Mark Dastmalchi-Round

Mark Dastmalchi-Round

I’m a DevOps architect, musician, animal lover and all-round geek. If it’s got shiny lights on it, makes loud noises or purrs/wags its tail when you stroke it, I’m all for it. When I’m not writing code or fiddling with computers for a living, I produce my own music and provide the low-end rumble for my band in West Sussex.

Featured articles

DevOps for the Sinclair Spectrum! A series of articles exploring a modern development environment for the classic 8-bit 1980s home computer

Haiku Package Management: A tour of the unique package management capabilities of the alternative Haiku Operating System

Amiga Systems Programming in 2023: A look at developing, packaging and distributing software for AmigaOS and derivatives

Recent Posts

Meh.

Well, by now, pretty much every news site and blog across the world has picked up on the fact that Apple are making the move to x86. It doesn’t really come as much surprise; IBM made promises it hasn’t met, and the G4/G5 line has stagnated while x86 romped past it. As a recent Mac convert, I can’t help but feel in some small way annoyed - but it’s mostly down to the fact that the resale value of my Powerbook just took a nosedive.

mod_php, libstatgrab and nessus updates

A bit of a bumper update from me… several packages are now available for testing at http://www.blastwave.org/testing. Any comments welcome - providing no major glitches are uncovered, these should make their way out to the main pkg-get repository and mirrors in a week or so.

New packages on the way

Although things have been quiet on the Blastwave front recently, it hasn’t been because of lack of activity. I am currently working on a set of PostgreSQL 8.0.3 packages, which resolve several bugs as well as some fairly serious security issues, the full details of which can be found here.

Solaris 10 on a Powerbook

Now I’ve got my Powerbook back from repairs, I decided to continue my experiment to get Solaris 10 installed under Virtual PC 7. I’ve finally managed to get a useable system, although it did take a fair amount of hacking. The end result is a fully useable Solaris 10 installation complete with zones and dTrace, and provides a useful base for installing Blastwave packages.

Solaris 9 Initial Impressions

Despite Solaris 9 being out for some time now, I have yet to see many overviews of it. I could find technical documents and “executive summarys” all over the ‘net - but nothing that provided me with an idea of what the new OS would be like. In light of the fact that I’ve recently purchased another UltraSPARC machine for home use, I downloaded the 3 discs from Sun, grabbed a coke and settled down to install.