Bochs
I'm currently playing with Bochs as a way of having a baby machine inside my real machine. I don't have a good estimation of how fast it's running, because it's installing the new OS on the emulated machine. What is impressive is how easy it was to get things to that stage. Simply grab the example config file, tweak a little, and have the emulated machine boot of a real CD-ROM.

I'm curious to see whether the performance of the virtual machine is fast enough for what I'd like to do with it, which is primarily to run Windows applications in a restricted environment, and good ol' games that have a hard time running on newer operating systems. I'd love to use plex86, but the project is only intending to emulate linux from linux, which doesn't suit my needs in this particular case.

So far I've installed 31% of the required files for my windows install while writing this journal entry. I don't know if that's good or bad, I can't remember how long windows installs usually take.

I wonder if running two copies of an MS operating system at the same time on the same physical hardware poses a licensing issue?

Geeks from Childhood
Jacinta is in the process of updating many of our contacts, including old freinds from high school, and she came across a fascinating discovery. One of our friends from University, Aaron Zurbo, I apparently knew when I was around 13 years old. It's even mentioned in the minutes of a DataServe Business meeting. I had no idea that we had such a long history until today. It appears that geeks at a young age tend to re-meet again as geeks when they get older.

Hurrah!
Hurrah! Advogato is back up. Oh happy day!

While our favourite mouse has been away, I've been keeping journal at use.perl.org. Now that advogato is back, I'll probably continue to write here, or (heaven forbid) cross-post to both.

Silly Things
I've discovered a rather silly game that contains many of the qualities of expensive MMORPGs, but with the convenience of running in a web-browser, and competely free. The humour isn't half-bad, either.

I've finally got around to improving the navigation and many other nagging fixes on the public mirror of our Temple of Elemental Evil wiki. Yes, you may be a geek when your role-playing games have a wiki for note-taking, and your players may be geeks (or lawyers and software engineers) if they draw up a Dungeoneering Management Plan.

End of Financial Year
Got all of our paperwork out for employees and their tax affairs out today. Now I have only a quarter of personal and company paperwork to catch up on. Hurrah.

Talks
I've got a draft due on Monday for my materials for the SAGE-AU conference to be held this year. Of course, I'm much more interested in hacking Perl code (and Perl guts) than actually writing the material. However, I've found lots of interesting things that I didn't previously expect, and which the people at the conference probably won't expect either. I expect a fun time to be had by all.

Open Source Development Conference
The Open Source Development Conference is happening this year, on the 1st to the 3rd of December. I'm on the organising committee, and the Call For Papers is out. If you'd like to give a talk, we'd love to hear from you. Check the webpage for more details.

Training
Teaching in Melbourne this week, Sydney next week, and Sydney again the week after that. And then there's the final copy of my materails for SAGE-AU, and the end of financial year. Looks like I'm keeping myself busy, as usual.

Training
Currently I'm working full-time on training related activities. I'm writing this from Canberra, where I'm providing training for a government department. Next week I'll be in Manukau, New Zealand, on another government assignment.

During the time when I'm not in front of a class presenting, I'm writing or reviewing coursework, as we have new courses scheduled for release with very inflexible deadlines. It's certainly left me with much less sleep than I would prefer.

However, my efforts are quite small compared to Jacinta's efforts, which have been nothing short of amazing. Jacinta has been working harder, longer, and more effectively than myself. I'm very blessed to have such a talented business partner and wife.