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Mar 15, 2006 - March Newsletter

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BSD Certification Group Newsletter
March 2006


Contents

1 BSD Certification at FOSDEM

Daniel Seuffert of DesktopBSD (http://www.desktopbsd.org) and AllBSD
(http://www.allbsd.de) helped man the BSD booth at the recent FOSDEM (http://www.fosdem.org) and had this to say about the response to the BSD Certification brochures:

``I printed the BSDCertification-flyer in German, English and French. Unfortunately only 40 of them in French and 100 overall. The French ones went away within two hours, the English ones were out Sunday and only 15 of the German ones were left. I printed 150 German ones for Linuxtag Chemnitz and Cebit today.

``I was astonished so many people wanted to know something about BSD Certification. I did an interview with Dutch television (NL21). They asked me about BSD Certification also and I explained some things, but couldn't do any details, two hours was not enough to tell everything about BSD.''

2 Upcoming Events

Dru Lavigne will be giving a talk on BSD Certification in Durham, England on March 22nd at the UKUUG Spring Conference (http://www.ukuug.org/events/spring2006).

Axel Gruner, a member of the German translation team as well as AllBSD
(http://www.allbsd.de), will give a talk on BSD Certification at LinuxTag
(http://www.linuxtag.org) in Wiesbaden, Germany in May. More details will be available in the next newsletter.

BSD Certification brochures will be given out at the BSD booth at LinuxWorld Boston which runs from April 4 - 6. If you're in the Boston area, drop by and show your support for the BSD projects and BSD Certification. The Exhibit hall is free if you register online before April 3 at
http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/live/12/events/12BOS06A/exposition.

3 BSDCG Nomation Committee Status

Warner Losh, the non-voting chair responsible for determining an unbiased and fair process for selecting the three members of the nominating committee, describes the process he chose as follows:

"I have been selected as the non-voting chair of the nominating committee for the board of directors for BSD Certifications. I have been told that the following are volunteers to serve on the nominating committee. This message is being sent to you based on that belief. See below for details if you do not wish to be considered for the nomination.

  1. Jim Brown
  2. Jonathan Drews
  3. Hubert Feyrer
  4. Dan Langille
  5. Scott Long
  6. Dru Lavigne
  7. Jean M. Melo
  8. Wes Peters
  9. Luiz G. Ramos
  10. Jeremy C. Reed
  11. David Rhodus
  12. Eduardo Ribeiro
  13. John Richard
  14. George Rosamond
  15. Brad Schonhorst
  16. Marc Spitzer
  17. Patrick Tracanelli
According to the bylaws, I must publish the criteria that will be used to select the nominating committee. This method must be fair, random and independently verifiable. Once the nominating committee has been selected, it will select the actual board, in accordance with the bylaws using the proceedures outlined there.

The method I have chosen is that I will take the closing values for the following financial indexes, as published in the Wall Street Journal for the close of regular trading on February 24th (local time), as published in the following issue. I will take the last three digits, as published, of each index modulus 17, if the last three digits are less than 986. If the last three digits of the index is greater than or equal to 986, I shall skip to the next index. If I cannot find the index in the Wall Street Journal for the appropriate day, I will skip to the next index. I will then add 1 to it to make a selection. This process will be repeated with successive indexes until 3 choices are selected. In the event that three choices are not made based on the close of trade on February 24th, I will use for successive trading days in a like manner until 3 choices are made. For the purposes of this selection, trading days shall mean days on which the New York stock exchange is open. If other markets are closed on that day, those indexes shall be skipped. If a market has closed before the the timestamp on this message posting's to a mailing list, indexes for that market will be excluded.

If you do not wish to be considered, please notify me. I will remove your name from consideration. I will keep everyone's number the same. If your number is selected above, I will skip it and go onto the next index. If the same number comes up multiple times, I shall skip it and go to the next index on the list. If, after being selected, a person opts out, for whatever reason, that person shall be replaced by the next person selected by this algorithm.

The financial indexes that I shall use are, in order, as follows:

  • Dow Jones Industrial Average
  • NASDAQ Composite
  • NASDAQ 100
  • S&P 500
  • Wilshire 5000
  • NYSE Composite
  • Dow Jones Transportational Average
  • Dow Jones Utilities
  • Russell 2000
  • FTSE 300
  • German DAX
  • French CAC 40
  • Nikkei 225
  • Hong Kong Hang Seng Index
  • Australia All Ordinaries
  • Brazil BOVESPA
  • Mexico Bolsa
  • Chile IPSA
  • Singapore SES
For example, on Feb. 23rd, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 11069.22. The last three digits of this index would be '922'. 922 modulus 17 is 4. Adding 1 gives 5, selecting Scott Long. NASDAQ Composite closed at 2279.32, 932 mod 17 + 1 is 15 selecting Brad Schonhorst. The NASDAQ 100 1672.29, 229 mod 17 + 1 is 9 selecting Luiz G. Ramos and we'd be done, assuming that none of these three opt out."

The names of the members of the nominating committee will be announced in the next newsletter.

During the month of March, the nominating committee will create a slate representing the three Board of Directors for the BSDCG and present the slate to the voting members of the BSDCG. The names of the Board of Directors should be available in the next newsletter. You can read about the election process in Article VII of the BSDCG Bylaws.

4 New BSDCG Member

The BSDCG is pleased to announce that Machtelt ``Tille'' Garrels has joined as an active (voting) member of the BSDCG. Tille is very active in the Open Source community and until recently acted as the translation and vendor coordinator for the Linux Professional Institute. We look forward to working with Tille to help make BSD certification a success.

You can read about active membership in the BSDCG in Article III of the bylaws.

5 Mailing Lists

The BSD Certification Group mailing list currently has 773 subscribers. And the announcements list has 146 subscribers.

If you are not on the announcements list, please sign up at
http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/bsdcert-announce/. It is a closed list for announcements regarding The BSD Certification Group.

The general discussion list is at http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/bsdcert/.

6 January and February Website Statistics

By Patrick Tracanelli

This month's report includes information regarding both January and February 2006.

In January, we had 42830 different visitors, which is somehow lower (around 12%) than December. In February 2006 the visitors average was even lower, 38748 different visitors, around 23% less visitors when compared to December and around 11% when compared to January. January had 3 days more than February, but in the average in January we had approximately 250 visitors per day, against 149 visitors per day in February, which confirms the lower visits that started in October 2005.

In the average in January 2006 we had around 23 Mbytes of data transferred in a daily basis while in February we had about 21 Mbytes. (Our record, from July 2005 is approximately 220 Mb). From January 16-26, we reached the month's top access, counting 240 visitors in the average per day, and 24323 bytes. In February, this month's top access range was from 17th to 23rd, counting 195 visitors and 19432 bytes per day in the average.

Usually our main access period is between 10:00 and 18:00 hours. In December, this scene was changed a little bit, the main access period was between 12:00 and 19:00 hours. But for January the usual time schedule was again between 10:00 and 18:00, similar to February which was from 09:00 to 18:00. This seven/eight-hour range was responsible for 59% of all our visits in January and 62% in February. Note that this is usually during work hours, so most visitors reach to us in commercial time periods.

The BSD Associate PDF release from October in the English language is the second most accessed in both January and February. The first one is the root URL on the website. In January, we had 671 downloads of the mentioned file and 543 downloads in February.

The top 10 accessed pages on January are:

# Hits URL

1 12442 /

2 589 /downloads/pr_20051005_certreq_bsda_en_en.pdf

3 389 /error.html

4 310 /downloads/BSDCertificationRoadmap.pdf

5 309 /downloads/sr1_links.pdf

6 307 /downloads/20051027_BSDA_command_reference_en-en.pdf

7 142 /downloads/pr_20051031_usage_survey_en_en.pdf

8 115 /downloads/brochure8.pdf

9 99 /downloads/pr_20050912_usage_survey_en_en.html

10 75 /scripts/contactresults.shtml

The top 10 accessed pages on February are:

# Hits URL

1 9074 /

2 361 /downloads/pr_20051005_certreq_bsda_en_en.pdf

3 312 /error.html

4 163 /downloads/pr_20051031_usage_survey_en_en.pdf

5 162 /downloads/BSDCertificationRoadmap.pdf

6 139 /downloads/sr1_links.pdf

7 124 /downloads/20051027_BSDA_command_reference_en-en.pdf

8 115 /downloads/brochure8.pdf

9 91 /scripts/contactresults.shtml

10 91 /robots.txt

Top 5 URL by Kbytes

In January, the top URLs regarding data transfer rate are mostly related to the BSD Associate exam document and Usage Survey, which, together with the Road Map are the most downloaded files.

# Hits URL

1 589 /downloads/pr_20051005_certreq_bsda_en_en.pdf

2 609 /downloads/sr1_links.pdf

3 542 /

4 310 /downloads/BSDCertificationRoadmap.pdf

5 132 /downloads/pr_20051031_usage_survey_en_en.pdf

The month of February had very similar statistics. The files were the same but the order were different.

# Hits URL

1 439 /downloads/sr1_links.pdf

2 461 /downloads/pr_20051005_certreq_bsda_en_en.pdf

3 434 /

4 175 /downloads/pr_20051031_usage_survey_en_en.pdf

5 172 /downloads/BSDCertificationRoadmap.pdf

Top 5 Entry Pages

In January, the root website is the very main entry page, followed by the error pages and files to be downloaded, especially the Usage Survey.

# Hits URL

1 12442 /

2 389 /error.html

3 59 /downloads/pr_20050912_usage_survey_en_en.html

4 11 /downloads/PressReleaseRoadMap.html

5 11 /downloads/pr-jta-20050720.html

In February, it is very similar - again the root URL is by far the entry URL with the most hits. The difference is the #4 and #5 entries.

# Hits URL

1 9074 /

2 312 /error.html

3 53 /downloads/pr_20050912_usage_survey_en_en.html

4 50 /scripts/contactresults.shtml

5 44 http://bsdcertification.org/

Top Referrals

Our top referrers are a set of websites which usually show up as the top referrers for the previous months. The well-known Chinese blog site, http://blog.china-pub.com is the number one page which attracted people to our website in February. While in January, Richard's Tao Security blog reached number one place with his latest posts. FreeBSDChina.org always shows up among the top referrals, and it is not different this turn for both January and February.

