open source software” )
are also new, I guess they will be fleshed out.
We’ll be updated the Sysadmin Miniconf [website](http://sysadmin.miniconf.org) over the next few days
and the call for papers should be out next week sometime.
I also posted an [email to the NZNOG list](http://list.waikato.ac.nz/pipermail/nznog/2008-September/014444.html)
asking about interest in a Sysadmin thing at NZNOG 09 ( in Auckland the week after LCA 09 ).
have a quick look and pop me an email if you are interested.
END
I spent a couple of ours doing a mock up of a possible new website ( sorry not online) for the
[Auckland Chess Centre](http://www.aucklandchesscentre.co.nz/webcontent/default.aspx) (link is to the old site) using [wordpress](http://wordpress.org/).
I must say I was fairly impressed the [5 minute install](http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress) really does
only take about 5 minutes and everything else is pretty easy. The only hard
bit was finding a good theme since most of those out there are blog based rather than
designed for fixed websites but I ended up picking the [deLight](http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/delight) theme which [looks okay](http://webdemar.com/demo/?wptheme=deLight).
Overall I’m pretty impressed with WordPress and it took just a couple of hours of playing around
to get the site to 95% of what I want. Depending on the feedback I might be able to go
live in a few days.
Throughly recommended for small sites.
END
I’ve just updated [the guide](http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/2007/0129.html) a
little as [linux.conf.au 2009](http://linux.conf.au/) gets closer. The
main changes are:
* Updated to point to Hobart
* Mention “Open Day”
* Added photos of Menu and Badge
If you have suggestions for further fixes please contact me.
I’ve also added a few ( unsorted ) photos from [Linux.conf.au 2008](http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/photos/lca2008/index.html)
and the [Linux.conf.au 2008 – Sysadmin Miniconf](http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/photos/sysadmin2008/index.html).
END
As usual I’m a bit behind in stuff but the excuse this time is that around 6 months
ago I started playing chess competitively again ( previously was when I was still at school) so
I’ve been spending a bit of time at it. Right now it involves going to
[the club](http://www.aucklandchesscentre.co.nz/webcontent/default.aspx) ( site being redone soon) one evening
a week, the odd tournament and some study and practice on [sites like this](http://chess.emrald.net/tProfile.php?TacID=21765) .
I’m now [ranked](http://www.poisonpawn.co.nz/nzcfratings.htm) 332nd= in the country but
I think with a bit of work I could be in the top 200 in a few months if I keep at it.
Other stuff that is happening is that a proposal for a [Sysadmin Miniconf](http://sysadmin.miniconf.org/) has been submitted
to [Linux.conf.au 2009 in Hobart](http://linux.conf.au/). More details to come.
Some links:
A good paper at Usenix 2008 on [Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage](http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix08/tech/full_papers/elson/elson_html/)
[PDF version with the diagrams](http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix08/tech/full_papers/elson/elson.pdf) .
…and an interesting article on [How long will we be trapped in this mobile hell hole?](http://www.smstextnews.com/2008/07/how_long_will_we_be_trapped_in_this_mobile_hell_hole.html)
panders to my dislike of mobile applications.
And finally a Watchmen Trailer / Heroes Mashup video:
