Lev Lafayette

SFD Melbourne 2012

Software Freedom Day: Saturday September 15

Linux Users of Victoria and Free Software Melbourne is hosting Software Freedom Day in Melbourne!

To begin with it is necessary to say that circumstances has meant that this will be a report that combines the duties of President and Secretary, a matter that will be discussed further. Overall however, looking back over the past year, it can said that this has been another successful for Linux Users of Victoria. Starting from September last year, we hosted a very successful Software Freedom Day, which was extremely well-attended by relevant members of the community, providing an excellent opportunity for networking and planning.

When installing the latest version of Open MPI (Version 1.6.1) with PGI compilers (specifically 12.5), the installation fails.

The following configure option are set:


CC=pgcc CXX=pgcpp F77=pgf77 FC=pgf90 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/${BASE}-pgi --with-openib --with-tm=/usr/local/torque/latest --enable-static --enable-share


For Torque "latest" in this context is only 2.4.17, however that shouldn't be the issue. The make fails as follows:


make[6]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/src/OPENMPI/openmpi-1.6.1/ompi/contrib/vt/vt/tools/vtunify'

Following attempted postings at:
http://www.bigw.com.au/sports-leisure/bikes-accessories/bikes/mountain-b...

I ride approximately 20km per day, to and from work. About half this distance is hills and bends (following a river) and about half is inner urban and mostly flat.

For the past six months I have struggled daily with this bike.

To change gears without the derailleur slipping the upper gears have to turned in the opposite direction to the lower gears. This is not documented in the user and maintenance manual.

The Chief Secretary (Mr. Tunnecliffe) said yesterday that Mr. F. Menzies., of the Crown Law department, had been ap- pointed to assist Mr. A., A. Kelley, P.M., who as a (loyal commission will inves- tigate charges of ill-treatment, to patients which have been made against Dr. R.S. Ellery, junior medical officer of the Kew Asylum, by members of the staff.

The "marquee" element was originally designed by Microsoft for early versions of Internet Explorer. Rather like Netscape's "blink" element, it is usually thoroughly unloved by web developers, for being proprietory, non-standard, causing usability problems, and is distracting to other content. It is considered deprecated by the W3C and not advised for use in any HTML documents.

Recently it has been noticed that MATLAB bench suite fails when forwarding (by "fails" I mean the applications dies horribly) OpenGL commands. This is not a problem unique to MATLAB, but rather to a range of applications, however there is a simple workaround. My experience is that this a fairly recent problem too, so I shake my fist in futility at certain video card manufacturers who harming scientific research, dammit.

One of the more interesting experiences with Drupal version upgrades is the discovery that your favourite third party module is no longer available, or is not ready yet for a production service. This is particularly the case when you're not the person managing the upgrade process. Or better still, you are managing it now, because the first attempt wasn't managed, as such.

OpenFOAM (Open Field Operationa and Manipulation) is a computational fluid dynamics toolbox which simulates "anything from complex fluid flows involving chemical reactions, turbulence and heat transfer, to solid dynamics, electromagnetics and the pricing of financial options." All this and free and open source as well.

Note that this installation instructions are substantially different to the version 1.5 install instructions.

Recently a staff member left the business for an extended holiday and beyond (congratulations). He was however the owner and moderator of almost fifty Mailman mailing lists. This would take "a while" if one had to change the ownerships manually on the Mailman web interface. Strangely, there seemed to no obvious command-line tool in the Mailman /bin directory.