Who would have thought that in the Year of the Rat, I would help initiate a national campaign to draw attention to the extinction of Australian fauna. Well, I knew I was going to but I wasn't sure what I was going to do. With memorial services, letters to politicians, and a mention in parliament, a new national day is established. Now, the United ( Read more... )

Today was Rick Barker's memorial service at the Melbourne Unitarian Church. A small number turned out from his three main areas of activity; people involved at the Unitarians, the various philosophy groups organised by David Miller, and his RPG friends. I guess if I had some contacts there could have been some people from his tramway historical ( Read more... )

A pleasing result of the week was the publication of Chimera and The Cyborg with colleagues at the University of Freibug on HPC/Cloud hybrid systems (and more). Today (and tomorrow) I've been teaching a c50 person group of postgraduate mechanical engineering students on HPC and Linux, and to be honest, I thought they would have more of a background ( Read more... )

The start of the year has been pretty productive just a couple of weeks in. I've had a flurry of activity over the past few days, making extremely good progress on the Papers & Paychecks supplement, Cow-Orkers in the Scary Devil Monastery. I was especially happy with my decision to make western dragons basement-dwelling advocates of the gold ( Read more... )

It's been a busy week on the academic front, with a paper submitted for the International Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation on the issues around "cloud bursting" in HPC, followed by another for the International Conference on Advanced Computing. In addition, I was invited for my annual guest lecture in the master's level course ( Read more... )

Whilst others on Saturday were concerned on which side of the grand ritual of the boot would be premiers for the year, we nerdlingers held a Cheesequest day, between myself caseopaya, hathhalla, and ser_pounce. I made a small mountain of liptauer (including a surprisingly tasty vegan not-cheese variant), which was contrasted with a crumbly Warrnambool cheddar, and some ( Read more... )