/devices/pseudo/bitbucket@0:bitbucket

Two years ago today, a very tired J and I arrived at the front door of our new home in Brisbane, and were delighted to walk into our own home. After so many years of renting it was a fantastic feeling to be able to walk in and know that yes, we could put a hook in the wall if we wanted (and where we wanted), and that all this was ours. (Well, modulo the mortgage!)

Home, sweet home. Love it!

In case you weren't quite convinced about just how cool, uuuuber, and just plain old fantastic an opportunity Kernel Conference Australia is, then you should consider this. We've got one more speaker coming along:

Brendan Gregg, member of the Fishworks team, author of the DTraceToolkit, co-author of Solaris Performance and Tools.

Naturally, he'll be talking about DTrace and all the serious and crazy (and seriously crazy) things he's done with it over the years.

Dates	15 - 17 July, 2009
Venue	Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland
Conference homepage	http://au.sun.com/sunnews/events/2009/kernel
Full abstracts	http://wikis.sun.com/display/KCA2009/KCA2009+Conference+Agenda
Registration page	https://www.conveneit.com/secure/sun/kernel_jul_09
Pricing:
Students	$95
regular price	$300

Just a short reminder that if you want to come to Kernel Conference Australia at the earlybird price of $195, then you've got until the end of this Friday, 12 June, to get your registration happening.

If you're interested in any of these areas:

• linux kernel crypto services
• ZFS deduplication
• cross-architecture OS and driver porting
• packet filtering and QOS
• TCP/IP protocol security
• bug finding tools for OpenSource Operating Systems
• network virtualisation, or
• how a DB engine can really hurt your system

then Kernel Conference Australia is definitely for you.

Dates: 15 - 17 July, 2009

Venue: Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland

The student price is still $95, too.

For full abstracts please see http://wikis.sun.com/display/KCA2009/KCA2009+Conference+Agenda

For the conference homepage, see http://au.sun.com/sunnews/events/2009/kernel/

And for registration, Go Without Delay To

https://www.conveneit.com/secure/sun/kernel_jul_09/

I look forward to seeing you there.

Today Tim and I celebrated the last public holiday in Queensland before Christmas by cycling up Mt Coottha. It was my first time going up the mountain (glad I'd put my slicks on last night), and boy oh boy did I suck!
Haven't been out on the bike since the May Day long weekend (when I also rode with Tim, but along the river into town and back), so my lack of fitness really showed going up the first bit past the quarry. However, what really killed me were my sinuses - dripping taplike and not letting me get enough air in. Had to walk the last 1.5km to the ABC compound, but at least I kept moving. From there it was a really nice undulation around to the summit proper, and then a bit of speed heading back down.
Haven't gone quite that fast on the bike before, and I was a little nervous, not knowing the turns or the road surface. I'll enjoy it a lot more next time we ride it.
All up we were gone for 3 hours, going to have to work on shortening that time over the next 6-9 months so that when next year's Bike Week comes around I can do the Coottha Challenge.
A great ride, and a grand day for it.

It's only one week before the earlybird registration period for Kernel Conference Australia closes.

As a quick reminder, in addition to our excellent keynote speakers Jeff Bonwick, Bill Moore and Max Alt, here are the people who you'll be able to meet, listen and learn from at KCA:

Fernando Gont	Results of a Security Assessment of Common Implementation Strategies of the TCP and IP Protocols
Henning Brauer (OpenBSD)	Faster Packets: Performance Tuning in the OpenBSD Network Stack and PF
Gavin Maltby (Sun Microsystems)	Hardware & Software Fault Management Architecture
Pawel Dawidek (FreeBSD)	GEOM - The FreeBSD way of handling storage
John Sonnenschein (Sun Microsystems)	Driver and Filesystem Development with the Solaris and OpenSolaris DDI/DKI
David Gwynne (University of Queensland)	MCLGETI: Effective Network Livelock Mitigation and More
Cristina Cifuentes (Sun Microsystems)	Finding Bugs in Open Source Kernels Using Parfait
Sherry Moore (Sun Microsystems)	Fast reboot support (and more) for OpenSolaris
Max Bruning (Bruning Systems)	Porting USB HID Device Drivers Between Linux and OpenSolaris
James Morris (Red Hat)	Linux Kernel Security Overview
Percy Pari-Salas (Bond University)	Automated Testing of OpenSolaris
Vivek Joshi (Sun Microsystems)	Porting OpenSolaris across architectures
Jayakara Kini (Sun Microsystems)	Crossbow for OpenSolaris Developers
Garrett D'Amore (Sun Microsystems)	Boomer: the new OpenSolaris audio system
Pramod Batni (Sun Microsystems)	Debugging and Diagnosing Interesting Kernel Problems
Stewart Smith (Sun Microsystems)	(Ab)use the Kernel: what a database server can do to your kernel

So what are you waiting for? Hurry up and register!

