Posts for year 2009 (old posts, page 1)

Happy Mother’s Day

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 …….







KCA2009 – we’ve finalised the accepted presentations

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.




KCA2009 – Call for Papers is now CLOSED

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.




Less than ONE WEEK to go for KCA2009′s Call for Papers

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







no really, I *do* need jdbc!

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




Kernel Conference Australia – Call for Papers issued

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.




Kernel Conference Australia – it’s coming!

Over the years it’s been a source of frustration for me that the conferences which I wanted to attend were either too expensive (time, travel, registration etc) or not covering topics I was interested in.Late last year I realised I should stop grumbling about it and fix it myself.So it is with great pleasure that I can announce that this July 15th to 17th in Brisbane, there will be an Open Source kernel-focused conference: Kernel Conference Australia. We don’t have absolutely all of the organisational bits together yet, but here’s what we do have:

World class speakers

Fantastic location

Our venue is the Queensland Brain Institute, within the University of Queensland.

Excellent climate

The University is situated in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Yes, it will be winter… but winter in Brisbane is a beautiful time to visit.

Call for Papers

The Call for Papers is not quite ready (still a few details to be ironed out), but if you’d like to be considered for a presentation spot you should be thinking about a topic in any of these areas:

  • Cross-architecture kernel development

  • Porting an OS to a new architecture

  • Filesystems

  • System performance visualisation (DTrace, SystemTap?)

  • Image visualisation (GPU kernels)

  • Fault Management

  • (globally) Distributed kernel development – how to make it work

  • Virtualisation

  • Clustering (HPC and High Availability)

  • Distributed systems

  • Kernel Testing – methodologies, interesting problems found

  • Traps and pitfalls found when porting drivers between OSes

  • Realtime performance and scheduling

  • Embedded OSes and drivers (including control systems)

  • Patents and Open Source

  • The state of OS kernel research / what’s new / work in progress

Apart from the above, we expect that pretty much any kernel-focused topic for an Open Source licensed OS will be considered by the organising committee.

Target OSes

If you would like to help with sponsoring the conference, please let me know via email (jmcp at my employer . com – and if you don’t remember which corp that is, wander into #humbug on OFTC sometime and ask.