lev_lafayette's blog

LUV President's Report to the Annual General Meeting, September 2011

The role of President from September 2010 to September 2011 period was initially one of accident; in my role as Public Officer I attended the Annual General Meeting and left the evening as President of the association. Thrown into this somewhat unexpected role I set as a priority ensuring that we had speakers for our LUV-main and LUV-beginners events, which was achieved quite quickly. Previous experience on the committee indicated that there is nothing worse than a last-minute panic to find speaker.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Presentation to the Melbourne Unitarian Philosophy Forum

1. Typical Definitions of Happiness
1.1 the quality or state of being happy, good fortune; pleasure; contentment; joy. (e.g., from Collins English Dictionary)
1.2 Origin (hap + y) 1150–1200; Middle English < Old Norse happ - luck, chance; akin to Old English gehæp fit, convenient; probably akin to Old Church Slavonic kob? auspice, Old Irish cob victory
1.3 Perspectives of "happiness" can come from religious, philosophical, psychological and economic viewpoints - plus a fairly unique revealed here.

Installing the GNU Debugger

The GNU Debugger (GDB) is the standard debugger for the GNU software system. It is a portable debugger that runs on many Unix-like systems and works for many programming languages, including Ada, C, C++, FreeBASIC, FreePascal and Fortran.

Installation is trivial, but slightly interesting for illustrative purposes. First download and unpack:


cd /usr/local/src/GDB
wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gdb/gdb-7.3.tar.gz
tar xvf gdb-7.3.tar.gz
cd gdb-7.3

MFIX (Multiphase Flow With Interphase Exchanges) with Intel compilers on a 64-bit Opteron Linux System

MFIX (Multiphase Flow With Interphase Exchanges) has been developed by the U.S. National Energy Technology Laborartory, providing transient data on the three-dimensional distribution of pressure, velocity, temperature, and species mass fractions.

An Open Letter to Eugene Kaspersky

Dear Mr. Kaspersky,

You are, of course, one the most well-known IT security experts in the world. Your company, Kaspersky Lab, is one of the largest and most successful providers of a suite products that protect users against various forms of malware. It was with some interest then, that I attended your presentation at the University of Melbourne on May 25, 2011.

Could Your Business Gain From A Switch To Open Source?

I'll start off with a caveat, I am an open-source advocate, a long standing committee member and current president of Linux Users of Victoria (http://luv.asn.au). My overall approach is that computer programs are scientific problems, and therefore there is an inherent tendency towards a better solution when the source code can be freely analysed, distributed and developed; release early, release often and with many eyes all bugs are shallow (to paraphrase Eric Raymond's famous essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar').

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