So it's been a bit wet today:

That's just the tail end of it. I've had to empty water from our pool three times in the last 12 hours, and I'm really hoping we're close to the end of this current rain cell:


That's since 9am today!

About 15 minutes ago I was ecstaticly pleased to see that the KCA2009 website had gone live with the confirmed agenda, speaker bios and most importantly, registrations.

This time last year we'd known for about a week that J was pregnant, and while we'd been elated to get that news, the knowledge that the first trimester is the one where most pregnancies fail (if they're going to fail) made it a little difficult to be happy on Mother's Day.
This year, however, we have a beautiful daughter and a reason to celebrate Mother's Day.

Happy Mother's Day, J!



Now if we could only get a bit more sleep .......

Today we started solids:

After a lot of back-n-forth in the committee, we've finally come up with a list of presentations that we have accepted for the 16 speaking slots at Kernel Conference Australia 2009. Hopefully all the presenters will get back to me asap so I can finalise the schedule and say who they are.

I'm pleased to announce that the official Call for Papers for Kernel Conference Australia 2009 is now closed. Over. Finito!
We've had a great response to the CfP, and the review committee will be meeting in coming days to nut out just which presentations we'll take.
Personally, I'm very happy that given the event is new, and economies around the world are in turmoil, we've had so many presentation proposals (and of a very high quality) submitted.
The review committee will be working hard to ensure that we get the accepted papers finalised as soon as possible, but either way we've still got enough of the schedule mapped out already (keynote speakers and panels) that when registrations open on Monday you'll have a fair idea of how it'll all go.

If you are planning to register and attend, please join our Facebook Event.

I woke up with a shock this morning, realising that there's less than ONE WEEK to go before the KCA2009 Call for Papers closes!
That's THIS FRIDAY!

If you're going to submit a presentation proposal, please get it in as soon as possible - you don't want to miss out on being part of this conference.
Here are the links, just link case you'd misplaced them:

Official Conference Website
Call for Papers (all pretty)
Call for Papers (original, dry and technical)
The Facebook event
If you're a potential sponsor, please contact myself, Claire or Gabriele (details on the Official Conference Website).

I've also put together a flyer which you could print out and post around your workplace. Please do - the more the merrier!

Don't forget, registrations open in one week, on 4 May 2009. Save The Date

I'm really pleased to announce that the KCA2009 conference website is now active. Registrations open on 4 May 2009. The Call for Papers / (original CfP page) is still open and we're really keen to get your presentation suggestions. We're also very keen to get more sponsors on board - this isn't just a Sun event, it's an Open Source event - and Innovation Happens Everywhere(tm).

After I upgraded to snv_110, I was having a heckuvatime trying to figure out why my Roller instance wasn't behaving properly. I saw scads and scads of java stacktrace errors, along with

SEVERE: Servlet.service() for servlet jsp threw exception
java.lang.IllegalStateException: Roller Weblogger has not been bootstrapped yet

I saw loads of messages in forum posts about this, several of which said something like "oh, figured it out, our db was down, all good now." Which was great, except I could confirm very easily that my db backend was up, I could connect to it using the appropriate dbname, username and password. I tried switching from my own tomcat instance to the integrated version - no joy. I tried deploying roller using a WAR rather than unpacked - still no joy. Checked and re-checked my roller-custom.properties, but it was all to no avail.

Eventually I re-read the instructions and something clicked - I should check the jdbc jar files. Well lookee here, that'll be the problem! My snv_106 instance had a symlink for the postgresql.jar file, and that hadn't been replicated in the snv_110 environment. Duh!

So I quickly added the postgresql.jar file to my WAR archive, re-deployed it and suddenly, it's all good again.

Nice to know that it was a simple solution, I'm just annoyed it took me so long for the lights to go on :-)

More movement at the station when it comes to KCA2009 - we've now got a Call For Papers which I've started emailing to various people and groups. I'm still on the hunt for sponsorship to help things along, so if your org can help, please contact me directly. One other thing - you might look at all the details for KCA and think "but I don't use OpenSolaris why should I bother?" - to which the response is that we're interested in Open Source, which is not limited to just one kernel or company. So please, don't think KCA2009 is not for you.