Top 10 Referrers for January

# Hits URL

1 1183 http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/

2 1058 http://blog.china-pub.com/more.asp

3 1022 http://blog.china-pub.com/blog.asp

4 520 http://www.freebsdchina.org/forum/viewtopic.php

5 262 http://www.freebsdchina.org/forum/topic_27101.html

6 188 http://business.newsforge.com/business/06/01/13/173233.shtml

7 120 http://www.freebsdchina.org/forum/topic_27545.html

8 106 http://blog.dream4ever.org/

9 99 http://www.bsdcertification.org

10 79 http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_taosecurity_archive.html

Top 10 Referrals for February

# Hits URL

1 681 http://blog.china-pub.com/more.asp

2 589 http://blog.china-pub.com/blog.asp

3 296 http://www.freebsdchina.org/forum/viewtopic.php

4 170 http://www.bsdcertification.org

5 133 http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_taosecurity_archive.html

6 104 http://business.newsforge.com/business/06/01/13/173233.shtml

7 76 http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_taosecurity_archive.html

8 60 http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_taosecurity_archive.html

9 43 http://www.freebsdchina.org/forum/topic_21870.html

10 38 http://blog.dream4ever.org/neoshi/

About Browsers / User Agents

Just like for the last months, the Mozilla family of web browsers are still the most used navigation applications that people use to visit us, which count over 53% of total visits in January and 58% in February. Most visits of Mozilla Family browser are from Microsoft Windows platforms using Firefox. The second most usual combination is Mac OS X with Firefox/Mozilla, the third is FreeBSD with Firefox and FreeBSD with Mozilla. Later, we get Linux with Firefox/Mozilla, and everything else are about the same on usage compared to each other.

Microsoft Internet Explorer on both Microsoft Windows (29%) and Mac OS X (13%) represent approximately 40% of our visitors browser application. Google Bot and MSN Bot are usually getting to our website. It is true for a number of other spiders. Now gigabot from gigablast.com is also one of the most frequent robots. The fetch(1) application, "fetch libfetch/2.0" which became usual at our website in the last two months is now a common issued application, it counted 4186 hits this month. Motorola and Siemens mobile telephones reached us in January and both plus LGE mobile phone reached us in February.

Geo (countries) Statistics on Visitors

Thirty-one percent of our visits were from the US, while about 19% could not be resolved. Among those resolved, Brazil, Germany and Mexico are in the top listing of countries which visits us most often. All countries which do not natively speak English. Here you can follow the top ten countries/regions which visited us in January.

# Hits Country/Location

1 15437 Unresolved/Unknown

2 11273 Network

3 7793 US Commercial

4 1902 Brazil

5 1380 Germany

6 1188 Mexico

7 1178 Japan

8 1135 Poland

9 967 Netherlands

10 946 Australia

In February, Mexico jumped from the third non-English native speaker country to first one regarding access to our Web site. Brazil and Germany dropped one position each and Canada and France which are usually on the top 10, but did show up in lower places are again among the 10 first. Here follow the statistics for February

# Hits Country/Location

1 9854 Unresolved/Unknown

2 7407 Network

3 5208 US Commercial

4 1233 Mexico

5 1776 Brazil

6 859 Germany

7 845 Poland

8 819 Russian Federation

9 638 Canada

10 623 France

Search expressions

Ninety-five percent of the searches which lead to BSDCG's website are made on Google. The other 5% is shared among MSN, Yahoo and Altavista, with some minor (fewer than 1%) for Lycos. The top ten strings when people searched the Web in January are:

# Hits Expression

1 37 bsd certification

2 24 bsd certification group

3 22 BSD-certification

4 21 Certificação BSD

5 11 bsd group

And on February, are:

# Hits Expression

1 35 bsd certification

2 33 bsdcertification

3 33 Certificação FreeBSD

4 22 Certificação BSD

5 21 BSD Certification

Note that in this two last months, we had expressions in non-English language, specifically in Portuguese language. In January, we counted 21 searches for "Certificação BSD" and in February there are more specific data, 22 hits for "Certificação BSD" and 33 specifically for "Certificação FreeBSD", a less-generic search. It clearly points interest on BSD and specially FreeBSD certs in Brazil and Portugal. Brazilian and Portuguese translation teams are among the most active ones so the search for those expression certainly return positive results.

7 About this Newsletter

The BSD Certification Group newsletter is published every month, near the middle of the month.

Thank you to Dru Lavigne and Patrick Tracanelli for contributing to this newsletter. The editor is Jeremy C. Reed.

If you have any news items related to the BSD Certification, please let us know by submitting via the contact form on the website or by sending an email to newsletter@BSDCertificationGroup.org. Or if you would like to volunteer for the translation team please send a note with the subject ``translation'' on the website's contact form.

Jeremy C. Reed 2006-03-15




























































































































































































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