News and Announcements

August 15, 2005 - July Newsletter

Newsletter     English     (available in pdf)

July News
 
Upcoming events
Discussion Items
BSD Booth at OSCON
Web site Statistics Report and Analysis
Mailing List Statistics
 
 
The most exciting news this month was the phenomenal number of downloads of the Report on the Task Analysis Survey which was released on July 21. There were nearly 5000 downloads of the report during those last 10 days of July and we are still seeing a fairly steady download stream.
 
Now that the report has been released the next step is the publication of the certification roadmap. There will be an announcement once the paper is ready. Look for it towards the end of August.
 
 
Upcoming events
 
There are several BSD related events coming up in the next month or two. If you know of an event that is not listed here, please send the details and we'll make sure we announce it in an upcoming edition of the newsletter.
 
 
BSDFest: Brasilia, Brazil
 
Pablo Sanchez, a member of our Brazilian Portuguese translation team, is one of the organizers of this year's BSDFest which will be held October 29-30 in the Brazilian capital. While they are still negotiating speakers, it looks like there will be good representation from each of the BSD projects, including Theo de Raadt from OpenBSD. Our own Patrick Tracanelli will be there as well and this should be an excellent venue for promoting and discussing BSD Certification. We'll provide more details in next month's newsletter.
 
 
NYCBUG BSD Conference: NYC, New York
 
The New York City BSD Users Group (NYCBUG) will be holding a one day conference at Columbia University on Sept. 17. Watch their site for details as they should be released any day now. Several BSD Certification Group members will be in attendance and the lineup of speakers is pretty impressive. If you're in the New York City area, this is one day you don't want to miss.
 
 
BSD-Installfest, Salt Lake City, Utah
 
The Greater Utah BSD Users Group (GUBUG) is pleased to announce a BSD Installfest on Sept. 24 at the offices of ArosNet. Our very own Dan Langille will be the special guest and he will be discussing bacula and will also be available to answer questions regarding BSD Certification and next year's BSDCan. This event is free. If you're in the Salt Lake City area, drop by to meet Dan, GUBUG and perhaps introduce someone else to BSD by assisting in an install.
 
 
 
Discussion Items
 
FreeBSD Whitepaper
 
The FreeBSD project has released a new white paper, FreeBSD: An Open Source Alternative to Linux .
 
Abstract:
 
The objective of this whitepaper is to explain some of the features and benefits provided by FreeBSD, and where applicable, compare those features to Linux. This paper provides a starting point for those interested in exploring Open Source alternatives to Linux.
 
This is just one of many new whitepapers soon to be published on both the revised bsdcertification.org website as well as the respective projects' websites. If you have an idea for a whitepaper topic you'd like seen addressed for your favourite BSD, send an email to either the discuss mailing list, or fill in the contact form with "editor" as the subject.
 
 
Proctoring Tests
 
One of the comments mentioned in the Survey Report (p. 103) suggested a testing methodology similar to that used to license amateur radio operators.
 
The ARRL Volunteer Examiners Manual
(http://www.arrl.org/arrlvec/vemanual/veman2000finalpdf.PDF) is an interesting read and shows how this example of a community-based, yet well respected, certification process works.
 
Points of interest:
 
- examination fees are minimal
- anyone is allowed to submit a test question for possible inclusion by the QPC (Question Pool Committee)
- testing is done in front of an accredited examiner team of 3 with exam locations being scheduled and advertised in advance
- examiner teams are mailed exam package (written forms plus custom software)
 
Have you written any of these exams? If so, what did you think of the process? The recent discussion thread on this topic starts here.
 
As part of this thread, Evan Leibovitch cautioned that this approach could be compromised:
 
"I would daresay that a comparison is different because few peoples' careers or pay scales depends on their ability to operate an amateur radio. You don't have the active trade in cheating (by both candidates and proctors) which is a by-product of the "high stakes" nature of most
IT certification exams."
 
What do you think? Are there safeguards that could be added or is this approach simply not suited to IT certification exams?
 
 
 
 
 
BSD Booth at OSCON
 
The BSD Booth at OSCON 2005 was very popular. Nearly 300 copies of the BSD Certification brochure were handed out, as well as several hundred brochures for BSDCan 2006 and the BSD Success Stories flyer. The PC-BSD CD went very quickly; Kris Moore brought 250 CDs with him which were gone within a few hours. The Offmyserver crew was kept busy burning custom live FreeBSD CDs and could barely burn fast enough to keep up with demand.
 
Even Beastie and Jordan Hubbard made appearances and some photos are available here. Dru Lavigne's blog is here.
 
In addition to PC-BSD, there are two other desktop oriented BSD variants. BSD-Office, a NetBSD desktop install, is available at http://inst.aydogan.net/ . (However the downloads are frozen temporarily, while the next release is being prepared.) Another easy to use FreeBSD modification is DesktopBSD. Have you had a chance to try either of these yet? If so, what did you think? Are they good advocacy tools or ready for the desktop market?
 
 
Web site Statistics Report and Analysis
 
In July we had 6698 (over 100% more, when compared to June) different visitors, counting 74,076 web page hits. It averages about 216 visitors a day, and about 224 MB of data transfered on a daily basis which clearly reflects the number of downloads of the Task Analysis Survey Report.
 
On July 21st, one day after the Survey Report was published, we reached our month's top accesses, counting the amazing number of 1170 visitors, and 1,455,558 Kbytes transfered.
 
We still have our main access period between 10 and 18 hours. This 8-hours period is responsible for ~ 73% of all our visits, which are all "commercial" period of times, so people still visiting us mostly when they are at work.
 
In July the Survey Report became the most accessed link on our website, counting even more hits than the root URL itself, which means that we have been directly linked from outside Web sites a number of times. These were the top 10 referrers for the month of July:
 
# Hits Referrer
1 2917 3.94% http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/
2 835 1.13% http://bsd.slashdot.org/
3 697 0.94% http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/61996
4 443 0.60% http://bsd.slashdot.org/article.pl
5 414 0.56% http://www.bsdcertification.org
6 331 0.45% http://blog.china-pub.com/blog.asp
7 329 0.44% http://www.linux.org.ru/index.jsp
8 291 0.39% http://blog.china-pub.com/more.asp
9 224 0.30% http://undeadly.org/cgi
10 210 0.28% http://undeadly.org/
 
Mailing List Statistics
 
As we've seen each month, the number of people on the mailing lists continues to steadily increase. Here are the number of subscribers for each mailing list as of August 13, 2005:
 
BSDCert Discuss: 781
BSDCert Announce 88




























































































































































































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