So, the first half day of AusHac2010 was yesterday. We had about 12 people turn up, which isn’t too bad for a Friday.

Erik de Castro Lopo did a lot of work on Ben Lippmeier’s DDC compiler for his Disciple language.

There was some initial work on the Accelerate library for accelerated array computations in Haskell, using various backends. Most of the current work is aiming at making the CUDA backend usable, after which more backends will likely be added, such as an LLVM backend, and possibly an OpenCL backend as well.

Due to the restricted time yesterday, not all that much work was started, but day 2 (see my next post!) has been much more productive.

So last night, my girlfriend’s dad gave me an old XP machine they didn’t have a need for. Turns out it has fairly decent specs, so I got to work  installing FreeBSD on it. In the next few days, i shall be turning it into my new web server, and possibly putting my blog back on it (although it’ll be slower to serve it there, i can at least install plugins, which I’m still pissed off about with this blog). In the mean time though, i have been installing pfSense on the machine that was my web server. the specs of the old one are as follows:

• 500MHz Pentium II
• 196MB RAM
• 8GB HDD
• 2x RealTek 100Mbit NICs

and the new one:

• 2.4GHz Pentium 4
• 512MB RAM
• 6GB HDD
• 1 sis0 onboard NIC
• 1RealTek NIC

so basically it’s a much faster machine (though now I come to think of it, maybe swapping the disks wouldn’t be a bad idea). So what you say? Well, what I wanted to tell you is that pfSense is awesomely easy to use, it’s wonderful. the webGUI is well laid out and works very well, installing new packages like nmap, spamd, bandwidthd, OpenBGPD etc. is as easy as visiting the web interface and clicking a button. You get some nice graphs about most aspects of system performance (though they haven’t been working for me, not sure why, getting no data).

The other thing I was going to mention is how nice Seagate’s warranty returns site is. Our 250GB drive died recently (not sure when, it was hooked up to the web server and i never used it), so I checked to see if it was still under warranty. Just sick in the model number and serial number, and they’ll tell you exactly when the  warranty ends. If you need to return it, you can go through two or three pages, choose the nearest point of contact for their repairs, and then print out a label with the address and your return address to stick on your parcel. They even give you wrapping instructions which is nice (though they seem to insist that you use a “SeaShell” plastic case to put the drive in, which of course I don’t own).

So, in the next few days, hopefully I’ll have a nice new web server, running my blog and being awesome!

I assert though that the GPL does not give us freedom, merely different restrictions.  I even assert that it does not give us all of the freedoms listed above.  In this post, I will argue that the GPL is inherently flawed when it comes to freeing software.

My good IRC friend Beelsebob decided independently to start a new blog, on the exact same say I did, but hopefully I Beelsebob’d him this time!* Anyway, he’s made a better start than I have by writing a nice article on why the GPL is in fact not free, but just restricting you in a different way. So go ahead and read the article