February 2008 Archives

Google (my employer) has announced a "Google Gadget" competition for students in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi and Ethiopia. The designer of the best gadget will a $600 USD stipend, five runners-up will receive a $350 USD stipend. Prize categories include Best Gadget UI, Best Local Content Gadget (Most Locally Useful Gadget), Best Education Specific Gadget, Best Procrastination Gadget, Most Technically Sophisticated Gadget, Gadget Most Likely to Get International Traffic, and Best Social Gadget.

Complete details are available on the East Africa Google Gadget Competition website. A PDF suitable for your university bulletin board is available here.

Tom will be the invited speaker at LOPSA-NJ on February 7th, 2008. His topic is "Is SaaS the end of system administration?". Tom will also talk about the 2nd edition of TPOSANA and the April Fools RFC book.

A few years ago I released HostDB, my simple system for generating DNS domains. The LISA paper that announced it was called: HostDB: The Best Damn host2DNS/DHCP Script Ever Written.

I just released 1.002 which adds some new features that make it easier to generate MX records for domain names with no A records, and not generate NS records for DNS masters. Other bug fixes and improvements are included.

HostDB is released under the GPL, supported on the HostDB-fans mailing list, and supported by the community. This recent release includes patches contributed by Sebastian Heidl.

HostDB 1.002 is now available for download.