Yes, I know. Bad title. After so many years only a handful of people will decipher it that I am looking for an affordable and standards compliant ARM machine for Linux & FreeBSD. It refers to a machine released 8 years ago, and a blog I wrote 4 years ago: The ARM developers workstation: Why the SoftIron OverDrive 1000 is still relevant The good news is that since my previous blog there is a lot more ARM hardware available.

Recently I was asked why the syslog-ng newsletter looks odd. At first I did not even understand what is the problem. Then I realized that I kept using the same format for the past 14 years, that was optimized for UNIX terminals :-) So, what is the problem? 14 years ago I was kindly asked by syslog-ng users to use plain text e-mails instead of HTML formatting. Of course it also means that there is no easy way to emphasize titles in the newsletter.

Recently I posted about two of my Power t-shirts. Many people responded. Some wanted to get one of the t-shirts from me, others asked me what else do I have. I cannot give you the t-shirts, but I can show you a few more :-) I must admit that only one of them has Power printed on it, but the other two are also Power-related. Genesi t-shirt The oldest t-shirt is from Genesi.

I love t-shirts, especially those that you’d call logowear. But it’s not the kind of big name fashion logos that I’m referring to. Rather, it’s logowear from my favorite IT companies. I have well over a hundred of these t-shirts, and except when I’m preparing for a special event, I pull a random t-shirt from my collection. Yesterday I happened to wear a power.org t-shirt, while today I’m wearing an OpenPOWER t-shirt, two POWER t-shirts in two days :-) Both of these brought back some nice memories.

This weekend I visited the first Audio Expo in Budapest. It was the first music event I truly enjoyed in years. Even if corridors and rooms were packed, there was enough fresh air. What sets this event apart from other events is the focus on listening to music on the vendors’ products rather than just the speeds and feeds on why you should buy their products. While, of course, the expected outcome is the same, with the emphasis on listening to live systems, I found the event much more comfortable to walk around.

Recently I was at EuroBSDCon, where several participants recognized that I am a POWER guy. And they were right, I have been an IBM POWER Champion focusing on open source software on POWER for the past three years. Talos II POWER9 mainboard I got the usual question from people: is there anyone working on an affordable and open source friendly POWER machine? My answer was a definite yes, but also had to admit that I do not know the actual status for any of the projects.

EuroBSDCon was fantastic, as always :-) I talked to many interesting people during the four days about sudo and syslog-ng, and of course also about many other topics. I gave a sudo tutorial, and it went well, with some “students” already planning which features to implement at home. There were many good talks, including one from Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick, who was with the FreeBSD project right from the beginning, and worked on BSD even earlier.

A few weeks ago I was in Lille, France for Pass the SALT, a conference focused on open-source software and security, and gave a training on sudo. Ever since the conference, I’ve been approached by people asking if I could give sudo training(s) for or through their organization. Instead of writing a short answer to everyone in private, here is more detailed public response. The short answer: it depends :-)

I’m often asked, how can I be an IBM Champion for POWER, if I do not own an IBM POWER server or workstation. Yes, life would definitely be easier if I had one. However, I have an over 30 years history with POWER, and there are some fantastic resources available to developers for free. Both help me to stay an active member of the IBM POWER open source community. Talos II POWER9 mainboard Last time I introduced you to the openSUSE Build Service.

I love high performance computers, and some of my best friends work in high performance computing (HPC). Obviously, sometimes we also talk about logging. Recently we not just talked, but I also helped Gábor in his first steps with syslog-ng. He summarized his experiences in a blog: Logs are one of those indispensable things in IT when things go wrong. Having worked in technical support for software products in a past life, I’ve likely looked at hundreds (or more) logs over the years, helping to identify issues.